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Comment by maxerickson | Hacker News Reader

That's a good angle.

We deify the military and then question whether the government can be trusted to build roads.

Whatever stupid military decisions the US has made, you are being quite flippant and ignoring one very important difference between the US and Finland and that is that the US is a superpower that maintains the geopolitical order with the help of its military. This includes the securing of maritime trade routes. Don't take that for granted. The US is heir to the British Empire and as such it is not a small Scandinavian country of less than 6 million people that, by the way, benefits, along with the rest of Europe, from the security provided by the American empire.

Sure I'm being flippant, but not about the military, about the bizarre attitude that a government can effectively police the world but can't be trusted to do much of anything else.

Keep the Navy on the oceans, but damn it, keep the government out of my Medicare!

This will sound like a backwards argument but you saw what happen when the navy wasn't paying attention to the exit to the gulf by somolia. One can look at it as moving the price for gas to other locations (aka the navy via taxes). I'm placing no positives or negatives on it just stating it. In reality the economy is a massive set of levers or to put it in CS terms it's optimizing in a very large number of dimensions. The solution space is massive and there are many local minima which are no where near the global minima. However people love to argue about specific levers and bike shed the discussion based on the small windows they have into it.

Including the destabilization of Middle East for at least the last 20 years, to secure/favor US interest?

The US is a superpower that maintains its geopolitical order with the help of its military. Like any dominating nation before it, no argument there. But please stop justifying all this with good intents or universal values. The US does what it does to improve the life of its citizens, period (or at least a subset of its citizens).

I disagree, the “stability” the US provides is more than offset by the instability it causes. Vietnam, Afganistan, Iraq, Iran has all been pushed in unstable directions by the US. US global order is a total hit and miss. And this excludes all the instability the US has caused in South America with overthrowing governments and war on drugs.

Btw kind of ironic to lecturing a finn about security provided by the US as they were left on their own to fight the enormous red army. They still managed to kick ass though.

It is what we have seen in Iraq, Vietnam and Afganistan as well superpowers are not nearly as effective militarily as people think.

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