About the idea of making all nations the same size

 When great powers have redrawn borders and created nations disrupting the tribal-ethnic character of residents as well as tossing in all kinds of antipathetic religious and economic elements in has tended to produce results akin to placing, large hostile cats in a bag. Wars of succession that eliminate stable leadership have had similar effects.

Africa and the Middle East have suffered more than a little from that kind of experience. Even the trans-Atlantic slave trade was stimulated by the disruptions following the fall of the Songhai empire and chaos in N.W. Africa and the Sahel with the capture and sale of humans ensuing to replace lost economic products like gold.

The U.S. Military- stronger during Ike or J.F.K. admin

The answer is fairly simple with two basic ways to interpret it I would think. One is to regard the meaning of ‘powerful’ as a physics and structure equation, In my opinion U.S. military power tends to evolve with advancing weapons designs and therefore during J.F.K.’s administration there were more nuclear weapons and better technology than before.

The second way to regard powerful is the overall effectiveness of the force. In that case I would say that Dwight Eisenhower had a more powerful military because of his leadership. An example can be found in a video of the Songhai empire of Africa and its history, leadership etc. They had a couple of great rulers and one that was quite wicked slaughtering people without need because he seemed to be inclined to do so and didn’t differentiate between civilians and military. One general and reformer with some wisdom named Askia Muhammed rose to power and defeated a larger army in battle once simply because he was a more experienced leader.

Nineteen Twenties and Thirties Isolationist Sentiment in the U.S.A.?

 There may have been some sentiment in the pre-W.W. II U.S.A. to stay out of European problems, conflicts and social diseases. Britain after all had burned down the U.S. capital in 1812 and the Franco-Prussian war of 1874 was no great thing.

The United States had numerous post-civil war reconstruction problems. Intervention in the First World War had created much turmoil. The United States had plenty of work to do in its own space such as building, roads, electrification, dams and so forth. It was a busy time of great post-war expansion that became a bubble that crashed leading to the depression.

As Americans had spent money bailing Europe out of the vast diagonal trench war by joining on the pile of soldiers and artillery that forced Germany to accept an armistice and levied a bill for damages on them (that in part was a motivation for the second round) they spent the 1920′s chasing national progress. That was followed by the depression. Some Americans made clothing out of gunnysacks (large burlap bags to hold potatoes) and sought work.

A former French Chancellor- Clemenceau predicted that when the allies did not guarantee the peace after the First War that the second war would develop and he turned out to be right. American investors felt that building up German industrialization perhaps an I.B.M. or Henry Ford are examples. was a better idea than entering into more military agreements.

It is somewhat doubtful that in the 1920s Calvin Coolidge or Herbert Hoover would have had the international political skill and military power (the United States wasn’t yet a Super power militarily and had no A-bomb up its sleeve) to keep Europe pacified while containing the extreme communist threat from the Soviet Union. In fact the Soviet Union’s emergency into existence during the First World War when Germany beat up the Tsar’s military pretty readily leading to the revolution and Red revolution of 1917 gave the United States a fair reason to reinforce Germany on the right to defrappe the Red threat from the east.

I also suspect that the rich of the gilded age were somewhat sympathetic to the deposed German royalty that were booted out in the German revolution at the end of the first war. The United States had actually sent some military forces to support the white army battling the reds during the Russian revolution - about 2000, and that hadn’t worked out well.

In order to keep things strait U.S. politicians developed a long range policy of being against Reds and Russians that continued to the present. That single attitude makes it easier for U.S. leaders to know how to play their roles without knowing much about international affairs.

In my opinion the U.S.A. wasn’t very isolated in the 20s and 30s. Jet aircraft didn’t exist and even Pan Am hadn’t started trans-Atlantic flights. People that had immigrated here or were descended from immigrants usually hadn’t the money to afford to tour Europe via cruise ship and then return home to the little house on the prairie. The rich however did travel to Europe a lot. Franklin D. Roosevelt visited Europe maybe 30 times before he turned 18 and that probably helped him manage the Second World War better than if he had just rowed up and down the Hudson River on some kind of rowing team when not driving a taxi.

One result of the chaos in Europe was the decision to limit immigration from Eastern Europe where it was believed many anarchists lived who might bring anarchy and communism to the U.S.A. Because the rich were running government then, as now, the red danger from Eastern Eurasia decisively prevented some immigrants from spending their lives breathing the air of freedom that exists some places west of the east coast, or did then, before pollution expanded from automobiles a lot in urban areas of the as as far as Los Angeles.

Why the decrease in freedom

 The greater the population density the more people there are that can adversely impact one’s ‘freedom’. With the profusion and acceleration of technological developments more people can organize more efficiently to oppress others. Organizations have more surveillance and tracking capability each year, and every dollar one spends can be tracked as well as cars, conversation etc. Global media and spy agencies, government officials and the curious get into everyone’s private space apparently so much as they like. Public education conditions students to think in accord with political correctness preferred by the ruling class.

