The Injustice Of Current Family Law

[Diogenes]

Which is really not refuting the point, your merely expanding the definition of "welfare" to include corporate subsidies, tax breaks, etc. The core point is that people will over time progressively vote to increasingly loot the public treasury, be it in the form of a check (welfare, food stamps, SS), a benefit (Medicare, Medicaid), or a subsidy of one kind or another or tax break. And that the end result will eventually bankrupt any representative (or direct) democracy, sooner or later. Whether you want to call what they get "welfare" or some other word is neither here nor there. Technological civilization has simply so far created an unprecedented amount of real wealth, or the collapse would have already come by now. Trouble is there is no limit to human greed, no matter how much wealth there is people will lust for (feel their entitled to) more; human nature doesn’t change, that’s why there are historical & economic cycles.

This is exactly right. Human nature doesn't change. Sometimes Humans become enlightened, but the normal tendency is narcissistic indulgent behavior.


Someone just put me on to this earlier today.


http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Collap ... _Societies

[hanelyp]

Collapse of the Wester Roman Empire => devolution from central to local authority.
The ultimate in "local authority" is 2 civilized men coming to an agreement, the foundation of the free market. But there's little opportunity for graft in freedom.

On another subthread, a lot can be said in favor of beneficiaries of the public treasury being disqualified from voting.

[williatw]

On another subthread, a lot can be said in favor of beneficiaries of the public treasury being disqualified from voting.

Let's see...welfare/foodstamps/SS/Medicare/Medicaid/Corporatewelfare/taxbreaks/..by the time you add all that up, wouldn't be much "electorate" left. And of course the aforementioned would never vote to have their vote taken away. Which unfortunately is another argument for democracy eventually collapsing into a dictatorship of one kind or another. An authoritarian gov doesn't have to care as much what the people want, will give them (or not) whatever benefit it sees fit. It wouldn't have to worry about trillions of dollars in "unfunded mandates", when you don't have to pay them. A Commie/or authoritarian government can give people national healthcare without going bankrupt because the providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) work for the government and are paid whatever the gov sees fit, take it or leave it. The "citizens" get whatever medical service gov sees fit in providing...gov doesn't have to worry about how to afford expensive medical interventions, because they only have to give you what they see fit and are willing to pay for. What you want/think you’re entitled too becomes irrelevant.

[MSimon]

Marriage has simply become so culturally or morally meaningless that more and more people are opting out of it.

The problem is not cultural. It is economic. It is a very bad deal for men. You can read about it on any of the men's sites I linked. My sons tell me the same thing.

It is amazing how little current research you do about everything you "know". Even when provided with links or if you want to head out on your own "search terms".

And gays? They are hardly a big enough factor in the population to matter. But OK. Suppose they matter. They WANT to get married.

As to the marriage monopoly on sex. That was always more for the woman than the man. Men do not like to support children that are not their own. Some will. Some will like it. Most don't. Step fathers are notoriously a problem. Way more prevalent than the problems caused by real fathers.

I might go so far as to not allow divorce except for cause until all the children of a marriage are above age 18.

===========================

Two views of government:

1. People MUST be controlled in very many aspects of their life. This runs into problems.

a. You need a control system. This is expensive to very expensive.
b. You need controllers. Controllers will be corrupted.
c. It is difficult to decide how much control is necessary. Every "problem" created by control requires more control.

All this leads to a control death spiral.

2. People should be controlled as little as possible.

a. The problem here is that people will do things that have unfortunate effects. That can be minimized by direct laws/control. Against the initiation of violence. Against lying in commercial transactions. Force and fraud.

b. People will do things that have unfortunate side effects. If the effects are small you either ignore them or lightly regulate the conditions. If the side effects are very bad you allow cultural wisdom to take over. We see that with alcohol prohibition. Despite drug side effects 10X worse than all the other intoxicants combined the idea of re-instating alcohol prohibition is not SERIOUSLY considered. To allow the culture to regulate an activity you have to be trained to allow people to go their own "wicked" ways until they come to Jesus. Minimal control - which allows us our liberty has to be trained. It is normally not natural. Fortunately we do have such an inadvertent training program. It has trained people to look into the advantages of minimal control. I would mention the name of the program but it seems to make you crazy.

To do this well you have to teach people the difference between vice and crime. We used to understand that. Our problem in that area is religion. Most of them conflate vice with crime.

What are the limits of control? If the area controlled covers much less than 1% of the population control is not an expensive or onerous problem - generally. Hardly any one cares that nuke weapons are forbidden to the general population. Despite the 2nd Amendment.

