How we got here

A couple of very interesting posts from newsisyphus and discardedlies on how the US got all this international responsibility. It is partially a discussion of values and nationalism, one area where Libertarians fall short. (I was going to go with the lower case "l", but realized is was more true of party members than libertarians outside the party.)

Money quote from the discardedlies post: "If the Democrats get an F in Nationalism, the conservatives get an F+. Nobody has an acceptable and coherent position on the national question, which for me is: are we still a nation, and how can we hang on to it? What does it mean to say we are Americans, and this is America?"

No answers of course, but worth reading and thinking about.