The citizenry would be an awful lot less rah-rah over "terrorism" and bad guys if the government was forced to actually ask the public to pay for the costs of war out of pocket. Oh, Saddam is an evildoer with WMDs? Let's get him - that'll be just $5000 per household.
I wonder how many people would put their money where their mouth is.
Wars have costs, and when those costs are subsidized by money printing, the bulk of society doesn't associate the immense costs of war with the war itself. Therefore wars are effectively waged cost free according to the populace since the US government has monopoly rights to print the world reserve currency. If nation-states lost the ability to mint their own money out of thin air, and instead had to continuously pester and beg the populace to pay for wars out of pocket, we would have less wars.
That is the cure for war, a move away from fiat money. Nothing else can be more effective than taking away the military industrial complex's right to print money out of thin air.
We know what happened with the Total Informational Awareness blowup in the early 2000's, the NSA will claim to stop tracking and tagging and collecting everything while continuing to do it behind our backs. They'll outsource the surveillance to overseas partners and exploit every loophole until there are none left in which case they will just do it with impunity.
Until every last man woman and child is tracked and tagged by the NSA like cattle, or until society moves to routing all telecommunications over Tor, with as much of that encrypted as physically possible, nothing is going to change. "Oversight" be damned.
If you had advanced warning that you would go through the same financial hardship, what would you do differently?
Have you considered driving an offroad vehicle out to BLM or USFS lands and subsisting there for free? You can live indefinitely without paying rent in some places.
I wonder how many people would put their money where their mouth is.
Wars have costs, and when those costs are subsidized by money printing, the bulk of society doesn't associate the immense costs of war with the war itself. Therefore wars are effectively waged cost free according to the populace since the US government has monopoly rights to print the world reserve currency. If nation-states lost the ability to mint their own money out of thin air, and instead had to continuously pester and beg the populace to pay for wars out of pocket, we would have less wars.
That is the cure for war, a move away from fiat money. Nothing else can be more effective than taking away the military industrial complex's right to print money out of thin air.