The population might not be happy, but they don't have the means to change it. Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top. 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth. Instead he put the losses on top of the public debt, became the leader of the new nation and enjoyed no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves. Today we can see the same thing happening again with different rich guys' names. But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
His wealth was mainly in very illiquid land. A lot of it was near worthless unless US won the war since it was beyond the line drawn by the Royal Proclamation of 1763 and white settlers were generally banned from settling there.
Otherwise like many landholders back in the day he was semi-broke and had limited access to cash.
Of course after the war of course he was both compensated for his expenses and got “his” land in Ohio (more or less)
Well, most of Elon Musks assets today are also not cash and highly dependent on the federal government going his way on key issues. He's certainly not dumb doing what he does if his goal is to get richer and more powerful. But unlike 200 years ago, we can watch live how that stuff plays out.
For comparison, the war with Iraq (a far less formidable opponent than the globe-spanning British Empire) cost the US-UK alliance $1.1 trillion [1]. Musk's net worth is $353 billion [2].
Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.
Being able to outspend the other side is definitely a good indicator of winning odds. There is some friction of course, but it’s a very rough approximation of how much industrial might you can put into the field. And just having money isn’t enough either, you have to be able to spend/convert it into a military power in some way.
So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.
They were also financed with a finite resource, or at least, one that grew at a much slower rate, governed by the laws of physics as they impacted the economic feasibility of gold mining. Rather than an indefinitely large supply of "money future generations will pay back."
That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.
And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war.
The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning.
It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.
The British also realized that as long as the Americans would borrow from the Bank of England, and were willing to trade their raw goods to England where they could be processed into industrial goods and then sold back to them, there wasn't much of a need to win the war in the first place -- though they didn't realize this all at once (as evidenced by the War of 1812). It was when the Americans (in the North) got to disrupting this economic situation that things really kicked off that they needed to back the Confederacy in what was effectively America's third revolution. Despite losing that one too, America's economy and politics were impacted enough that it was just a few decades later the British agent and American turncoat Woodrow Wilson was able to bring the former colonies back to heel with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, and entry into WWI as Britain's ally.
It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.
The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did.
Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered.
Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn.
Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control.
Perhaps but IMHO it’s a very high risk strategy and I doubt it’s necessarily optimal if more wealth is his primary goal (as opposed to his other seemingly highly megalomaniacal ambitions..)
So far his actions haven’t really been that beneficial for Tesla (of course its sales growth might have significantly slowed down even if he stayed out of politics). SpaceX can only make that much even if it gets to appropriate the entire budget of NASA. Also at the end of the day his and Trump’s relationship might fall apart any day.
That doesn't seem likely to me as I don't see how someone can get to be that rich without being incredibly motivated by more money. Surely a normal person would get a few million and decide that they had more money than they'd ever need?
If you only care about money then there’s no difference between a few hundred million and anything above that. What can you not do with money with a few hundred million? Not much.
The people who get to be billionaires are motivated differently to normal people. They are more like feudal kings.
In every system. The whole point of money is you can use it to get what you want. The whole point of having power is that you can use it to get what you want. They are the same thing if not completely interchangeable. You can use money to buy power and you can use power to accumulate money.
You can use money to buy things people are willing to sell.
You can use power to get people to do they would not otherwise do.
Generally, if money is able to get people to do things they wouldn't otherwise do, there needs to be some sort of duress, or corruption. People who are content with what they have don't resort to prostitution or otherwise compromising their principles for money. Those who are held under crippling debt, or who come to have no principles, are much more inclined to do so.
Power is more subtle, and it is related to money, but no, they're not the same thing.
I wouldn’t necessarily go as far as directly comparing Musk and George Washington. But I suppose there are some parallels [if we take the more cynical] perspective. Both were willing to take on significant risk to upend the established socio-economic order primarily for the benefit of their respective social classes (wealthy landholders and tech-oligarchs).
But yes, confiscation of all his property and even the gallows (fortunately or unfortunately for everyone else) is not a risk Musk is facing yet.
And its not like confiscating his property would do much. Like most billionaires his wealth is almost entirely stocks which while theoretically liquid would loose most of its value if you tried to sell it all at once.