With a limited area that is the Earth for people to live in, exploit and try to control in some ways with governance, free ranges of motion may continue to decrease for some, in some ways, while increasing for others, in some ways. President Biden recently referred to those states loosening Covid 19 mask wearing and public spacing as ‘Neanderthals’ (who presumably would not understand what germs and airborne pathogens are or how to defend against them). Does mandatory masking wearing impact freedom? In some ways it does, in other ways it doesn’t. If one asked some people not to use talcum powder riding public buses because it makes some people sneeze, they might be offended and cry havoc about attacks on their freedom.

https://freedomhouse.org/report/freedom-world/2021/democracy-under-siege

One could move on to the subject of what is freedom and then determine if that can be quantified and if the amount of it is increasing, decreasing or stable. Regulating people so they don’t drive their environment-tramping vehicles into storefronts or throw people out of the good seats at the basketball game that they didn’t pay for impacts things. I wonder if there is some sort of coefficient between population density and freedom that isn’t environmentally determined that also effects the level of skill specialization possible.

A commune with all things equal for everyone would have a kind of freedom that would not exist in a society based on individual rights and political self determination, strong border security, private property and private business, and the latter would have freedom to be exclusive and develop their own ideas and inventions/products etc that would be lacking in a herd of animals without private property, private space or individual rights.

I don’t wish to take swipes and forced free to be the same as everyone else communes here Instead i wonder if demographics won’t drive the two polar opposites toward some sort of balance given the world population continues to increase and the environmental health continues to decline.

Concentrating wealth and networks of production, distribution and communications globally seems to be the inevitable result of transistors and miniaturization that occurred since the mid-20th century. Maybe leadership more like Casey Stengel or Yogi Berra with degrees in environmental economics, philosophy and a load of common sense and dead reckoning will fix the world if we are lucky.

Causes and phenomenalities of the national splintering

 Public education is universal, as well as television, and it may be that the mass culture drives one to select a brand of social products to go along with. If public education for primary and secondary schools is over-mature, the remedy might be to move about 60% of public school financing to contracts for private schools that anyone could choose to send their progeny to. maybe more diversity would let people develop a better sense of individual and personal interest rather than being indoctrinated with political correctness.

National splintering it isn't a new phenomenon... https://www.hup.harvard.edu/catalog.php?isbn=9780674064362

It could be that Alvin Toffler’s 1972 book ‘Future Shock’ about the pace of change and data overwhelming ordinary people actualized with a sense of the masses being intellectual drowned an at a loss or need to be responsible for the governance of their society, or perhaps relinquishing rule to the 1% and the corporate people at the top.

The United States has gone through a zillion social changes forced from the elites and Wall Street the past 30 years, or since the Reagan administration even, and their may be some cynicism. People have taken to a little trendy neo-nihilism and have tuned out from a degree of belief in the decency of society. People have become emulators of the trends sold by Wall Street, and they know Wall Street has been bailed out by the Federal Reserve. Political economic theory and all else is almost dead as people sig the money fuhrer of the time. None besides Bernie Sanders want to be regarded as socialist or disloyal to Wall Street since corporatism has taken over, the rich have bought the broadcast media and corporate censors control free speech giving the Orwellian epithet ‘hate speech’, hate crimes and stopping just short of ‘thought crimes’.

In the Clinton administration I thought it was disgusting that a fellow showed up for work with pink hair highlight, mascara and a hangover. Eventually the neo-conservative Chief Justice of SCOTUS decided to make homosexual marriage the law of the land. That was a lasting split of sentiments. Instead of busting the old wine skin the homosexual crowd should have established a new institution for themselves that left the old intact.

Abortion did not help traditional moral norms, neither has the Democrat Party preference for illegal aliens (now called non-citizens) that flooded the nation with tens of millions of cheap workers. Republicans developed a cadre of neo-troglodytes that hate science, global warming and mass extinction of the Anthropocene era having decided that they are leftist hoaxes.

Democrats prefer legal dope and tend toward being antipathetic to Christian values unless the church has secularly conformed and semi-non-faith doctrinal winkyness.

Some Americans seem to be immersed in a brave new world order and just want an interesting, comfortable and prosperous lifestyle, or ample power and prestige, and don’t really care about suffering of others or social change unless it is trendy to do so. In a way the nation is no longer grounded in meaningful standards and has become Darwinist free floating dollars for themselves without sufficient philosophical education.

Possible more and better philosophers writing for public consumption can be the pipers leading the people to unity (joking).

Modern theories of the role of government are somewhat vague and terms anachronistic

The United States has a government where individuals started out free (except for slaves) and government was minimalist. So many of the roles that government needs to fill today didn’t exist when the United States revolted from England.