Once you get up to 1% things start to get dicey. Control starts to get expensive and socially corrosive.

Around 5% control is impossible. And horribly expensive in every way. Spiritually, morally, socially, economically.

I'm not anti-Prohibition so much as anti-control. Control is bad for the human spirit. It is expensive. It is socially corrosive.

I'm of the opinion that people will eventually do the right thing after they have tried everything else. We should let them. Eventually a body of cultural wisdom will evolve. That is the least expensive form of control and it is not brittle. It is adaptable on relatively short time scales.

Government control is brittle unless done by a dictator who is very little into control (know any?). Rules get established that are hard to change once conditions that prompted the rules change. And of course there is regulatory capture.

We have a cure for cancer http://phoenixtears.ca/ it is poorly researched and rarely available and very expensive because we have a control system supposedly controlling something else.

Oh. And calling me pro drug is quite incorrect. I'm anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco. The two most dangerous drugs out there. Still. I prefer social control even in those cases. I am especially in favor of any popular drug that reduces the harmful side effects of those drugs. If by switching people to those other drugs they reduce the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco - even better.

It would be good if you could face the fact that government control is breaking down because it always breaks down from its own contradictions. It might be good if you could accept that social control is much less prone to such breakdowns. But no matter. I have the younger generations mostly on my side.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson

==========

As to my attitudes towards marriage? Personally I always cared a LOT for my kids. But I never much cared about the wider society until my boys started talking to me about their problems with it. That induced me to study the problem and also the nature of women. I never knew there was a general problem of understanding the nature of women because I assumed everyone eventually got the kind of education I did. I was mistaken. However, the 'net is correcting that.

Once you understand the way things work - what to do falls right out. The problem as always are the things we know that ain't so.

My engineering hat is always on. "How does it really work" is a question that is never far from the front of my mind. And I am ALWAYS willing to change my mind. Not as easily as I used to but I always consider that an option. Most people lose that option for significant areas of their life after age 25 or so when endocannabinoid production in the body declines rapidly. Now that is not bad when the average lifespan is 40 years. When it goes to 80 years it causes difficulties. Societies get too rigid. Lets do the math 40-25 = 15. Which means society is never more than 15 years out of date - on average. 80-25 = 55. Which means society is on average 55 years out of date. Given the current rate of change that is a disaster.

So in that particular dimension we have two parties. The youth party and the old people's party. In the dimension of control they are the same party. It didn't used to be that way. The only thing I have in common with the old people's party is their understanding of economics. In that dimension the old people's party gets that control is pernicious. They get that adaptability is very important. If only they could extend that understanding. My problem is that I am not a control freak. So neither appeals much to me. What the old people's party doesn't get is that social control is just as pernicious as economic control. Adaptability is the missing element. Because things will change. Go with the flow. It is self correcting if you have the patience for it.

What the old people's party doesn't get is that social control gives license for economic control.

Success is attractive. Failure is not. If we understood that deeply we would be less apprehensive. And more adaptable. Failure teaches individual lessons. When control is paramount those individual lessons do not get learned.

Ah. Well. Human nature is what it is.

[Stubby]

On another subthread, a lot can be said in favor of beneficiaries of the public treasury being disqualified from voting.

Let's see...welfare/foodstamps/SS/Medicare/Medicaid/Corporatewelfare/taxbreaks/..by the time you add all that up, wouldn't be much "electorate" left. And of course the aforementioned would never vote to have their vote taken away. Which unfortunately is another argument for democracy eventually collapsing into a dictatorship of one kind or another. An authoritarian gov doesn't have to care as much what the people want, will give them (or not) whatever benefit it sees fit. It wouldn't have to worry about trillions of dollars in "unfunded mandates", when you don't have to pay them. A Commie/or authoritarian government can give people national healthcare without going bankrupt because the providers (doctors, hospitals, etc.) work for the government and are paid whatever the gov sees fit, take it or leave it. The "citizens" get whatever medical service gov sees fit in providing...gov doesn't have to worry about how to afford expensive medical interventions, because they only have to give you what they see fit and are willing to pay for. What you want/think you’re entitled too becomes irrelevant.

Whenever someone enumerates the recipients of government money they always forget the companies that get so-called 'legitimate contracts.' Things like defense contracts for stuff we don't need, or immigration reform bills that specify very specific weapons system and contractors. Since you included food stamps, I assume you include farm subsidies?