I doubt money has been Elon's primary motivation for at least the last 25 years, possibly longer. He is seeking approval and recognition, maybe power. His love for Mars might go beyond the recognition he gets from it. But Money is just a gateway to all of these things, and in a way a byproduct.
> George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War out of his own pocket and he still would have retained two thirds of his wealth
Is that true ?
As far as I am aware, the money the French Government alone loaned to the US during the revolutionary war (at least two million dollars[0]) far exceeded the value of Washington personal wealth (estimated at $780,000 in 1799 [1], so at the time of his death, not during the war).
And this is not counting all the loans made from other foreign sources (the Spanish Government and private Dutch investors), and the money raised directly by the Continental Congress.
Also, as others have said, it would have been almost impossible to liquidate his assets (his lands and his slaves) during the war - the problem was availability of cash, not wealth.
It goes far beyond that: France sent troops and France and Spain sent their navies to protect the East Coast and fought with the British navy to prevent them from landing forces. They also prepared an invasion to invade the British isles, which tied what forces Britain had remaining to the British isles. That is how the small rebel contingents were able to win against the scarce British presence. Even that required Lafayette to come up from the south with his French contingent and do a pincer move.
Your source says that it depends on how you look at it. See the similar discussion regarding Iraq war spending in the other comments.
But it is also totally irrelevant, because the point is that Washington was one of the richest people in America before the war started and even richer when he died. There is no doubt about that.
I'm not doubting that Washington was very very rich.
I'm doubting the different and very specific claim that "George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War" with just a third of his wealth.
To me, the math simply does not add up. I suppose it can be chalked up to hyperbole ?
I also don't see how a discussion of the Iraq war could be relevant to that claim ...
War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it. Would you for example say that George Washington would have owned more than 30,000 slaves in today's world? A straightforward extrapolation of the population size might suggest so. But then again that is also grossly overlooking many other aspects. So you would also be right to doubt it. Either way, you would still be missing the point of the discussion.
> War financing is incredibly complex and even more so when your only source is some paper notes from several hundred years ago. Whether you believe that or not basically boils down to how you want to see it.
Perhaps so. But you're the one who made the initial claim so confidently and definitively. To now say "it's complex and based only on a few notes, and depends on how you want to see it" is basically the same as saying "my original claim was my spin on it, which I was asking everyone to take as accurate".
The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime.
Turned out that in this day and age when the governments have unprecedented powers of surveillance and the ability to cut anyone from the respective financial system, a revolution is a really hard thing to pull off.
If the British had the kind of power that even half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded.
You have to both outnumber the loyalists to certain degree and show significant determination. Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak. As a percentage of the population that's less than what Belarus saw, but at the same time Yanukovych had significantly fewer people willing to do his bidding than Lukashenko.
>Euromaidan did that with 800,000 protesters at its peak.
Euromaidan succeeded because it also had massive support and influence from the western powers and from the western(mostly US) itelligence agencies to make the pro-Russian regime change happen.
Similar to the fall of the Berlin wall and the fall of communism in Eastern Europe, it was a decades long effort from the US itelligence agencies, they didn't just sit around and wait for the local population to revolt.
People ignore how much external interference these revolutions get in order to make regime changes happen.
I was following the events very closely. The most obvious foreign interference I saw was Russian spetznaz being brought in as reinforcements to try and suppress tbe protests for longer.
Yeah obviously, but I never claimed there wasn't interference from both sides since Russia would be stupid not to have interfered, but it's not like CIA, who also would have been stupid not to have interfered, wears high visibility vests with their org's logo while on duty abroad or posts their ops on Wikipedia for everyone to see.
If the public knew everything the CIA was doing, they would be not very good at their job. Stuff like this is usually declassified only 50+ years later or sometimes never. So please, let's not use the "I've only seen Russian agents in the streets but not CIA" as some sort of argument since that insults everyone's intelligence.
Agree! I’m not saying CIA (or whichever other three letter agency) were not involved in any way. But the way I see this, if I was out in the streets trying to get rid of a pro-Russian stooge making my country an autocratic puppet regime, I would be thankful to whomever is paying for the tea, or helping in any other way.
