Our biggest risk is that another country will become more "stable" and their currency will displace the Dollar
I guess that is my $64,000 question.. With all its issues, could the Euro be poised for that position?
2B, of course things have changed.. what would obviously have been considered "unreasonable" search and seizure has now become somehow "reasonable"..
I'm not convinced of a "link" between economics and constitutional issues.. but perhaps a 'presaging'..?
Things are definitely changing in the US.. reading the above article I began thinking of the "Shoot First" laws.. now it's perfectly OK to shoot someone dead in certain states if you can 'prove' you 'felt threatened' (in some cases this has occurred during neighborhood disputes over too many trash cans..) !?!? [
http://www.shootfirstlaw.org/] With this kind of paranoia legitimized, "what's next?" is what I am wondering...
Then I thought about other "wacko" issues, like the NYT (treasonously?) writing about the SWIFT program.. Now, I have known for years that 1.) the gov't keeps tabs on, at minimum, any financial xaction over $10,000 and that 2.) for me to transfer $ I need a SWIFT code for the receiving bank. Put 1 + 2 together... [Am I an 'enemy combatant' for having written this?]
Have been going over other threads like these:
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?topic=9278.0
http://early-retirement.org/forums/index.php?topic=8566.0
The jury seems to still be out on US economic ascendancy. Buffet and Gates have been shorting the dollar, long term, one assumes for reasons beyond the political.
Many here have been speculating about what will happen when the proverbial "chickens come home to roost" w/r/t the private sector (CC, mortgages, and so on). What happens if/when this starts to apply to the public sector as well? Merely
surviving the Civil War, or the Depression, or the Iraq debacle is not exactly the point. More to the point is what the Average Joe/Jane had to suffer during the transition, and whether something similarly drastic may await us. 2B, you have a lot of good and sensible points about why US currency is still as strong as it is.. From my point of view, though, I am looking at a significant dollar devaluation since I moved abroad, so you can see why these issues interest me.
The political question of whether a government exists to serve a people, or whether people exist to prop up serve a government is indeed a chicken/egg question. DH (a student of ancient history) and I were intrigued by this article as well, tracing the end of the Roman republic to an overreactive reliance on well-funded counter-terrorism and its concomitant concentration of power:
http://tinyurl.com/e96ku
Leonidas, I know it is all very complex; one could probably spend a quite a bit of time on legally determining who is a "lawful" combatant and who isn't.
brewer, you are right about China.. but it has had to adapt mightily to a market economy, though the changes are probably not perceptible on our radar. I guess the question then is how much of the strength of the USD comes from economic reality and how much is 'value added' by little things like 'freedom' and transparency (seemingly ever more fleeting)?