I liked this:

Evil people love and worship temporal things, i.e., things that cannot be possessed without the fear of losing them, and always live therefore in fear. China's tormented first emperor, Qin lived in constant fear of losing his empire or his life, and did great evil in the process of trying to possess them. Augustine said good people escape fear by loving only the things that can't be destroyed, a concept lost on Chinese emperors, Egyptian pharaohs, and most of American suburbanites.

His earlier post is an interesting prophesy for America:

The seeds of her demise were sown in her successes. Her populace became rich and fat and ever less willingly to endure for even the shortest time any dislocation in their comfort. The sacrifices of their forebears were quickly forgotten for the culture of instant gratification made possible by their regal throne atop world hegemony...

The fat and comfortable populace was relieved from the burden of defending their wealth and comfort by the institution of an all-volunteer military that drew heavily from new immigrant and lower-class populations. The years without an existential threat lulled the populace into a false sense of security, and they either didn't realize or didn't care that they were fast losing control over the means of protecting their way of life...

It elected leaders that weren't leaders, but were instead just men in suits hired to tell the populace what it wanted to hear...

The empire could no longer afford its far-flung outposts, and had to retrieve its troops from Afghanistan, Iraq, Korea, Germany, Japan, etc. The troops returned home to a society slipping slowly into anarchy, and were soon put to work quelling the unrest.

I don't really think its going to go down like that. Winston Churchill said "The Americans will always do the right thing . . . After they've exhausted all the alternatives."

As far as the economic contraction is concerned, I fear we're still exhausting alternatives.