EPIC WASTE AT PENTAGON

Reuters has a report about epic waste (trillions) at the Pentagon. Whether the 'waste' was because of ineptness (totally possible) or because defense contractors have all the right friends in the right places (probable since we are talking about a staggering amount of money) or the money is going to black programs or combinations thereof.

Or is buying politicians/generals so they vote/decide for your best interest not sucking on the teat?

[williatw]

Whenever someone enumerates the recipients of government money they always forget the companies that get so-called 'legitimate contracts.' Things like defense contracts for stuff we don't need, or immigration reform bills that specify very specific weapons system and contractors. Since you included food stamps, I assume you include farm subsidies?

Which is really not refuting the point, your merely expanding the definition of "welfare" to include corporate subsidies, tax breaks, etc. The core point is that people will over time progressively vote to increasingly loot the public treasury, be it in the form of a check (welfare, food stamps, SS), a benefit (Medicare, Medicaid), or a subsidy of one kind or another or tax break. And that the end result will eventually bankrupt any representative (or direct) democracy, sooner or later. Whether you want to call what they get "welfare" or some other word is neither here nor there.Technological civilization has simply so far created an unprecedented amount of real wealth, or the collapse would have already come by now. Trouble is there is no limit to human greed, no matter how much wealth there is people will lust for (feel their entitled to) more; human nature doesn’t change, that’s why there are historical & economic cycles.

The point is that people will vote to spend their government and themselves by extension into bankruptcy. But I suppose you want to talk about how I feel about other gov spending like National Defense. I am sorry Stubby but coming from a Canadian, who like our European friends were able to get by on spending vastly less on their national defense because frankly the lion's share of the burden of defending your country was borne by the US. It was the US fighting the wars in Vietnam and Korea (whether you agree with the former being needed or not), the US which after liberating Europe from the Nazi's had to maintain hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe an elsewhere holding the line against the Russian/Warsaw pact for four decades. The American military and economy virtually carried the free world for easily 20yrs after 1945, at our expense. It would be like if somebodies baby sister/brother growing up with a big brother who took care of all of their problems with "bullies" such that they never had to make any serious effort to learn how to fight, defend themselves, go to the gym learn how to box; etc. They could easily look disdainfully at the aforementioned big bro, laughing at all the time and effort he spent working out, learning boxing or MMA or krav maga or whatever, laughing it up and deciding he must be motivated by "something else" like "penis envy" or whatever, never realizing how sheltered their existence really was. Believing every problem can be solved with "negotiation", "discussion", talk can fix just about anything, because they have no experience in dealing with the harsh realities of life, what it is really like dealing with a violent sociopath(be he the leader of a country or neighborhood bully). Someone who doesn't care about much of anything except getting what they want, and is only interested in seeing whether you are someone they can push around. Probably 90% of national defense is deterrence, coming across as someone you don't want to mess with; you can say it is alpha male behavior if you want, that doesn't mean it doesn't work; most of the leaders of the world are alpha males, understanding such is how they survived to be leaders.

[williatw]

So who will the Democrats be running next? Most likely a woman.

And women make up 51% of the population. Nice edge right there.

And women MSimon simply do not feel the same way about the "nanny state" or about biased divorce/child custody laws. They by and large IMHO perceive them as protecting poor defenseless women (& children) from the cruel rapaciousness of men. So our next president might very well be a possible man despising lesbian with a cheating spouse and a probably massive bone to pick with men.

Quite so. But I must say your phrasing is suggestive.

In any case our SoCon friends think the biggest problem is gay marriage.

Women (and most men) of your generation and older probably took the idea of marriage as a duty, obligation, responsibility to society more literally than most younger people today do. The older idea was that divorce if granted at all, had to meet some objective criteria called "grounds". That is you needed a reason in the eyes of society to terminate a marriage. That society had a strong vested interest in the institution of marriage, the integrity of which was perceived as vitally important to social cohesion. "No fault" divorce means explicitly that someone doesn't need a reason other than their desire to be divorced to end the marriage. That is the purpose of marriage is to make the people who are married, "happy", and that consideration outweighs everything else. A hundred years ago, a man who ran out on his wife and four kids, (or married woman who ran off with the traveling salesman or whatever) would have been a social pariah. Irresponsible, immature, immoral; society male and female alike would have heaped scorn, contempt and abuse on them; they were lower than dirt. Nobody would have given the butt end of a horse whether doing so made them happy. The trouble is that no fault divorce means any reason is as good as another to end a marriage. Sure feminists were thinking in terms of what they perceived as their immediate short term interest, getting out of a marriage they didn't want; and in typically American fashion chose to be heedless of the long term consequences. Men are only good for a paycheck anyway in their view, and a child support/alimony check (or welfare if you are poor) is good enough. They refuse to acknowledge their decisions basically torpedoed for instance the two-parent black family, that had survived 100 + years of slavery and decades of Jim-Crow, only to be decimated by "cultural revolution" of the 1960's leftist do-gooder. Even today they seem to acknowledge no or very little blame or fault; seem to think the problem is that the social-welfare check just isn’t big enough, there is plenty more money available to spend. Just raise taxes cut military spending, whatever, there is plenty more of other’s people money to appropriate for the greater good.

