Keep 'Em Marching

[Click photo for larger version.]

By that more complex graphic I'd say the ideal for a society on the scale of "the West" would be #16, libertarian socialism, after a slow (i.e. not Great Leap, maybe 2 generations) progression through social democracy. In general my idea would be closer to the lower left corner, but I don't see any way for the USA to get there from here without a major worldwide population reduction: if our body politic gets proportionally much smaller and if our society gets any nicer to our "broad masses" than say Israel is to its Jewish citizens we'd risk being conquered by a nastier regime with a bigger military, the way the USSR beat the Nazis.

In fact one of my proposals involves a larger standing army & navy, instead of letting so many un- or under-employed Americans become mentally & physically lazy "couch potatoes" who do little every day but overeat, watch TV and consume intoxicants. For one thing, historically it's been the Army Corps of Engineers that led the way in building the infrastructure we have that now needs repair or replacement, and it would probably take something very much like military discipline to get enough people to actually help do it.

In general don't see any better way then gentle compulsion, i.e. giving poor people a much more secure & purposeful life in uniform than out, to keep our people productively occupied now that we have no need for a large industrial or agricultural base. And part of that would be that to advance in grade you'd have to be physically fit and attend academic courses as well as those training & refresher courses directly related to your MOS. I'd also require some kind of national service after high school, for the same reasons those countries that do that do it.

I credit my brother-in-law for this insight: his & my sister's strategy to keep my youngest niece on track was to see that she was too academically and athletically busy to get into the kind of shit I did as a teenager. I thought it was a bit much then, I am an anti-authoritarian at heart, but I must admit now that the kid's almost 21 that their strategy seems to have worked well enough. So, broadening my perspective, I've become convinced that that kind of "benevolent despotism" is necessary to keep America from eating itself.

If nothing else we've at least got to keep the morons marching. Because, as that niece said when she was 17, "people are too stupid for anarchy." Hell, for the past 8 Presidencies we've been too stupid to manage representative democracy.

(Oh hell. This was not originally intended to be more than a quick paragraph. I sure do go on.)