A world without war is the only solution

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Bill Clinton, the president in office before George W. Bush presided over the longest period of peace-time economic expansion in American history, which included a balanced budget and a reported federal surplus Based on Congressional accounting rules, at the end of his presidency Clinton reported a surplus of $559 billion.

Clinton engaged in no wars. So I would say Dussel is right. War has brought on the recession. The housing crisis could have been rescued without a big recession if the U. S. government wasn't in so much debt which grows each year as interest on it increases.

George W Bush's government failed not because of his flamboyant support for the free market but because of his hare-brained act first, think later jump into war. In principle he was right and so he can't be judged too harshly. The Taleban and Saddam Hussein aren't widely regarded highly. But his methods have been too costly in my opinion.

http://clinton4.nara.gov/textonly/WH/Work/040299.html

http://thomas.loc.gov/cgi-bin/cpquery/? ... OC_627612&

Oddly enough, for a guy who didn't "fight any wars" more US troops died under Clintoon than Bush v.1 or Shrub.

Military Losses 1980 -- 2007

Whatever your politics, however you lean and however you feel about the Bush administration,
this report is interesting. As tragic as the loss of any member of the US Armed Forces is, consider the following statistics:

The annual fatalities, by any cause, of military members while actively serving in the armed forces from 1980 through 2006:

1980 -- 2,392 (Carter)

1981 -- 2,380 (Reagan)
1984 -- 1,999 (Reagan)
1988 -- 1,819 (Reagan)

1989 -- 1,636 (George H W)
1990 -- 1,508 (George H W)
1991 -- 1,787 (George H W)
1992 -- 1,293 (George H W)

1993 -- 1,213 (Clinton)
1994 -- 1,075 (Clinton)
1995 -- 2,465 (Clinton)
1996 -- 2,318 (Clinton)
1997 -- 817 (Clinton)
1998 -- 2,252 (Clinton)
1999 -- 1,984 (Clinton)
2000 -- 1,983 (Clinton)

2001 -- 890 (George W)
2002 -- 1,007 (George W)
2003 -- 1,410 (George W)
2004 -- 1,887 (George W)
2005 -- 919 (George W)
2006 -- 920 (George W)
2007 -- 899 (George W)

George W years (2001-2007): 7,932 deaths
Clinton years (1993-2000): 14,107 deaths - Almost TWICE as many.

Are you surprised when you look at these figures?
They indicate the loss from the two latest Middle East conflicts are less than the loss of
military personnel during Clinton's presidency when America wasn't even involved in a war --
unless you include Bosnia and Mogadishu, Somalia. (Remember "Blackhawk Down"?)

Even more surprising is that in 1980, during Carter's presidency, there were 2,392 US military fatalities!

These figures appear to indicate many members of our media and politicians pick and choose the information on which they report -- that they present only those "facts" that support their agenda.

These statistics are published by the Congressional Research Service and may be confirmed at:
www.fas.org/sgp/crs/natsec/RL32492.pdf

So, despite the rhetoric, the US Military Industrial Complex was happily grinding up people and money during the Clintoon years as well.

No one would deny a world without war would be a good thing, however it would be the result of a golden age, not the cause of.

War is generally triggered by resources. Even when it doesn't appear to be, an overabundance of resources on all sides still would have broken the chain of events that started the war. Thereforth unless abundant food, energy, and living space is provided for every single human being, conflict will always arise.

Now these requirements are very difficult to accomplish, since they need to be achieved not only for a majority of the population but essentially for the entire population. This doesn't mean a government controlled economy, but it requires a situation where working a minimum wage job will earn you enough money to buy a nice car, your own house, plenty of energy (be it fuel or electricity), and enough food to stuff your face every single day (of course you might not want to out of health reasons). And if you hate your job that's okay because there's 10 places that will hire you on the spot on within a quarter mile of your current employer.

Now that situation needs to be replicated in every single nation on the entire planet. Including the 3rd world.

Energy could potentially be provided by new developments in power generation, imagine coating every building on the planet with ultra-efficient solar panels. Safe fusion reactors every few hundred miles and piezoelectric plates on the roads and sidewalks, absorbing all the energy of people moving around.

The food resource can be resolved by building farm towers in every single city. This would not only cause food production to greatly increase, but all of the transportation costs of food production would drop to zero.

Living space however is something that can't be indefinitely satisfied within the confines of the planet. The world's population would skyrocket in such an age of prosperity and eventually we'd actually run out of room on the surface of the earth. Any solution would only delay the inevitable, and that inevitability is that humans would have to colonize not only the solar system, but beyond. Of course by this time we are reaching several thousand years after the golden age began and by then technologies would exist in every school desk that would boggle the mind of Stephan Hawking.

Well, I'm going to go easy and only attack one part of that post.