[Diogenes]

Marriage has simply become so culturally or morally meaningless that more and more people are opting out of it.

The problem is not cultural. It is economic. It is a very bad deal for men. You can read about it on any of the men's sites I linked. My sons tell me the same thing.

You deliberately ignore the fact that the current culture allows men to get sex without marriage. You are either being incredibly sloppy or deliberately dishonest. Did the current culture not allow it, men would marry regardless of the expense.


Sex is a necessity for men. Promiscuity has made the price cheap, so now men look at the economics. (Among other considerations.) You simply ignore the underlying root cause in your statement.

It is amazing how little current research you do about everything you "know". Even when provided with links or if you want to head out on your own "search terms".

I keep up with "Research" as much as it warrants. I would direct you to read some of Glenn Reynold's (and his Wife's) analysis of why men are eschewing marriage.

And gays? They are hardly a big enough factor in the population to matter.

They are "Broken Windows" in the larger sociological picture.

But OK. Suppose they matter. They WANT to get married.

So What? Chas Bono wants to be a male, but she has two "X" chromosomes. She cannot be a male. She can pretend, and that's what the homosexual "Marriage" folks want to do as well, but Society does not have to cater to the whims of the psychologically deranged among us.

Unfortunately, the society itself is becoming psychologically deranged.

As to the marriage monopoly on sex. That was always more for the woman than the man. Men do not like to support children that are not their own. Some will. Some will like it. Most don't. Step fathers are notoriously a problem. Way more prevalent than the problems caused by real fathers.

I might go so far as to not allow divorce except for cause until all the children of a marriage are above age 18.

And so the Libertarian wants to use the force of law to compel someone to do something they do not wish to do? And for the benefit of the larger society? (Through the well being of the immediate children.)


Sound's like you're gonna have to turn in your Ayn Rand badge.

===========================

Two views of government:

2. People should be controlled as little as possible.

Which is my view.

a. The problem here is that people will do things that have unfortunate effects. That can be minimized by direct laws/control. Against the initiation of violence. Against lying in commercial transactions. Force and fraud.

b. People will do things that have unfortunate side effects. If the effects are small you either ignore them or lightly regulate the conditions. If the side effects are very bad you allow cultural wisdom to take over. We see that with alcohol prohibition. Despite drug side effects 10X worse than all the other intoxicants combined the idea of re-instating alcohol prohibition is not SERIOUSLY considered.

It was insane overreach in the first place. Alcohol had a many thousands of years history with humankind and it was deeply incorporated into the cultures of many populaces. A sudden ban on it was concentrated stupidity, and destined to provoke a backlash. The Demand was already existent and it was massive. Supply just had to find a way, which it did.

Once again, you put forth the arguments of the silly attempt to ban Alcohol, to justify Cocaine. In the essential aspects, they are not comparable.

To allow the culture to regulate an activity you have to be trained to allow people to go their own "wicked" ways until they come to Jesus. Minimal control - which allows us our liberty has to be trained. It is normally not natural. Fortunately we do have such an inadvertent training program. It has trained people to look into the advantages of minimal control. I would mention the name of the program but it seems to make you crazy.

I have no idea what you are talking about. I do have experience with people addicted to crack and meth, and they will steal you blind in an effort to feed their addiction.

To do this well you have to teach people the difference between vice and crime. We used to understand that. Our problem in that area is religion. Most of them conflate vice with crime.

Doing hard drugs isn't a "vice." It's a deadly threat to the individual, and a serious threat to everyone around them.

What are the limits of control? If the area controlled covers much less than 1% of the population control is not an expensive or onerous problem - generally. Hardly any one cares that nuke weapons are forbidden to the general population. Despite the 2nd Amendment.

The Second Amendment was created to protect the security of a free people, not to threaten it. It assumes "gun democracy" as an inherent axiom of it.

