ubernoir wrote:
i really shouldn't blog when i've been drinking which i had when i wrote that

Thanks for all this detail. This is interesting...

What prevents the army from taking control in Britain, Germany and the US etc is tradition and ideolgy. By crossing the Rubicon Caesar broke tradition; he used the army to settle a political dispute, like Musharraf.

I don't see the U.S. Army engaging in a coup. However, there are troubling developments.

In particular, the increasing privatization of U.S. military capability may disconnect the tactical capability from that sense of citizenship that you speak of. It isn't occurring on a large enough scale that it presently threatens that sort of impact, but it could continue to expand.

Furthermore, the nature of anti-terrorism involves the military in domestic affairs. The entire premise of the War on Terror, and specifically fights over FISA, Habeas Corpus, and cases like Jose Padilla involve the use of military capabilities and practices against domestic targets.

(Footnote: The UK has taken a different tact and they have gone back to talking about Terrorism as a criminal issue and not a military issue. I find this somewhat comforting, although I still think the UK is becoming a surveillance society. However, I think the problem in the UK is fundamentally different than it is in the US and this is driving the difference in approach moreso that these kinds of philosophical questions.)

These things compose most of the intellectual criticisms against the Bush administration; that these changes are myopic not because they cause wide spread difficulty now, but because they undermine democracy over long periods of time. Your discussion of the fall of the Roman Republic seems to fit right in to this criticism. Would you agree?

In regard to debt, yes, you're right, debt does generate wealth, and can expect wealth to increase and the cost of providing a particular standard of living to decrease over time. I think the problem when you talk about entitlement programs is that the standard of living that people expect to have goes up over time as the general wealth and technological sophistication of the society improves, and so people's expectations in regard to medical treatment and pensions increase over time. Its possible, ney likely, that for both demographic and technological reasons our expectations have become disconnected from what we can reasonably provide. The view that technological advances will fix everything is as wishful in the case of entitlements as it is in the case of energy sustainability.

Furthermore, this issue is locked in the kind of partisan gridlock that keeps a number of issues stalled out in American politics. The Republican point of view is we should provide as little as we can get away with, and the Democratic point of view is that there is absolutely no problem. Often this sort of gridlock is used intentionally when both sides must pander to interests but truly desire to maintain the status quo. Its always been my impression that the interests in question desire to maintain the status quo because the people involved will be dead when this comes to fruition, and my generation will be left holding the hot potato when the fuse runs out.

The only alternative I can see is to repair the demographic problem with a massive influx of immigration: exactly the sort that Bush administration failed to achieve recently.

RE: FT.com / World - Learn from the fall of Rome, US Comptroller warns