" half-competent governments have today, the American revolution would never have succeeded."
tbh British empire at that time still has Canada,India,Australia and not counting 'small size' territory they has, Yes they can supress American Revolt absolutely but it would be a burden and not cost effective at the same time. colonies is bussiness after all
if they can't produce wealth then why fought so hard to defend this land???
> The people of Belarus put this to test not that long ago. Massive numbers of people came out, factories went on strike, even people from the military and police spoke out against the regime.
Did they, though... The Western media depicts all color revolutions as such movements, complete with 'the military speaking out'. They did the same in Venezuela and other places. The 'military guys speaking out' turned out to be Colombian mercenaries who put on the wrong Venezuelan army uniform and whatnot.
They did yeah. There was this whole hashtag-like thing on Telegram where people who had a regime uniform in their wardrobe would stuff it in the trash. It was mostly demobilised conscripts, policemen, and such. There was also one high ranking retired officer who openly spoke out against the regime, who’s in exile now.
Having written that, so yes and no. As in, I don’t think there were many (any?) active service members. That likely would’ve been very dangerous. But people who had close and recent ties with the military, so could be expected to be regime loyalists, yes, plenty.
EDIT: I never follow Ukraine, Russia, or Belarus on “Western media”. I read Russian, so I follow a bunch of Telegram channels from those countries. The protests in Belarus were basically covered live.
One thing the 'reactionaries' (anti-revolutionaries) do is spread propaganda of powerlessness. I'm not saying you are doing it intentionally, but they do it for a reason.
Belarus had 500.000 people show up. But they got beat down. Hong Kong had millions of people show up. But it just led to massive crackdowns. Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.
> Numbers mean nothing when the guys who own the guns are not on your side.
Not saying it will turn out differently, but there are more guns circulating in the US than there are people. Nearly everyone has or can easily get access to a gun. US culture is also quite a bit different, celebrating violence, don't tread on me, etc...
Again, it might not make a difference, but I'm not sure those other situations are comparable.
Something else to note is that military officers swear an oath the constitution, not POTUS (like enlisted do). Asking someone to order or to shoot fellow Americans, particularly if unarmed, would definitely be a test. If something like that did happen, we would be entering a second civil war.
If it actually does come to a new civil war, my money is still on whoever owns most of the military. Small arms are nice and well, but they don't help you a lot when the other guy has got APCs and tanks.
I think it would be an open question as to which side ends up owning most of the military. Bases are all over the US along with national guard. The people in the military are also a pretty diverse group. In a civil war situation I don’t think it would be an automatic siding with DC.
One of the reasons the military has so many independent branches is that it would take all of them to rebel and join the opposing side in order to win. It's impossible to tell how they would side in a real internal conflict and the whole apparatus probably has to break down first before they will ever officially take sides of a force that opposes the federal government. At that point there will be total chaos and the wealthiest people can once again swoop in, amass the most powerful force and take over.
In the US's two most recent wars, the people with small arms outlasted the US military. It happened in 3 of the 5 U.S. wars since WWII, and in the other two there was nobody with small arms.
It's always the people who have never fought in a war that say things like this.
APCs take fuel, require men to run, and need tires or tracks. For $10 worth of chemicals or a little bit of camouflage and some earth work you can make the APC irrelevant very quickly.
Happened in Iraq all the time.
The US military and its members have spent almost 25 years fighting through insurgencies.
(If you spend a lot of time learning to fight against an insurgency, you also spend a lot of time learning how to wage one against a technologically superior force.)
It's actually pretty similar when you get to the bottom of it. Lenin was a member of the nobility during the Tsar rule. He saw his oppurtunity when Russian leadership was weakened after the first World War (similar to how the British were weakened after the Seven Years' War) and took it. The biggest difference is that he had unsuccessfully tried before and was orchestrating the whole thing from his exile base in Switzerland. Hunger was just a useful tool to overthrow the government more easily. If hunger alone was enough, Mao would have gotten his ass kicked harder and faster than anyone else in history. But in the end hungry people don't make good soldiers and only soldiers can bring drastic change in governance.
>he was promoted to Director of Public Schools for the province, overseeing the foundation of over 450 schools as a part of the government's plans for modernisation. In January 1882, his dedication to education earned him the Order of Saint Vladimir, which bestowed on him the status of hereditary nobleman.