Once you get up to 1% things start to get dicey. Control starts to get expensive and socially corrosive.

Around 5% control is impossible. And horribly expensive in every way. Spiritually, morally, socially, economically.

You're kidding right? We have a situation right now where 52% of the stupid people in this nation want to control the health care of 100% of the nation. On this and a whole host of other issues, we are WAY past the "5%" control threshold.

I'm not anti-Prohibition so much as anti-control. Control is bad for the human spirit. It is expensive. It is socially corrosive.

I'm of the opinion that people will eventually do the right thing after they have tried everything else. We should let them. Eventually a body of cultural wisdom will evolve. That is the least expensive form of control and it is not brittle. It is adaptable on relatively short time scales.

This is, of course, *YOUR* theory. My theory is that once you let this fire get started, it will sweep through the populace until we are unable to even feed ourselves, and eventually a dictator will step in and start shooting people.


How you think Americans would be immuned from the disease that wiped out the Chinese is just beyond my ability to understand, and I can only explain it by assuming you believe in magic or something.

Government control is brittle unless done by a dictator who is very little into control (know any?). Rules get established that are hard to change once conditions that prompted the rules change. And of course there is regulatory capture.

We have a cure for cancer http://phoenixtears.ca/ it is poorly researched and rarely available and very expensive because we have a control system supposedly controlling something else.

Oh. And calling me pro drug is quite incorrect. I'm anti-alcohol and anti-tobacco. The two most dangerous drugs out there. Still. I prefer social control even in those cases. I am especially in favor of any popular drug that reduces the harmful side effects of those drugs. If by switching people to those other drugs they reduce the harmful effects of alcohol and tobacco - even better.

It would be good if you could face the fact that government control is breaking down because it always breaks down from its own contradictions. It might be good if you could accept that social control is much less prone to such breakdowns. But no matter. I have the younger generations mostly on my side.

I would rather be exposed to the inconveniences attending too much liberty than to those attending too small a degree of it. — Thomas Jefferson

And once more, all your arguments on behalf of Marijuana do not address the issue of hard drugs.

[Diogenes]

The point is that people will vote to spend their government and themselves by extension into bankruptcy. But I suppose you want to talk about how I feel about other gov spending like National Defense. I am sorry Stubby but coming from a Canadian, who like our European friends were able to get by on spending vastly less on their national defense because frankly the lion's share of the burden of defending your country was borne by the US. It was the US fighting the wars in Vietnam and Korea (whether you agree with the former being needed or not), the US which after liberating Europe from the Nazi's had to maintain hundreds of thousands of troops in Europe an elsewhere holding the line against the Russian/Warsaw pact for four decades. The American military and economy virtually carried the free world for easily 20yrs after 1945, at our expense. It would be like if somebodies baby sister/brother growing up with a big brother who took care of all of their problems with "bullies" such that they never had to make any serious effort to learn how to fight, defend themselves, go to the gym learn how to box; etc. They could easily look disdainfully at the aforementioned big bro, laughing at all the time and effort he spent working out, learning boxing or MMA or krav maga or whatever, laughing it up and deciding he must be motivated by "something else" like "penis envy" or whatever, never realizing how sheltered their existence really was. Believing every problem can be solved with "negotiation", "discussion", talk can fix just about anything, because they have no experience in dealing with the harsh realities of life, what it is really like dealing with a violent sociopath(be he the leader of a country or neighborhood bully). Someone who doesn't care about much of anything except getting what they want, and is only interested in seeing whether you are someone they can push around. Probably 90% of national defense is deterrence, coming across as someone you don't want to mess with; you can say it is alpha male behavior if you want, that doesn't mean it doesn't work; most of the leaders of the world are alpha males, understanding such is how they survived to be leaders.

I think your wisdom is wasted on that fool. I doubt he has the intellect to even grasp it.

[choff]

The way I see it, since Wall St. financed Communism and Nazism in the first place it makes no sense to complain about other countries not carrying the can on defense spending. In Canada's case, we fought Germany for 4 more years in WW1 and 2 more in WW2. In Europe and the UK there's a saying, America won the war after everybody else did the bleeding, in Vietnam the U.S. found out what that actually meant.

Interested readers may want to dig into the WW1 Belgian relief effort of Herbert Hoover, in a nutshell, it was really involved in keeping Germany fed so the war could be prosecuted. When international finance decided it was time to turn off the war, they stopped the food smuggling, Herbert was made President as his reward.

