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Discipline yes. Values??? What military values are you talking about exactly.
I remember the cadence we used to do in the Marine Corps. It went something like:
[LEFT]Jarheads, Jarheads commin back?
Been twelve years since we seen Iraq,
Fighting and Shooting all day long
Killing and a Slashing and singing this song
Napalm sticks to kids, OohRah
Napalm sticks to kids.
Brown, black, yellow, or white
they all burn just as bright
brown, black, yellow or white[/LEFT]
they all die in my sight.
Is this the type of values that you believe is a good thing?
Prosperity is the creation, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services. Making more with less, so more can enjoy is the recipe for success.
Anything that interferes with the creation, trade and enjoyment of that production is bound to cause impoverishment.
Penalizing the productive (via taxes) and rewarding the non-producer (via entitlements, etc) will result in collapse.
When the "fleas" outvote the "dog", the "dog" is doomed.
In other words, if you reward the takers, and penalize the givers, the takers "take over".
My uncles who raised me were products of the depression being between 20 and 30 at the time. Only one went into the army for WWII. All these men were good men.
It wasn't the military that made one successful and not the others. It was a collection of many different things that formed them into men.
I know that the AF did me allot of good that I use in my civilian life but it is not the single equation that defines me.
I had also benefited from a great rural up bringing, with people that were hard workers, good thinkers and thought it was their duty to make sure that I would learn that success is a balancing act and not to be taken for granted. I also learned from these men to see failure as an experience not a destructive end.
The mind set of the pre WWI generation was different then we have today. We want things happen much faster and when they don't we rush them. How often do we put something in the microwave for two minutes but take it out with 10 seconds left. The pre WWI generation had to show more patience and more thought and planing to get things done.
They also had to work more as a community then we do today. They worked together to raise a school, hand dig a road to town, build government facilities and churches. They had more Co-Ops for food production and more community socials.
We have lost that because we got in a hurry and don't have to think as much as they did. The equation may include a military participation but it is not the single defining factor.
Prosperity is the creation, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services. Making more with less, so more can enjoy is the recipe for success.
Anything that interferes with the creation, trade and enjoyment of that production is bound to cause impoverishment.
Penalizing the productive (via taxes) and rewarding the non-producer (via entitlements, etc) will result in collapse.
When the "fleas" outvote the "dog", the "dog" is doomed.
In other words, if you reward the takers, and penalize the givers, the takers "take over".
The 1940's- the early 1960's almost every man was enlisted in the military and went through boot camp and eventually serving our nation.
The 40's through the 60's saw enormous prosperity.
Could it have anything to do with the values and discipline implanted by our military?
If this was the case, we should expect nations that still have the draft to be prosperous, and to do better than nations who do not have the draft. Is such a correlation observable among nations?
The 40's through the 60's were highly atypical. Those decades represented unusual and unsustainable circumstances.
Most of the competition, the rest of the industrialized world, had blown itself up. America had a functioning infrastructure, and vast resources in terms of population, natural reasorces and space. Not to mention that it had had sufficient losses in WW2 that there was work for most of the people who made it, and scarcity drove wages up.
That probably had a lot more to do with the prosperity of those decades than military service did.
It is probably also why people feel that America has slipped so much in the world since then. A world view resting in the 50s and 60s, and to a lesser degree the two decades that followed cannot avoid seeing a decline when it comes face to face with the situation today. But its not so much a decline as the rest of the world getting its act together.
I don't know, I was a poor young man when I joined the military, now I am middle class with a house and three cars and no worries financially. I'd say the military solved my problem of being poor rather well.
But hey, you probably already stopped reading this since I am not agreeing with you, but just in case you still are... Merry Christmas!
If I stopped reading comments from people not agreeing with me, I might as well leave this board
I know that in the US the military manages to attract a lot of people because of the education it offers. That is one of the reasons why in the past so many black people joined the military, they could not afford college etc. in the civilian world and were not overly welcome in the job market, either.
So, while this might be better than nothing, in my view the military just exploits the failures of civilian America.
Prosperity is the creation, trade and enjoyment of surplus usable goods and services. Making more with less, so more can enjoy is the recipe for success.
Anything that interferes with the creation, trade and enjoyment of that production is bound to cause impoverishment.
Penalizing the productive (via taxes) and rewarding the non-producer (via entitlements, etc) will result in collapse.
When the "fleas" outvote the "dog", the "dog" is doomed.
In other words, if you reward the takers, and penalize the givers, the takers "take over".
'Nuff said.
Not everyone has to and can be productive, there will always be a huge difference in the productivity and capability of individuals. However, not least thanks to the media everyone knows what the standard of living is like, i.e. what people are expected to have, and thus there is no willingness to accept the difference in quality of life corresponding to the difference in the productivity and capability.
If I stopped reading comments from people not agreeing with me, I might as well leave this board
I know that in the US the military manages to attract a lot of people because of the education it offers. That is one of the reasons why in the past so many black people joined the military, they could not afford college etc. in the civilian world and were not overly welcome in the job market, either.
So, while this might be better than nothing, in my view the military just exploits the failures of civilian America.
The scenario you offer is in part true. Many minorities use the military benefits as a way out of impoverishment. I would not call that exploiting I would say it was offering a man a way to work his way to a better life instead of sitting and expecting welfare to help
The 1940's- the early 1960's almost every man was enlisted in the military and went through boot camp and eventually serving our nation.
I suspect you're factually wrong, here. There were of course drafts for WWII and Korea, but I doubt that you're right about "almost every man" - frankly, I doubt it was even a majority. I've poked around for statistics with little luck - do you have any?
Quote:
The 40's through the 60's saw enormous prosperity. Could it have anything to do with the values and discipline implanted by our military?
The massive infusion of cash into the production sector during WWII was probably the bigger factor. Uniquely among the great powers, the US emerged from WWII with its factories and cities mostly intact and with a civilian population flush with cash.
WWII cemented the middle class' position. With war profiteering being a crime and a government that had no qualms about intervening, few emerged very rich from WWII - but many, many more entered the post-war years with a moderately nice savings account, some bonds perhaps, and a craving for cars, better kitchens etc. etc.
Sorry, but the the U.S. military was segregated and not a shinning example of values during the 40's through 60'. Jim Crow was ever present in the U.S. military during WWII and the 60's.
I agree that the only people who saw "enormous prosperity" during this time were white Christian men.
And there were a whole host of other factors that helped the economic boom other than military enlistement and service.
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