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Comment by nickik | Hacker News Reader

Of all the enemies to public liberty war is, perhaps, the most to be dreaded, because it comprises and develops the germ of every other. War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few. In war, too, the discretionary power of the Executive is extended; its influence in dealing out offices, honors, and emoluments is multiplied; and all the means of seducing the minds, are added to those of subduing the force, of the people. The same malignant aspect in republicanism may be traced in the inequality of fortunes, and the opportunities of fraud, growing out of a state of war, and in the degeneracy of manners and of morals engendered by both. No nation could preserve its freedom in the midst of continual warfare.

—James Madison

Pretty much exactly what happened. Pretty smart these guys.

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Every time I read things by the founding fathers and the era immediately after them, I am always surprised by how many extremely insightful people the time period produced and that they actually got into positions of power where they could organize things according to constitutional principles. Pretty amazing group of people in one place and at one time in a culture and circumstances that could have a large impact.

Founding father fetishizing (or whatever you want to call it) is very taboo in lefty circles because of how much conservatives do it. But that doesn't stop me personally from thinking that that group of people had the best ideas and developed the best framework for government the world has ever seen. It's just a shame it didn't work out to their intentions in practice.

The issue is that the “Founding Fathers” are treated as if they thought collectively. They didn’t. Among themselves, they agreed, disagreed, and changed their mind on many things.

The same cannot be said today. If you even hint at non mainstream idea about gender or race in the Silicon Valley, you'll be shunned immediately

This is very dependent on the type idea you have, rather than the fact that it may be non mainstream.

That's incorrect. Scientific and neutral ideas that do not fit the mold cannot be safely discussed

Highly amused at how you have illustrated the bovine predictability of the HN hivemind. The HN crowd smugly pats itself on the back as being smarter and more enlightened than the average bear, yet in practice is tremendously narrow minded and hateful of anything that goes against its prevailing norms. The diversity agenda apparently does not include diversity of thought.

There is no "HN crowd" in that sense. This is a common illusion, known as the Hostile Media Effect:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hostile_media_effect

https://hn.algolia.com/?query=%22hostile%20media%20effect%22...

People with opposite views have opposite images of the "HN crowd". Since these images are determined by your/their own views, they don't contain any information about HN.

And so you prove my point yet even a step removed - to even mention that mentioning that a collective narrowmindedness might exist incurs criticism, is not permitted.

No, they didn't. They had some good ideas inspired by the Enlightenment and by Romanticism, but quite a few expressed the idea that the Constitution should be reviewed regularly and updated and adjusted for changing conditions. The issue is that many "conservatives" believe the Constitution was perfect from the get go.

You have a point there, in that the Constitution was designed to be changeable. It was not supposed to be easy to change, but possible. But there has been just one new amendment since 1971, and none since 1992.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Twenty-seventh_Amendment_to_th...

Why would you need to change the constitution anymore? Now we just twist into a pretzel to reinterpret the meaning of things.

Changed by actually changing it. Not by just ignoring or talking around the constiution while claiming it still operates.

That’s a deliberate strategy on the part of the conservatives.

Ferishizing the past while simultaneously ignoring everything they have to say is a cynical way to anchor modern policy position with the distant past.

There are lots of comparably astute thinkers in the modern age. We ignore them because they don't command the same gravitas as the founders and because in some sense intellectualism is no longer valued in the West.

But it's not hard to say: "if you commercialize war and create an entrenched institution around it, then there are a lot of people (weapons manufacturers, government contractors, military leadership) with considerable money and power who are highly incentivized to perpetuate the state of war, irrespective of its necessity."

One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label. I always found it staggeringly obtuse for conservatives (people; not the corrupt politicians and media manipulating them) to simultaneously complain about the debt and endorse pointless wars that end up costing many trillions of their own taxpaying dollars.

And then I realized that rationalizing the right wing platform is a total package deal: maybe you came for your gun rights, red meat manliness, shallow (or deep) streak of white supremacy, and/or your Christian values, but you end up staying for the costly warmongering, poor-to-rich wealth transfer, and excessive broad spectrum deregulation.

The reason it isn't hard to say that (about war and power) is, in large part, because we are preceded by people like Madison.

It is, I have found, very difficult for people to accurately assess what it would be like to not know something they already know. Steven Pinker calls this the Curse of Knowledge.

>One of the most successful con jobs was conceptually linking war and manliness, so that 'pacifist' became a derisive label

Please. You're ignoring biology if you think the association between manliness and war is an engineered phenomenon.

I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy. That the most secure civilization (economically and otherwise) in human history has not managed to completely do so is almost surely the consequence of artificial intervention.

If you compare military ads for example, you’ll see that in the US we glorify and Hollywoodize war (because they know the Call of Duty aesthetic will lure kids into joining) whereas in a place like Ukraine it’s positioned as a grim and unpalatable necessity.

I’m not saying we don’t need a military btw. I am saying it’s potentially an order of magnitude more bloated than it needs to be. Biological aggression alone hardly serves to explain that. Cultural and political manipulation are the dominant explanatory variables.

And this should bother us, because while we’re busy fighting the wanton perversion of our democratic system in this and various other ways, other countries committed to a state-sanctioned technocratic agenda are running laps around us. It’s stupidly tragic.

>I don’t buy that that is any longer a significant contributing factor. Unadulterated societies should graduate from barbarism as they move up Maslow's hierarchy.

