HobbitFoot

I didn’t just provide one example, though. There are cycles of war and peace in Europe that got mapped out to the globe as European nations became the dominant powers. There are eras of wars where various great and lesser powers participate in more destructive wars because the international order has broken down and isn’t there to restrain belligerents. There are also times when costly wars don’t end with a lasting “peace”, but an armistice before fighting resumes.

We seem to be at a point where the post World War II international order is breaking down. When that happens historically, there is usually a big war and destruction on the order of magnitude of World Wars I and II.

Still less than the dead of World War II

It has still been a relatively peaceful time in human history post fall of the Soviet Union even when you include Iraqi and Afghani deaths as a proportion to the world’s population. Wars still happened in that relative time of peace, but those conflicts were relatively contained to not create a new great power war.

Great powers haven’t entered in open conflict on the scale of World War II, which was chosen as a bench mark.

I’m going to look at it more in terms of how long a European peace lasted.

The Napoleonic wars ended with the Concert of Europe, a peace that was able to last until World War I and depended on a balance of power that lasted for almost a century.

An equivalent system was set up after World War II with a peace anchored by the Allied Powers, decolonization, and the US-Soviet rivalry. That system has lasted for about 80 years and is showing significant strain.

I don’t know how long this system will last, but it doesn’t seem like it will last for much longer. Trump’s election seems to be hastening that end.

It depends on the form of employee ownership as to whether it works out for the employees.

In trucking, the industry uses the owner-operator model as a way to push costs onto employees and skirt labor laws. On paper, the truckers are their own bosses. In reality, they are effectively employees of logistics companies where the logistics companies can pay their employees less than minimum wage and push maintenance costs onto their employees.

In this case, ownership is used as a tool of oppression.

But why is there a two party tango?

Democrats will implement some policies and laws and then see support collapse as Republicans get voted in. Then people who didn’t vote will complain that Republicans got voted in and dismantled what Democrats were able to do.