Hi John,
Re: The questions of who benefits and how so from the Government Debt Market is something that we can explore
going forward.
OK, my opening salvo is that the 29(?) prime dealers (I realize I'm a bit behind in the M&A count here) would be the major beneficiaries. It's a good business for them, as long as the "Moser" effect is kept to a minimum. Shuffling paper for fun and profit. <g>
Re: National Debt - I understand the argument about government surpluses being dis-inflationary. I'm not sure I completely buy the story. To me, inflation is more of a monetary artifact, than a result of the fiscal actions of the Federal Treasury. What I really object to is the notion that we should turn a blind eye to the $7 Trillion or so in National Debt and simply examine the current receipts and expenditures in the national accounts. The interest paid on that $7 Trillion is pure waste, as far as I'm concerned, and ought to be eradicated.
Re: Empire and It's Boundary Zones - One of the aspects of the Vietnam quagmire that you may or may not be aware of is that Ho Chi Minh, as a freedom fighter, was greatly enamored of Thomas Jefferson and the Federalist Papers. Just after WW II, and prior to the partition of North and South Viet Nam, Ho wrote a letter to then President Truman, describing Ho's enthusiasm for an alliance with the U.S. government as a counter-force to the re-installation of a French administration in the country. Upon advice from Dean Acheson, among others, President Truman failed to respond to Ho Chi Minh's overture. Thus, Ho was induced to seek an alliance with his second choice in empire builders, i.e. the Soviet Union, in his struggle against colonialism. The United States supplied material and expertise to the French during the struggles leading to Dienbienphu and the partition of Viet Nam in 1954. We never left, and the Eisenhower administration continued to provide expertise and material to the puppet regimes in South Viet Nam throughout the 1950's. Kennedy inherited this situation, and there is some question in the minds of certain historians as to Kennedy's troubled frame of mind regarding the deepening of our involvement in Viet Nam as November 1963 approached. Having been handed a humiliating defeat in the botched Bay of Pigs invasion, there was doubt as to the wisdom of a course of action in Viet Nam involving what appeared to some Administration members to be a quagmire in the making.
I cannot agree with the history you present regarding the Kennedy-Krushchev tete a tete. To my mind, history doesn't turn on a debating point. But rather on the juggernaught of empire building that both the U.S. and Imperial Russia/Soviet Union had been engaged in for a couple of centuries before they met on the field in Da Nang. Cf. "Tournament of Shadows", by Karl Meyer. The U.S., by the 1960's, had simply picked up the imperial ambitions that Britain and France could no longer afford, and the Russians were a decade away from the apogee of their empire.
-Ray |