[choff]

http://rense.com/general72/cav.htm

On April 15, 1915, "The Nursing Mirror" in London published her letter revealing that the Allied "Belgian Relief Commission" (charged with feeding Belgium) was in fact channeling thousands of tons of supplies to Germany.

Sir William Wiseman, head of British Intelligence and a partner in the bankers Kuhn Loeb, demanded the Germans arrest and execute Cavell as a spy. Wiseman believed that the continuance of the war was at stake. The Germans reluctantly agreed, thus creating "one of the principal martyrs of the First World War." (Mullins "The Secrets of the Federal Reserve", pp. 72-73)

[williatw]

The way I see it, since Wall St. financed Communism and Nazism in the first place it makes no sense to complain about other countries not carrying the can on defense spending. In Canada's case, we fought Germany for 4 more years in WW1 and 2 more in WW2. In Europe and the UK there's a saying, America won the war after everybody else did the bleeding, in Vietnam the U.S. found out what that actually meant.

Well it's not our fault the western democracies appeased Hitler throughout the 1930's, that Britain and France capitulated on Czechoslovakia partioning, British PM Chamberlain not our president who returned from Munich proclaiming peace in our time. It wasn't our fault the British and French armies were routed, barely staving off total disaster (at least for the Brits) in the "Miracle at Dunkirk". France collapsing in about 6 weeks, we weren't in the war at that point. Stalin trusting Hitler signing a 10-yr non-aggression pack, and being shocked when he was betrayed. The ruinous to Germany after WWI war reparations that Britain & France insisted on applying (over our objections). They setup the Weimar Government's collapse after the Great Depression (the debt incurred by Germany as a result of reparations made the depression that much harder on Germany than anyone else, setting up the Nazi rise). The pre-war failure of the League of Nations (which we weren’t in) in stopping aggression in Manchuria & Ethiopia, thereby encouraging Hitler. Guess it wasn’t us with Lend-lease “loaning” enormous amounts of money/supplies to Britain & allies, starting before we were even in the war.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lend-Lease

A total of $50.1 billion (equivalent to $650 billion today) worth of supplies were shipped. That represented 17% of the total war expenditures of the U.S.[2] In all, $31.4 billion went to Britain, $11.3 billion to the Soviet Union, $3.2 billion to France, $1.6 billion to China, and smaller sums to other Allies.

And no offense you may have fought them longer in WWII, but Canada's contribution to the Allied victory hardly compares remotely to ours. I am sorry but it wasn’t your armies that liberated Western Europe, helped rebuild it with the Marshall Plan, and held the line against the Russians for 40 years. And regardless of whose fault you have convinced yourself Communism & Nazism was if it wasn't for American military and economic might, there would be no free Europe, or free much of anything today. Yes we lost in Vietnam (after taking over from the French who got their asses handed to them), but the Vietnam War was part of the greater conflict of the Cold War, which we won. Just as the British lost at Gallipoli but obviously was victorious in WWI (with our help). And as far as you (& the other allies) doing more bleeding in both world wars (the 1st of which we weren't even in until the third year and really wasn't our fight to begin with), as George S. Patton said (paraphrasing) you don't win a war by dying for your country you do by making the other poor dumb bastard die for his.

[paperburn1]

Yep Canada lost 45,000 people in there time in world war 2 . The united states lost 450,000. Even if you divide it along a per capita basis we still almost match Canada (0.08 percent less) and we were in the war 2 years less.
Now the soviets lost 10 to 15 percent of the population depending on whose figures you use.
And traveling in the UK I never heard the saying that america came in after the bleeding was done. The worst statement I ever heard was "well you were a little late to the dance but we were glad you came." Told to me gentleman that had TWO submarines sunk while he was in them.
But that is another story

[choff]

The official history never finds it strange that the French didn't invade Germany at the start when Hitler was fully occupied in Poland and his western border was undefended, or why the British were never routed at Dunkirk. My point is that international finance had a lot more to do with how the wars were begun, the outcome of battles, and how they were ended.

It's no coincidence WW1 started a year after the creation of the Federal Reserve, the major European actors had too much debt from arming to fight without it. Rather than complain about how much each country contributed, you should look at why the conflicts existed in the first place. Currently 0.2% of the banks own 70% of all bank assets, banking being the only industry that counts debt as an asset. Keeping the ponzi scam going requires the selling of more debt and more war debt, otherwise collapse.

The part about the bleeding was taught to me in high school by a teacher who had been an navigator on a Lancaster.

[paperburn1]

I will agree war is driven by money or financial gain. But it has been this way long before the establishment of the world bank