Literally all the founding fathers stood to be wealthier by getting the colonies to work with Britain than against it. Like, this is basic fucking math. Dragging armies across the economy you do business in with the end result being you are on your own and can no longer rely on the dominant economic power for protection and trade agreements and whatnot is not how you get fabulously rich if you are already starting from "not peasant".
If you want to look at them through an economic lens the right one to choose is "the founding fathers were rich enough that they knew that even if revolution was bad on a macro level they'd still be filthy rich and wouldn't starve"
>But the poor will not benefit this time either. When things get bad for average people, it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
I think you need to look at more revolutions. What tends to happen is a shuffling of the people who are already on top and the "HN class" of high end professionals, academics, media personalities, business leaders and other "peasants who are critical to the system" wind up in the gulags or losing their heads because the "fungible peasants" are pissed off at them for really squeezing out every penny until the system collapsed.
> 250 years ago George Washington could have financed the entire Revolutionary War
That was a rebellion, not a revolution. The colonial elite broke away from the mother country. They sculpted the eventual legal and political structure to protect their power and privilege without having to pay taxes.
If you're looking for a revolution, better look at the French Revolution or the October Revolution.
The October Revolution wasn’t a popular uprising but a surgical strike by a minority faction. just after the take over, SRs were more popular but bolsheviks crushed them fast without much resistance. so it wasn't about what people wanted but what a determined minority could pull off.
> The October Revolution wasn’t a popular uprising but a surgical strike by a minority faction
And with that argument, you reduce every.single.revolution to a 'surgical strike by a minority faction'. The French Revolution becomes a surgical strike of a few enlightened bourgeois in Paris. The American Rebellion becomes the rebellion of a very small clique of rich colonial landowners. No revolution would be an exception.
Every single revolution happens through a vanguard party pushing it forward - that's what the Bolsheviks got right.
> it wasn't about what people wanted
It wasn't what the better-off bourgeois and their dependents in Moscow, St. Petersburg and other regions wanted. It was apparently what the people wanted, because the resulting, foreign-aided civil war was won by the power of those people. No revolution can win a civil war without popular support.
Cryptography, as the state department used to understand, is a munition (but of course, thank God for the First and Second Amendment). Cryptography based peer to peer currency that can replace a debt based system of inflation that provides an unfair advantage to the first spender of the new money is a particularly powerful munition in addressing this issue.
At least Bukele seems to get this. As does the IMF, as evidenced by their panicked attempt to shut him down.
No rush in any case though; the people who understand Bitcoin the best are those that need to, and rapid adoption is just a stressor on those building out the rails.
> Instead he put the losses on top of the public debt, became the leader of the new nation and enjoyed no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves.
That’s a rather skewed take. You might see what Washington himself said about becoming that leader.
George Washington wasn’t a signer of the Declaration of Independence either, so this idea that he concocted the revolution for personal gain is silly. He was appointed to lead the Continental Army by John Adams because of Washington’s military experience and his being from Virginia which was an asset in unifying the colonies.
Unions have done more to increase the wages of the working class than tax cuts for the rich have ever done.
If you want to live in a country with rampant poverty, homelessness, crime, etc then go to a country with low or no income tax. If you're not a lord in a feudal society then you're a serf.
> How very Marxist. How have those Marxist governments fared in the past?
One lasted about 70 years, turned a country from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities".
The other big one went from "agrarian" to "makes most of your smartphones, e-readers, etc."
But more than that, if your standard for "marxist" is "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes", then the UK, France, and Germany are currently also Marxist. The UK and France brings the number of permanent UN security council members who are "Marxist" to 3 (not 4, because Russia doesn't have those things today), and those plus Germany are the economic backbone of western Europe.
It went from from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities, and still couldn't provide toothpaste to its people".
Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
So the USSR may not be making the point for you that you think it is...
> It went from from "agrarian" to "beat the USA to Earth orbit, put landers on the moon and Venus first, roughly equal nuclear capabilities, and still couldn't provide toothpaste to its people".
> Yeah, it was able to channel more of the output of the workers into achievements like nuclear weapons and space programs. It didn't put much into things that actually benefitted the workers, though.
Yes, and? I don't feel a need to claim the USSR was in any sense "nice" or "wise" or anything else like that. They were awful in many, many ways.