The government now has 16 areas that it regards as critical infrastructure and those run across public and private sector concerns. There is a roaster at this web site

https://www.cisa.gov/critical-infrastructure-sectors

Governing theory has it that some tasks are needed to assure the defense and well being of the people that live in a nation. Defense is obvious- without adequate defense a nation may be conquered and the rulers destroyed. Sometimes the people want that to happen (maybe the Inca are an example). Sometimes elements of a society may unite with external proletariats or sympathizers from over the border in order to use a myocardial slow-build insurrection that may formerly have been known as sedition slow-cooked.

Public education arose because governments realized that educated citizens were better and more competitive people. Illiterate hillbillies couldn’t fair well in war against tech-savvy weapons users able to read manuals or calculate trajectories for artillery. Hillbillies might be excellent shots with long-guns, yet that was a different kind of literacy skill that wasn’t transferable to alphabet-based instruction.

If private educators had provided Universal literacy and basic education free the government would not have needed to get involved. When, as today, the nation is saturated with public education structures that could be done with private educators and educational facilities given government contracts or student vouchers it is probable that the historical inertia has become so established that it fails to advance to a higher, newer level of support for public education that avails itself of the vast pool of college educated citizens that haven’t enough jobs as educators as it is- that is more people with advanced degrees could enter into educational facilities to work if more private school existed with the same cost as public schools to parents because of government redirection of funding to the private sector.

There are numerous roles for a government that go beyond basic infrastructure that are requisite for keeping a society healthy, competitive internationally and happy. Ironically government in the U.S.A. tends to flunk the basic infrastructure roles and doesn’t show much ability to continue to improve them such that they would be suitable for sustainable ecological economic parameters. Government lacks some of the theorists and think tanks that should exist to discover, invent and adapt newer forms of infrastructure to existing forms seamlessly.

https://www.ushistory.org/gov/1a.asp

The modern world civilization cannot be well supported with anachronistic theories of political economy. When that is what politicians and others writing in the marketplace of ideas offer the nation does in effect cobble together ad hoc structures at great public expense that don’t work very well and tremendous public spending continues that would not be necessary if a better set of infrastructure and theories existed.

An example might be health care for the poor. Obamacare was designed for the middle class and put a tax on younger workers for a product they mostly didn’t need. Some of the poor that travel interstate for climate and seasonal reasons just can’t pass through the state bureaucratic hoops that require fundamentally a sedentary life with a home, phone, street address and residence in triplicate. A federal program with uniform values that worked everywhere for the poor would have been a better idea. It is Bureaucrats have a different view of the U.S.A. from those people that don’t get an easy regular paycheck.

Does a nation need to pay to support the preservation of historic buildings, or to make sure that grizzly bears and good salmon fishing aren’t extinct? Does a society need to prevent people from breathing a lot of carbon monoxide or clean up toxic waste sites. If one could build a great and affordable mass transit system from Petersburg Florida to Petersburg Russia via Alaska yet only the government could get it done and keep the cost of a ticket down, should it go ahead rather than letting nothing happen?

There are people that are against anything a government might do that could be done by private special interests including military service. Some would leave that to oil corporations if their profit margins declined.

The role of government in a time when the private sector has a great amount of wealth compared to the public sector might be to make sure that fairness and neutrality exists socially so individual self determination and free enterprise can exist with equal protection of the law for all citizens. Government might be tasked to secure public goods and developments coordinating ideas, opportunities and avenues for implementation by the public through the private sector. The challenge of keeping a healthy national ecosystem and good social relations that eliminates oppression and dead-end lives with nowhere to go that never allow people to maximize development of their capacity for progress.

It is amazing that the government is somewhat inefficient with the trillions of dollars it does have in its annual budget that also allows public debt because it is underfunded. Government needs to use the private sector better to work to fulfill public goals and policy objectives in a way that brings profit to the private sector while paying for its own existence and functions. Obviously government needs to know what those ideas and goals a priori.

Is it morally acceptable to make vaccines, ultra-soft kid gloves, lampshades, or cosmetics with aborted human body part ingredients

 Ethical questions arise concerning the Johnson and Johnson Covid 19 vaccine that was made reportedly using stem cell lines from aborted humans. Is it morally acceptable to make vaccines, ultra-soft kid gloves, lampshades, or cosmetics with aborted human body part ingredients, or should human decency respect the dead including those aborted proto-humans.

Nazi scientists were of course not recalcitrant about exploiting anything to advance their purpose. maybe they believed they could socially engineer a better human being. One of those Hobbs and Shaw movies had such a premise in it.

Another concern is the phenomenal possibility of evil in first aborting humans and then using them to engineer vaccines that are from a corrupted source. If Satan exists he might be amused at debasing all of mankind with such self-degradation.

When people take shortcuts to goals that aren't necessary they admit the possibility of deleterious unintended consequences and that should be avoided if one is being cautious at all.