The empire will end – but how?

The United States can no longer “pay for its own elevated living standards or its wasteful, overly large military establishment.” Looking at the full cost of the U.S. empire – Johnson favorably cites Robert Higgs in noting that “figures on defense spending are notoriously unreliable…. Some 30 to 40 percent of the defense budget is ‘black’” – the U.S. “defense” budget is probably larger than the rest of the world’s combined. The spending continues because of a false patriotism and economic ignorance: “It is hard to imagine any sector of the American economy more driven by ideology, delusion, and propaganda than the armed services.” But “the estimated trillion dollars we spend each year on the military and its weaponry is simply unsustainable.”

So it will all end, but how? Will it be peaceful, as with the Soviet Union? Johnson writes that “the people of the British Isles chose democracy over imperialism.” Although we may point out that democracy and imperialism are not as mutually exclusive as left-liberals assume, he makes a good, if somewhat ominous, point. The British decided to scrap their empire after the devastation of World War II, which was perhaps more costly for Britain than it needed to be, since they had tried so hard to maintain their beloved empire. Johnson offers ten steps for liquidating the U.S. empire, with almost all of which libertarians can agree. In any event, if the United States does not end its empire peacefully, purposefully, and soon, then when the end does inevitably come, it will be most terrible.

Reprinted from The Future of Freedom Foundation.

Rest of blog here.