The U.S. Supreme Court recently ruled that online retailers are responsible for collecting sales tax even if they don’t have a physical presence in the state where the purchase is made.

I would have written on this sooner, but I am still trying to digest the ramifications from this Supreme Court ruling.  The more I read about it though, the more unclear it becomes.

I have written before on the disastrous situation regarding 50 states with all differing sales tax policies.  There are only a few states that do not collect sales taxes on consumer goods.  Although I am a decentralist, I could see the benefit of actually having some kind of national policy regarding sales tax collection.  Like anything that Congress does though, they would probably just make it worse.

Most of the cases taken by the U.S. Supreme Court should never be heard at the federal level.  The Supreme Court usually abuses its power by taking jurisdiction over issues that should be settled at a state or local level.  With this case regarding sales tax collection, it is harder to say because there is a reasonable argument to be made that it does involve interstate commerce.

Although the Supreme Court made this ruling, it is not legislation.  Therefore, we don’t really know if it will be enforced or how much it will be enforced.  We don’t know how it will be enforced.  It reminds me of a quote attributed to Andrew Jackson to Supreme Court Chief Justice John Marshall saying, “John Marshall has made his decision; now let him enforce it.”

With this ruling, some are saying that Amazon will actually benefit because the company already collects sales tax in every state.  However, this is overlooking a major point.  About half of the products sold through Amazon are through third-party merchants.  There are many people who make a living selling their products through Amazon.  Most of these people do not collect sales taxes, except perhaps in the state where they actually reside.

What is to happen to these private retailers?  Amazon does not want to lose any significant percentage of this group.  But for a third-party merchant to collect taxes in all 50 states would be highly burdensome.  You would be registering (and oftentimes paying fees) to get set up in each individual state.  Each state’s form is different and the process of reporting the payments and sending them off to the state is different for each one.  It is a bureaucratic nightmare.

I suspect that most third-party merchants will just ignore this whole thing and take their chances.  Otherwise, unless they are making well into six figures or more per year, it probably won’t be worth the hassle (time and money).  There will be programs such as TaxJar that will either benefit greatly from this, or it may put them out of business.

Now let me explain that last part.  If the people at Amazon were smart at this stage, they would just set up sales tax collections on behalf of its third-party sellers.  Amazon has billions of dollars to work with and shouldn’t have too much trouble setting up systems to collect sales taxes for each state.

Many people on the outside think that Amazon sellers are complaining just because they don’t want to compete with brick and mortar stores.  But that isn’t really the biggest issue.  The biggest issue is the administrative headache of trying to collect sales taxes.  If Amazon did this on behalf of its merchants, I don’t think most sellers would mind.  They would probably be happy.

It gets even trickier when we start talking about Ebay and Etsy.  Of course, there are hundreds of more sites that sell products, which aren’t confined to one state.  Is someone selling $5 ornaments on Etsy going to collect sales taxes for every other state in the country? Is this seller who lives in Alabama going to pay hundreds of dollars to California to register a tax ID for the privilege of acting as a tax collector?

These are all real and valid questions that have yet to be answered.  I think enforcement is going to be very difficult because compliance is so difficult in the first place.  There is safety in numbers up to a certain point.  Is the federal government (or a state government) going to bring this to an absurd level and make an example out of someone who sells $100 (in revenue) per month?  If that happens, then something will change after the backlash.  At the very least, perhaps Congress will pass something that at least grants an exemption for those selling under a certain amount, say, $25,000 per month.

Stay tuned for where this whole thing goes.  I don’t expect it to dramatically hurt or help Amazon in the short term.  But for the long term, I think the executives at Amazon would be wise to collect all sales taxes on behalf of its sellers.  With one less headache, it would only encourage more sellers to join the Amazon platform.

I was recently involved in a thread on Facebook in which the original commenter was telling of their fear of investing a large lump sum of money in the stock market, especially given its current condition.  The group revolves around personal finance, but it is not a libertarian group.

Many in the group advocate something similar to Warren Buffett.  They think the best advice is to invest in a broad U.S. stock market index fund (such as Vanguard) that has very low fees.  They advocate buying and holding because “the market always goes up in the long term.”  Although they are following the advice of Warren Buffett, it is important to note that Buffett was highly successful because he didn’t do what he now advocates for others to do.

