🚀 go-pugleaf

On Aug 13, 8:03 am, kyb...@pobox.upenn.edu (Karen Y Byrd) wrote:
> History teaches us that every single great civilization has had
> a birth cycle, a growth cycle and a decline(sometimes death) cycle.
> Some of these civilizations have a renaissance cycle.
> Some don't.

Very true.  I was just thinking about the Spanish empire, how it
managed to sail around the world so long ago and colonize so many
different places and impose its culture on them.  Then it all fell
apart.  I don't know their history to know why it all fell apart.
(Spanish Armada loss?  Spanish-American war loss?)

England was the big world power and went bankrupt in WW II and never
recovered.  Actually WW I hurt England very badly.  I think going
socialist after WW II really hurt England's chance of recovery, it
took far longer for it to recover from the war than it should've.
Socialism killed investment incentive and bloated the government.



> Somehow you think the US can avoid(or should) the decline(or
> perhaps death)cycle. It can't.

I have no crystal ball.  But I thought the US was done for back in the
1960s when civil rights and anti-war demonstrations were tearing the
country apart literally.  Then there was a malaise of the 1970s.  But
the country did rebound nicely in the 1980s and onward.  And of course
the Depression was very dark but we survived.

In the US the pendulum swung from socialism of the 1960s-70s to
capitalism of the 1980s-date and now we're hurting as the capitalists
got too greedy and sucked everything out.  The rising tide did not
lift all boats.  In the meantime a big segment of society is locked
into 'gimmee I'm entitled" handouts and won't let that go, letting
itself rot in the process.

NYC was a hellhole before Koch, Guilliani, and Bloomberg said
"enough!" and literally and figuratively cleaned up the streets.  The
Broken Window theory really meant something, as did a simple thing
like getting rid of the squeegee people (that Philadelphia refuses to
do).  Now NYC is thriving.