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Comment by tancop | Hacker News Reader

there are two big exceptions to this, the military and healthcare. playing world police is incredibly wasteful and so is funding a system based on submitting to the demands of big pharma and for-profit hospitals.

the problem is 50 years worth of propaganda convincing americans that all this is good and necessary and if you disagree that makes you a communist/welfare queen/terrorist supporter/woke activist. at least now with gen z even the far right agrees that foreign wars are a bad idea.

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The US has made an active policy decision for decades to be the world police, flowing from that policy spending on world policing isn't automatically waste unless it's highly inefficient.

It’s money well spent if you view the cost of not doing it as another war that leaves half the world’s industrial capacity in literal ruins as happened several times before.

I’m not saying this is true, but it’s the motivation.

A war that was very good for what the US economic juggernaut has become. We may be significantly better off maintaining great relationships with our Western Hemisphere countries and let the oceans protect us.

There is an ocean in the middle of the "western hemisphere". Did you mean "Americas continent countries"?

Including South America too, yes. I'd not characterize it as the middle, it's mostly centered around the landmasses on most maps.

MIC gets paid handsomely to make sure this gets perpetuated. But goes back to even Smedley Butlers time, using the military and intelligence services to ensure capitalists have cheap access to resources. Supercharged with the second Iraq war as mercenary companies took over military work and contractors "rebuilding" the country.

Trump is a continuation of this well played track, with the a large sprinkle of fascism, grifting and destruction of the federal government as a goal.

>and for-profit hospitals.

but only 36% are for-profit?

https://aspe.hhs.gov/reports/hospital-ownership

Medical services are for-profit, not the hospitals. The hospitals funnel money to for-profit vendors.

Depends on your definition of wasteful. Americans expect their government to be able to waves hands DO SOMEthing about various things in the world. Maintaining that capability is expensive.

I don't know if that desire is caused by intentional propaganda or if it's just who we are as a people because of our history.

Maybe it's not right, but it's what Americans expect from our government right now.

> playing world police

The most expensive are purely for oil, for hawks feeling manly bullshit wars.

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