That is a very idealistic view. The truth is that the majority of the world still lives a stone's throw from death, and even lower class American neighborhoods are filled with violence that is inseparable from traits that are amplified by male biology - pride, aggression, anger - compounded by physical differences between the sexes which affect psychology - i.e. a lifetime spent weaker or stronger than average.

Don't get me wrong. These drives and emotions have their place, and I would argue that they are also responsible for much of the good in the modern world.

But these biological and social properties continue to force an association between manliness and war, although to some degree propaganda and Hollywood do have an amplifying affect, as you suggest.

The sentiment about the harms of long duration wars is echoed in the Art of War. When I read that book, I wonder if our politicians and military leaders have bothered to (not Trump or the Republicans, that much is obvious). Astute thinkers have existed in all generations of humanity. Many of the principles that were mentioned in past are relevant today. We just have a bad track record of following them.

A lot of people at the time were likely first or second generation immigrants and the tyrannies of the "old world" were still experienced either first-hand or through the eyes of their parents and grandparents. I think, this, in a lot of ways, influenced the founding fathers. And similarly, I think this is why many immigrants in this country become successful people in the modern times.

... and in a backwater colony with a population of 2 1/2 million or so. There are metro areas today with that kind of population, look at the kind of leadership they end up with.

The past is such a weird place, not least because there's just so few people actually in it. The 19th and 20th century revolutions in agricultural technology exploded the numbers of human beings on the planet, particularly coming on the heels of the depopulation of the Americas in the 16th and 17th centuries.

As long as you overlook that whole slavery thing....

Adam Smith, from The Wealth of Nations, Chapter III:

"In great empires the people who live in the capital, and in the provinces remote from the scene of action, feel, many of them scarce any inconveniency from the war; but enjoy, at their ease, the amusement of reading in the newspapers the exploits of their own fleets and armies. To them this amusement compensates the small difference between the taxes which they pay on account of the war, and those which they had been accustomed to pay in time of peace. They are commonly dissatisfied with the return of peace, which puts an end to their amusement, and to a thousand visionary hopes of conquest and national glory, from a longer continuance of the war."

War is the parent of armies; from these proceed debts and taxes; and armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few.

Counterpoint: in the modern era debts and taxes derive from the social system, not war. The US spends 2 trillion per year on taking care of its retirees and “only” 600 billion on the military. The entire world spends less than 2 trillion on war, so less than the US social security and medicaid budget. The thing governments largely spend their money on is taking care of their people, and taxes largely get redistributed through social systems. The image of the typical government as some malignant force dominating its populace is false (although such governments do exist).

The budget of the Department of Defense is only a small part of what the United States spends on war. Add in the Department of Energy's portion for nuclear weapons, the Veteran's Administration, the "black budgets" for the CIA, NSA, and others, the accumulated interest on the national debt for various wars (declared and undeclared), and the costs of PTSD-wounded warriors shifted to the public. I don't have a number, but I imagine it's quite a sum.

The State department has become essentially a property managment arm for the DoD.

Lots of 'War against Drug' money is used to support the wars. Lots of 'devlopment' aid is used to support war.

Massive amount of money are given to Israel and Egypt that is essentially military spending. The list goes on.

The social security and medical costs are higher in veterans than in the general population and the number of veterans receiving state support is significant. This inflates the cost of social security and medical care relative to the defence budget. Your costing of global defence budgets is possibly off a little but not much according to the below. Thanks for your post, I was surprised by the numbers.

https://www.ssa.gov/policy/docs/ssb/v66n2/v66n2p1.html

https://www.google.co.nz/amp/s/www.telegraph.co.uk/business/...

Yes, but war also helped some groups find their place. World Wars one and two saw oppressed races (and genders) make gains due to the lack of meat for the grinders and grudging inclusion by the system of those previously excluded groups through pressing need. The inclusion helped push forward their rights, and while things often remained pretty abysmal post war it helped move things along and started movements toward more equality.

Short terms shocks have reactions. Many of these things were already going in the right direction. 100 years of freedom (or no WW) between 1914 and now would probebly have been better for these groups.

Possibly, but there are numerous examples of minority (and majority in the case of women) groups agitating for the rights that they deserved, and in many cases having the dominant groups support them. I don’t think the social change would have happened at the same rate without the wars.

Can you elaborate on the oppressed genders, plural, that were recognised and included due to WW1 and 2? Female I imagine is one. Which others? And even then it was only the Soviets having women fight.

I only intended to mean females and that plural is an error.

Edit: The Soviets and resistance groups had women fight, but most countries had women in the armed forces and filling roles previously male only. Outside the military there was a pressing manpower shortage and women filled roles that were previously male only. Post war not everyone wanted to give up the positions they had filled and done excelled at.

Written in 1795. From:

https://founders.archives.gov/documents/Madison/01-15-02-042...

Great quote, but this is the same James Madison that requested a declaration of war against Great Britain in 1812.

> "armies, and debts, and taxes are the known instruments for bringing the many under the domination of the few"

This reads as profoundly anti-statist. Can somebody clarify the context please?

Madison was a Federalist and after the War of 1812 he advocated for a stronger national government and military. He was not anti-statist.

He recognized the difference between government used for domination and government used for liberty. A distinction that today is rarely understood, and hence why he appears as an "anti-statist" when he was advocating for more government power.

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