The Sad Tale of History

[saveliberty]

Perhaps if that became the dividing line on whether we went to war or not Toro, everyone would be better off.

 

[william the wie]

We do not fight to win wars outright. We could wipe out any nation on earth in five seconds if we so choose. But we don't. We use restraint.

Spoken like a non-vet. Try 30 minutes at a minimum. 19% of the arsenal will not be fired on time at a minimum: snafus, wrong transmission of orders, wrong keys or coding entry error; getting a senior enlisted man in to bypass the failed null fail safes ad infinitum ad nauseum. All kinds of other problems from enemy action to space junk to goonie birds up the intake will also attrit.

The comforting fact is that your tax dollars pay for the world's most effective military force. The USAF and USN will perform at least twice as well any possible opponent most especially in avoiding blue on blue mistargeting and fratricidal. I do hope you realize that nobody has used any of this systems in a realistic simulation. We no longer possess Nagasaki/Hiroshima technology in stock but some of our stuff will work, hopefully, and more or less as intended. The really bright spot is that our cyber-warfare technology purportedly does work, at least none of our gas terminals have been mistaken for an above ground nuclear test nor do we have several billions worth of equipment that went blooie. So the US will win eventually but not easily.

 

[Toro]

We do not fight to win wars outright. We could wipe out any nation on earth in five seconds if we so choose. But we don't. We use restraint.

Spoken like a non-vet. Try 30 minutes at a minimum. 19% of the arsenal will not be fired on time at a minimum: snafus, wrong transmission of orders, wrong keys or coding entry error; getting a senior enlisted man in to bypass the failed null fail safes ad infinitum ad nauseum. All kinds of other problems from enemy action to space junk to goonie birds up the intake will also attrit.

The comforting fact is that your tax dollars pay for the world's most effective military force. The USAF and USN will perform at least twice as well any possible opponent most especially in avoiding blue on blue mistargeting and fratricidal. I do hope you realize that nobody has used any of this systems in a realistic simulation. We no longer possess Nagasaki/Hiroshima technology in stock but some of our stuff will work, hopefully, and more or less as intended. The really bright spot is that our cyber-warfare technology purportedly does work, at least none of our gas terminals have been mistaken for an above ground nuclear test nor do we have several billions worth of equipment that went blooie. So the US will win eventually but not easily.

I agree. However, if total victory had been our goal in Vietnam, Korea or Iraq, we could have nuked them and be done with it. But the United States does not fight for total victory, and I don't mean that in a bad way.

 

[william the wie]

Cool but FAE attacks on all military bases and ships is as close to total war as I want to get, fewer dead non-combatants are better non-combatants. Saves money on PTSD treatments too.

 

[Flopper]

.”

People don't just change their values and work ethics because of politically movements or government programs. These types of changes come out of personal experiences. The toughing of the national fiber that resulted from the Great Depression and WWII was responsible for much of the growth in the last half of the 20th century. Work ethics are not something you learn out of a book. It comes from the experiences of you and your family. I really don't know where that is going to come from today.

I think you are taking far too superficial view of the last 50 years...

"The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification. Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement…

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons…portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded…in the mid-1960s, [many] abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying…[instead] political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions…[and] tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools."
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009

If the 1960's were the beginning of the end of the work ethic in America, it would seem that we would see a marked decrease in the rate of growth of GDP. However that is not the case. The rate actually began accelerating in the 1970's. From the 1970's through the first decade of the 21st century, the rate continued to rise at a nice clip. Only within the last five years have we seen GDP falling off.

 

[PoliticalChic]

Three in the OP is a fallacy. Free trade has not brought this nation down. In fact it is quite the opposite. Since WWII the growth of trade has outstripped economic growth meaning that trade has become more important, not less.

As for war, GDP has risen pretty much continuously for the past 65 years even as military spending has declined relatively. In fact the economy has grown at pretty much the same pace for at least the past 140 years regardless of the level of military spending.

"Free trade has not brought this nation down."

Neither the OP nor Brands state that it has done so.

yes it does. Read it again. It says it brings weaker economies up and ours down.

Yes...I see your point....and believe it refers to the loss of lower level manufacturing jobs, and is mitigated by the terms 'ultimately' and 'to some extent.'