If my point had been about niceness, I could of course also point out that at the same time, the USA was still in the middle of saying "well obviously black people need to have separate bus seats" and had yet to end redlining policies, while the UK had yet to fully internalise that perhaps the people in the colonies who kept shooting the troops might possibly not like what we had done and were continuing to do with their homes.
But such was never the point I made in the first place.
Think lower on Maslow's hierarchy of needs.
Famine is the default, that everyone used to suffer on a regular basis. The USSR, India, China, these are all countries had all been suffering from mass famines at the start of their industrialisation, and compare them to how Ireland was part of the UK when the potato famine happened: The Soviet famines were 1930–1933 (including Holodomor) and 1946–1947 (which was partly due to WW2 and a need to not look weak due to very legitimate fear of America at that point); the Chinese one was the Great Leap Forward in 1958-62 (the CPC only took power in December 1949); the last really severe Indian famine was 1943, just before the British were made to leave.
Then think of the housing stock. Of electricity. Of plumbing, even (even today, Russia's % of that is pretty low). Pre-industrial societies basically do not have mass plumbing — can't pump sewage away without power. Toothpaste is important, but it's way down the list compared the radical improvements to quality of life that these governments brought their people (which is not to say they therefore are above criticism, they're absolutely fair game for criticism!). Even good nations aren't above criticism, and the USSR wasn't even good. The USSR in particular had huge avoidable problems caused by their own censorship preventing themselves from fully understanding how badly wrong their own policies were.
Even despite all the stuff the USSR did wrong, they still made things a lot better than what came before. (Unlike, say Pol Pot, who was an unmitigated disaster for Cambodia).
That the USSR was, and China now is, able to reach the point of challenging the USA for hegemony, is nevertheless a national success story. Despite both being flawed. Likewise India now having a GDP higher than the UK, even if they're still a long way behind on the per-capita front.
There are zero rights without obligations. Why do we never hear about the latter?
To read about people standing up for their rights in a Marxist State read Robert Conquest's 570 pages of 'The Great Terror' - an account of the crimes committed against humanity in the name of the Soviet Communism that emerged from the 1917 revolution. 'We'll do it differently' is the usual response. Sadly this always leaves out appreciation of the human factor whereby charismatic leaders arise and are convinced they know the truth and the way. Before considering a revolution, ensure there's a solution for this human problem of leaders who lead the masses (they regard the latter as such) down a path that in retrospect is seen to be a disaster. Pol Pot, The Great Leap Forward, the Iranian Revolution. We need to sit down and think about this before taking to the streets.
How about evolution rather than 'eggs in one basket' revolution?
> There are zero rights without obligations. Why do we never hear about the latter?
I hear much about the latter. The right to freedom of speech vs. the obligation to not defame, to not pump up your own share price, to not leak state secrets, to not openly call for civil wars in foreign countries, etc.
The right to bear arms, vs. the obligation to keep them locked up so kids can't play with them.
While I share your opinion that revolutions are generally bad and messy things, there's plenty of people who think the rich are failing their obligations to the society which gave them the right to own property.
Taking an isolated look into history is unhelpful and lacks wisdom. The events you mention will feel and sound raw due to how close it is to us. Looking at it this way, it only serves to protect existing entrenched power structures because it fails to acknowledge why revolution happen. If the system evolved, we wouldn't have revolution. It's the last straw.
China's economy is more state owned than not. The private market is strictly controlled with socialist ideology. The difference between Chinese markets and liberal markets is that the state there controls the capitalists, in the US the capitalists control the state.
Xi has been moving in that direction yes, but generally that has not been true. Also, it sounds like you greatly sympathize with Chinese authoritarianism, maybe you need to do a reality check. You can always go live in China if prefer that. I've been many times, for months at a time, since I have in-laws there. Lately I would describe it as a high-tech North Korea.
I honestly would prefer moving there but it's pretty hard to attain citizenship. I believe the US is going to collapse and potentially balkanize in the coming years and don't want to witness it firsthand.
To someone who thinks "Laborer coordination and workforce strikes." are "very Marxist", China is indeed Marxist.