The responses to the original comment on this particular thread did vary, but the consensus opinion seemed to be to just invest the money now in stocks and not look at it for a long period of time.  It may go up or down in the near future, but you can almost be sure it will be much higher in 2 decades, or something along those lines.

The advocates of such a strategy can never answer (at least to my satisfaction) why a Japan-like scenario is not possible in the United States.  Japan is a first-world country.  If someone invested at the top of the market in 1989, they are still down by about half.  That is almost three decades now.

The answer I typically get, if there is any, is that the U.S. is not Japan.  And they say that if the U.S. stock market does that bad, then we are all in trouble anyway.  But I don’t completely agree with that because a down stock market doesn’t necessarily mean a collapse of the division of labor and a virtual collapse of civilization.  During the Great Depression of the 1930s, there was still 75% of the working population with jobs, even during the worst time.  Sure, times were really tough, but there were still people who were thriving.

It is no different in Japan today.  The stock market has been down for three decades, but it is not as if everyone is living in poverty.  Despite its massive problems, there are still many prosperous people living in Japan.

I am not saying that the U.S. or the U.S. stock market will end up like Japan.  I am just saying that it is possible, and a prolonged downturn in the stock market is a real possibility.

Now returning to this thread on social media, I stated that PRPFX is a good alternative.  For anyone that knows me on this blog, I am an advocate of setting up a permanent portfolio or something resembling it.

I have discussed the mutual fund PRPFX before.  It is a little different from the permanent portfolio as described by Harry Browne.  PRPFX does some stock picking, even though no one stock makes up a large percentage of the portfolio.  It also invests about 5% in silver. It also buys some Swiss franc-denominated assets.

Still, overall, PRPFX is pretty good.  As of this writing, I am not, nor have I ever been, an affiliate for the mutual fund.  But I am constantly recommending it.

In this discussion with mostly non-libertarians, I didn’t want to take the time to lay out the permanent portfolio.  It would get too complicated for some, and they would lose interest.  It was easier to just mention PRPFX.  I don’t expect to sell many people on it in such an environment, but you never know if one person will look into it and like it.

The one comment I received back (not from the original commenter) was that the expense ratio for PRPFX is high.  It is currently shown at 0.82%.  And to be fair, it is high compared to something like VTSAX, which doesn’t require much management because it is just buying the total stock market.

To be sure, the expense ratio for VTSAX is currently 0.04%.  It is almost nothing.  Meanwhile, PRPFX is closer to 1% per year than it is to zero.

Of course, investing in a mutual fund is a lot more than just management fees and expense ratios.  It matters not just how the fund has performed and is expected to perform.  It matters how much risk you want to take.

In my opinion, a fund like VTSAX is riskier than PRPFX by a large multitude.  If the stock market crashes by 50%, then I hope all of the investors in VTSAX are proud of having saved that 0.82% expense ratio.

For me, that 0.82% is an insurance policy.  It is a small price to pay to sleep at night.  There are no guarantees, but if the stock market crashes by 50%, I don’t expect PRPFX to go down by any more than 10%, and even that would be dramatic for this fund.  I will gladly pay the 0.82% in order to avoid the 50% drop.

You can, of course, set up your own permanent portfolio.  This could include VTSAX, which fits nicely for the 25% stock portion.  But you have to manage your portfolio, and you have to rebalance it when it is appropriate.

This is why I advocate PRPFX to those who want to keep it simple.  They don’t have to buy several funds.  They don’t have to be disciplined to rebalance when one asset class goes way up or way down.  They can pay the 0.82% and have it done for them.  It is a small price to pay in the larger picture of things.

This is a follow-up post to a recent post I wrote on investing directly in U.S. Treasury bills.  I pointed out that you can earn a great deal more in interest buying Treasury bills than you can earn through a regular checking or savings account with your bank.

Since writing that last post, I went ahead and set up an account through the TreasuryDirect website.  It wasn’t the easiest website to navigate, but it wasn’t the worst either.  Overall, for a government website, it went pretty well.  The only part that was a little confusing was setting up the account ID and password.  It was incredibly simple putting in a link to my bank account.