 

[saveliberty]

People don't just change their values and work ethics because of politically movements or government programs. These types of changes come out of personal experiences. The toughing of the national fiber that resulted from the Great Depression and WWII was responsible for much of the growth in the last half of the 20th century. Work ethics are not something you learn out of a book. It comes from the experiences of you and your family. I really don't know where that is going to come from today.

I think you are taking far too superficial view of the last 50 years...

"The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification. Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement…

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons…portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded…in the mid-1960s, [many] abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying…[instead] political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions…[and] tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools."
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009

If the 1960's were the beginning of the end of the work ethic in America, it would seem that we would see a marked decrease in the rate of growth of GDP. However that is not the case. The rate actually began accelerating in the 1970's. From the 1970's through the first decade of the 21st century, the rate continued to rise at a nice clip. Only within the last five years have we seen GDP falling off.

Consumption increased due the use of much more credit. Credit is a substitution for real labor.

 

[Flopper]

I think you are taking far too superficial view of the last 50 years...

"The breakup of this 300-year-old consensus on the work ethic began with the cultural protests of the 1960s, which questioned and discarded many traditional American virtues. The roots of this breakup lay in what Daniel Bell described in The Cultural Contradictions of Capitalism as the rejection of traditional bourgeois qualities by late-nineteenth-century European artists and intellectuals who sought “to substitute for religion or morality an aesthetic justification of life.” By the 1960s, that modernist tendency had evolved into a credo of self-fulfillment in which “nothing is forbidden, all is to be explored,” Bell wrote. Out went the Protestant ethic’s prudence, thrift, temperance, self-discipline, and deferral of gratification. Weakened along with all these virtues that made up the American work ethic was Americans’ belief in the value of work itself. Along with “turning on” and “tuning in,” the sixties protesters also “dropped out.” As the editor of the 1973 American Work Ethic noted, “affluence, hedonism and radicalism” were turning many Americans away from work and the pursuit of career advancement…

Attitudes toward businessmen changed, too. While film and television had formerly offered a balanced portrait of work and employers, notes film critic Michael Medved in Hollywood vs. America, from the mid-1960s onward, movies and TV portrayed business executives almost exclusively as villains or buffoons…portrayals both reflected and strengthened the baby-boom generation’s attitudes. One 1969 Fortune poll, for instance, found that 92 percent of college students thought business executives were too profit-minded…in the mid-1960s, [many] abandoned the notion of rewarding traditional bourgeois virtues like completing an education or marrying…[instead] political correctness: in the new version, recycling trash and contributing to save an endangered species were virtuous actions…[and] tolerance and sensitivity, expanded like a gas to fill the vacuum where the Protestant ethic used to be.

The cultural upheavals of the era spurred deep changes in institutions that traditionally transmitted the work ethic—especially the schools. University education departments began to tell future grammar school teachers that they should replace the traditional teacher-centered curriculum, aimed at producing educated citizens who embraced a common American ethic, with a new, child-centered approach that treats every pupil’s “personal development” as different and special. During the 1960s, when intellectuals and college students dismissed traditional American values as oppressive barriers to fulfillment, grammar schools generally jettisoned the traditional curriculum. “Education professors eagerly joined New Left professors to promote the idea that any top-down imposition of any curriculum would be a right-wing plot designed to perpetuate the dominant white, male, bourgeois power structure,” writes education reformer E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his forthcoming The Making of Americans: Democracy and Our Schools."
Whatever Happened to the Work Ethic? by Steven Malanga, City Journal Summer 2009

If the 1960's were the beginning of the end of the work ethic in America, it would seem that we would see a marked decrease in the rate of growth of GDP. However that is not the case. The rate actually began accelerating in the 1970's. From the 1970's through the first decade of the 21st century, the rate continued to rise at a nice clip. Only within the last five years have we seen GDP falling off.

Consumption increased due the use of much more credit. Credit is a substitution for real labor.

I don't think so. Consumer debt was pretty constant in the 60's and 70's staying at about 42 to 45% of GDP while the rate of increase in GDP was rising rapidly. In 1990's, Consumer debt took off. It's about 91% of GDP today.