Re: Interesting Letter-to-the-Editor

[EMAIL PROTECTED] (John S. Dyson) wrote in message news:<[EMAIL PROTECTED]>...
> In article <[EMAIL PROTECTED]>,
>       "R. Steve Walz" <[EMAIL PROTECTED]> writes:
> > John S. Dyson wrote:
> >> 
> >> It is interesting where the 'socialist meccas' like France and
> >> Germany  are also having problems with their budgets, and they
> >> don't even do a competent job of providing for their own defense.
> > ----------------------
> > They have the industrial output, they simply prefer to spend it
> > on luxuries as long as they can.
> >
> The cost of defense isn't really that great (very few defense
> plants per-se in the US.)  It is that the LAZY-ASS socialist meccas
> choose to suckle off the American teat.

American spending in defence is equal to the sum of the total defence
spending of the next ten nations down the pecking order. This is an
unprecedented high - the classical pattern is for the top nation to
spend as much as the next two closest nations.

The paranoid reaction to this would be to assume that you plan to
invade the lot of us at once.

The realistic reaction is probably that your politico-economic
structure is in a mess, and your defence budget is a massive channel
for corrupt pay-offs between politicians and people selling stuff to
the military - the tax-payers are paying about twice as much as they
should for the defence they are getting, and the rest is being creamed
off as bribes and excess profits.

The rest of world would appear to have their military industrial
complexes under better control, which may reflect better control
electoral expenditures.

So it may be that we are not LAZY-ASS socialist meccas - which doesn't
exactly fit South Korea - but rather that you are a bunch of
over-taxed suckers.

> >> If they provided for their defense, it wouldn't really make that
> >> much difference to their budgets, because it is the morally
> >> destructive socialist programs that cost so very much!!!
> > -------------------------
> > Social programs are EVIDENCE or morality, they don't DESTROY 
> > morality, except the stupid hidebound antisexual forms.
> > 
> Don't you understand anything about the psychological aspects
> of enabling (or encouraging) stupid behavior?  Of course you
> don't.  (It isn't really 'morality' or 'ethics' that are actually
> destroyed, it is more that STUPID behavior is encouraged by
> socalist programs.)

A famous right-wing claim, not supported by any objective evidence.
 
> Socialism is plain and clear evidence of social decay -- whereby
> the basis of growth and encouraging productive behavior (and
> discouraging stupidity) is long forgotten.  So, it is VERY CLEAR
> that the regression in France (and somewhat Germany -- and
> other wakko-leftist regimes) is progressing quite sadly.  (Geesh,
> they obviously don't even learn from their mistakes WRT the
> anti-Jew attitudes.)  The 'new' mistake of embracing the terrorists
> (e.g. Saddam) seems to result from an overwhelming growing
> stupidity.

On most evidences of social progress, including crude things like
infant mortality and life expectancy, France and Germany are ahead of
the U.S. rather than behind.

Will Hutton's "The World we're In" ISBN: 0349114714, available
ex-stock from www.amazon.co.uk and with more difficulty (surprise,
surprise!) from www.amazon.com, claims higher labour productivity and
higher social mobility, both driven by better social welfare programs
than those available in the U.S. which provide a better educated and
more flexible work-force . I could dig out the relevant references
from my copy - Will Hutton is largely a populariser of non-monetarist
academic economics - but they'd be wasted on you.

And the French and German attitude to the invasion of Irak wasn't
pro-terrorist, or even pro-Saddam, but merely aimed at getting an
internationally acceptable intervention. In so far as such an
intervention wouldn't have been as provocative to the Arab countries
as your ham-fisted little military adventure, their stance should
probably be counted as anti-terrorist.

As Win Hill has pointed out, Irak is now a terrorist's amusement
arcade - the infidel invaders are the targets to be knocked down, and
the rewards are instant promotion to heaven by being killed while
pursuing a holy war (jihad) - and the customers are flocking in. A
really effective anti-terrorist move on your part :-(

To accomodate the average right-wing nit-wit, I'll point out that the
last sentence of the above paragraph is intended to be read
ironically, not literally.

-------
Bill Sloman, Nijmegen