After setting it up, I put in an order to buy a 4-week Treasury bill.  The transaction went through today, and it looks like the interest rate is currently just over 1.8%.

The yield curve has been flattening a bit lately (a recession indicator).  The long-term rates have gone up, but the short-term rates have been going up at a faster pace over the last few months.  Therefore, I didn’t want to lock in anything too long because short-term rates may keep creeping higher.

When you put in a purchase order, you can enter in the dollar amount for investment, coupled with the length of time for the investment.  For example, you can put in an order to buy a 4-week Treasury for $10,000.  It will tell you the next date of auction for when it will be bought.  You can also look at the previous auctions and the going interest rates, although that is no guarantee of the interest rate you will ultimately get.

One thing I noted is that it took slightly less out of my bank account than what I had ordered.  Using the above example of placing an order for $10,000, you may only see a reduction out of your bank account for $9,985.  I believe the reason for this is that the amount you order is actually the amount at maturity.  You will earn $15 over that 4-week period and have $10,000 placed back in your checking account, unless you specified that you want it reinvested.

I know that interest rates are still extremely low by historical standards.  Still you can go through the TreasuryDirect website and at least get something as compared to the near zero with your bank. If you have any substantial amount of “cash” sitting on the sidelines, you might as well get a little bit of return without a lot of effort.

If you are concerned about liquidity, you can just keep purchasing the 4-week bills and rolling them over until you need the money for something.  It is a very short timeframe to lock up your money.  You could always split up your order in half and stagger the purchases every two weeks.  That way, you always have access to at least half of your money within a two-week timeframe.

If anyone else has had any experience with the TreasuryDirect website, feel free to share your experience in the comments below.

I know it is odd for a libertarian website to be promoting the buying of government debt, but you have to do what is right for you.

When the FOMC releases a new statement on monetary policy, I often comment, just as I did this past Wednesday.  One of the things I mentioned is that the FOMC increased its targeted federal funds rate by 0.25% to a range of 1.75% to 2%.  I also stated that the interest rate that the Fed pays to banks on their reserves was raised by only 20 basis points, or 0.20%.

Regarding this slight deviation, I stated the following: “This is more a curiosity than anything, but perhaps the Fed didn’t raise its target rate quite as much as stated.  The range of the federal funds rate went up 0.25%, but the interest paid to banks went up 0.20%.”

It turns out that the Fed chair, Jerome Powell, actually commented on this fact, and CNBC ran an article about it.

The article states, “The interest rate on excess reserves, known as the IOER, is now 1.95 percent while the funds rate was set in a target of 1.75 percent to 2 percent. The Fed sets the IOER at the high end of the funds range to keep the benchmark rate in check, but the difference between the two has narrowed sharply in recent weeks. The Fed hopes that a lower increase in the IOER will hold back the funds rate.”

It goes on to state, “Fed officials aren’t sure why the funds rate had been rising to the top end of its range. While there’s a belief that it is in large part due to increased issuance of short-term Treasury bills to pay for the increase in government spending, Fed Chairman Jerome Powell said Wednesday that uncertainty remains.”

In regards to the deviation, the Fed chair actually stated, “The truth is we don’t know with any precision.”

In other words, the Fed has no idea why this deviation has occurred, and its only reasoning is to blame it on the increased issuance of short-term Treasury bills.  But since the deficits will likely continue to increase, then there should be a continued increase in the issuance of short-term Treasury bills, especially as the Fed continues to be a net seller of them.

It’s not that I ever had a lot of confidence in the officials working at the Fed, but I thought they at least sort of knew what they were doing.  Now, I am less sure.  The Fed used to target a specific rate for the federal funds rate, such as 1.75%.  Now it uses a range, and it is having trouble just staying inside that range.  And this is during a time of seemingly little turmoil in the financial markets.  What will happen when the next financial crisis comes?

The Federal Open Market Committee (FOMC) released its latest statement on monetary policy.  As expected, the federal funds target rate was raised to a range of 1.75% to 2%.  You can see the latest statement with the changes made as compared to the previous statement.

