<story><title>The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/10/the-us-has-spent-1point5-trillion-on-war-since-september-11-attacks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rfinney</author><text>What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world?&lt;p&gt;Our forefathers paid a higher price.&lt;p&gt;Security and liberty are not without costs.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>The usual thought experiment for framing the magnitudinal difference between millionaires and billionaires, extended to trillions:&lt;p&gt;One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days).&lt;p&gt;One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years).&lt;p&gt;One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years).&lt;p&gt;The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>mikeash</author><text>That only works if the massive resources spent on Afghanistan and Iraq helped with the Pax Americana. I see no reason to think it did, and a multitude of reasons to think the opposite. How many millions have now died because we knocked over Iraq without anything resembling a real plan for handling the aftermath?</text></comment>
<story><title>The US has spent $1.5 trillion on war since Sept 11 attacks</title><url>https://www.cnbc.com/2018/09/10/the-us-has-spent-1point5-trillion-on-war-since-september-11-attacks.html</url></story><parent_chain><item><author>rfinney</author><text>What about the contrarian view that the Pax Americana has brought the greatest era of peace, wealth and standard of living to the world?&lt;p&gt;Our forefathers paid a higher price.&lt;p&gt;Security and liberty are not without costs.</text></item><item><author>kibwen</author><text>The usual thought experiment for framing the magnitudinal difference between millionaires and billionaires, extended to trillions:&lt;p&gt;One million seconds ago was Thursday, August 30 (11 days).&lt;p&gt;One billion seconds ago was Saturday, January 3, 1987 (31 years).&lt;p&gt;One trillion seconds ago was back during the Pleistocene geological epoch and the Paleolithic era of prehistory (31,689 years).&lt;p&gt;The quantity of American resources that have been wasted on war is shameful. For my own mental health I try not to dwell too long upon all the infrastructure, research, and social programs that money could have been better spent on.</text></item></parent_chain><comment><author>cyphar</author><text>Given that America has constantly been at some sort of state of war since WW2, the concept of Pax Americana (which apparently started after WW2, while the Americans were in a cold war with the Russians -- and various new conflicts each decade) is simply a rewrite of history based on modern imperialistic pro-American propaganda.&lt;p&gt;Arguing that &amp;quot;security and liberty&amp;quot; (of Americans I assume, not the rest of the world) is worth &amp;quot;bringing peace&amp;quot; (read: starting wars and overthrowing democratically elected leaders) to other countries is just silly. Many millions of people were killed in the middle east (and many of them were innocent civilians). How would you act if a foreign power (acting as though they were the bringers of civilisation to a group of savages) decide to kill millions of Americans? I doubt you would think that those invaders were particularly deserving of the moral high-ground.</text></comment>