I know you're not the person who responded with that conflation, but if you were, to ask if Lenin would agree with that assessment is a motte-and-bailey fallacy.
False equivalence. The strawman that sticks out gets hammered. Peter Turchin has mapped this out. The elite wealth pump is what's ending the US empire and prosperity. This is why Trump is in power. Talk and negotiations dont work anymore, do you think people will lay down and give up?
>Revolutions don't happen when people are mad, they happen when the ones who can afford armies and equipment sense the possibility of coming out on top.
I agree. Too often 'revolutions' are framed as though common people were responsible for it - because it appeals to the modern day 'peasants' ( the 'middle' class and below) ideas of a 'fair' society. They are just pawns in a larger game and they are oblivious to it.
Because it's literally the same basic concept. The fall of the French monarchy and the eventual rise of Napoleon followed the exact same principles: Rich people born into nobility using their military influence and public dissent to overthrow a government and establish themselves as new rulers. The biggest difference here is that Napoleon came from a more modest form of nobility by comparison and was an actual military genius who rose from a low-end officer all the way to the top because of his skills on the battlefield (at least until his success went to his head and he crowned himself emperor). But he wouldn't have gotten anywhere without his soldiers.
> Rich people born into nobility using their military influence and public dissent to overthrow a government and establish themselves as new rulers.
Just to be clear, are you saying that the French Revolution was done by the rich born into nobility (even if minor)? Even if the rich still had an advantage during the entire turmoil, I think it's hard to argue that for the decades after 1790 that there wasn't a huge boost to social mobility.
Washington did not have anywhere near the financial resources to fund the Revolutionary War, and the war was financed mainly through debt, foreign aid, and state contributions. While he did benefit from independence in some ways, he did not orchestrate it as a means to avoid taxes or personally enrich himself.
I think that's a very narrow and largely inaccurate view of revolutions.
A lot of revolutions were carried out by people with very little resources - Mao led his army from under-developed hills, the October Revolution didn't have much of an industrial base either, nor did the left in the Spanish civil war (although the military eventually won, but hey, they had a fighting chance).
And aside from that, many revolutions happen relatively peacefully. For example Chile or South Africa. Although the latter case did have some violence and property destruction.
And aside from that, guns in the USA (assuming we're talking about this and not Europe) are cheap and plentiful. And a large, determined, but poorly-armed opposition has often beaten the smaller, well-armed forces of decadent states in the past.
Let's hope it doesn't come to that though - even a peaceful movement can succeed if it's widespread.
Historical nitpick: the Spanish civil war kicked off when the right - most of(police + military + church + rich people) - rebelled against a constitutional republican government. I'll leave it as an exercise for the reader whether that best fits their definition of a "revolution".
Revolutions happen relatively peacefully only when a significant part of the armed forces changes sides or at least refuses to execute orders.
With the transition from conscripted militaries to autonomous robotic weapons, there will be no more humans refusing to execute orders and no more traitors.
A future revolution will succeed only against a grossly incompetent government.
For me it alternates between mind-numbing and mind-blowing the models of political violence people hold.
It's one of the refreshing things about the crazy rightoids of late, how they emphasize how their larp revolution will cash out and retire enemies of the state.
But here on HN we get ESL-Occupy Wallstreet jeremiads that'd make Sorel blush.
I guess my issue is more that I feel like you’re looking in the wrong direction here. Imo the government’s behavior, which I don’t think is quite as egregious as you’re making it out to be, is primarily downstream from other things (notably the interests of money). I asked that question because I don’t think that getting rid of the federal government would help people very much at all.
> no longer having to pay taxes to the British for the economic output of his slaves.
This suggests that taxing the slaves would have better helped the poor. Was it helping them before the war? Were the poor suddenly worse off because of the revolution?
> it's just an opportunity for other rich guys to take the reigns.
Do George Washington's heirs control a significant portion of today's wealth?
The heir question is goalpost moving; it has no bearing.
Whether things may get better for the poor or may not isn’t so much the point as I see it. The observation here is that the poor, and their anger, become pawns for the games of elites. Sometimes those games benefit them where an elite acts as a benevolent avatar of their anger, but this is usually a transient faux-alliance because the elite calls the shots and has no genuine interest in a positive outcome for the poor they claim to represent.