In order to control this overnight lending rate for banks, the Fed has been raising the rate it pays to banks on reserves, as stated in the FOMC’s Implementation Note.  Up until now, the Fed would raise the interest rate paid on bank reserves to the upper limit of its targeted federal funds rate.  For example, when the range was 1.5% to 1.75%, the Fed was paying 1.75% interest to banks.  However, in its latest statement, it raised the interest rate paid on required and excess reserves to 1.95% (instead of 2%).  This is more of a curiosity than anything, but perhaps the Fed didn’t raise its target rate quite as much as stated.  The range of the federal funds rate went up 0.25%, but the interest paid to banks went up 0.20%.

The Fed is also continuing on its path of monetary deflation, at least in terms of its balance sheet.  The Fed will continue to roll off a total of approximately $30 billion each month.  But according to its Implementation Note, this will increase to $40 billion in July.  This will be $24 billion in Treasury securities and $16 billion in mortgage-backed securities.

This is really the biggest story.  The Fed can impact the market interest rates to a certain degree, but the money supply is the bigger factor.  If this tightening leads to a recession at some point, then the target federal funds rate isn’t going to mean that much.  Market interest rates will go down most likely (especially long-term rates), regardless of what the Fed does, as investors seek safety in U.S. Treasuries.

The FOMC statement comes just a day after the latest consumer price inflation (CPI) numbers were released.  The year-over-year CPI for May 2018 stands at 2.8%.  The much more stable median CPI even went up to 2.7%.  This gives a green light to the Fed to continue its policy of tightening, but it may find itself in a bind if there is a conflict with rising prices and slowing economic growth.  I’m not ready to say that it is the 1970s all over again, but there was a slight step in that direction this week.

While I will continue to monitor the CPI numbers, I still think by far the most important thing to watch now is the yield curve.  I like to look at the 3-month versus the 10-year yield in particular.  If these yields start to get close, this will be a recession warning indicator.

I really believe that the yield curve will flatten, if not fully invert, before we will see a full-blown recession.  And it would not surprise me to see the short-term yields go higher in the coming weeks.  If the 10-year yield stays around the 3% mark while short-term rates creep higher, then things will really start to get interesting.

The Fed is indicating that it plans to raise its target rate two more times this year.  Of course, we know this can change quickly if economic conditions change.  The Fed is also planning to go full speed ahead with its balance sheet reduction.  This is eventually going to take its toll.

There is no reason to be in panic mode of any kind, but I don’t recommend being heavy in stocks anyway.  I recommend a permanent portfolio.

If the yield curve flattens or inverts, then I plan on doing a little speculating by shorting the stock market.

While Donald Trump has been largely a disaster in following his predecessors, he has done some good things too.  He has certainly shaken the establishment.  Although much of his policies have been in line with the establishment, the powers-that-be fear Trump because he is viewed as something of a loose cannon.

Just as there were a few good things Obama did in an overall terrible presidency, Trump has had a few decent moments in his first year and a half.  I think his harshest critics are hypocritical, and their criticisms of him are mostly shallow.  They will go nuts over a mean Tweet that he sends out, but then they will be silent (or sometimes even a little praiseful) when he bombs Syria.  If you say something mean and hurt someone’s feelings, then that is just unacceptable behavior.  But if you kill innocent foreigners, then that is presidential.

With all of that said, Trump did a good thing recently in meeting with Kim Kardashian West and ultimately commuting the sentence of Alice Johnson, who had been sentenced to life in prison for drug trafficking.  Sure, as a libertarian, I would like for Trump to pardon all non-violent drug offenders who are in federal prison due to the crazy war on drugs.  But at least Trump took this one first step in acknowledging that the drug war and its sentencing guidelines may not be all that fair.  You could rape and kill someone and get the same sentence, or maybe even less.

We should hope that Trump spends all of his time looking at individual cases and trying to right the injustices to the degree that he can.  There are hundreds of thousands of people who are in prison who should not be there.  While I would rather him just end the federal war on drugs, it would be a great step if he starts looking at each individual case on its own merits.  He can get the rest of his staff to help out.  Any time spent on freeing innocent people from jail is time not spent on bombing another country, or at least that can be our hope.

I would also like to pay a little credit to Kim Kardashian West.  She recently denied accusations that she was just used as Trump’s pawn. Meanwhile, those criticizing her have done nothing to advance the cause of liberty or to help make a more just society.  Most of those criticizing her are likely opponents of liberty when you get down to it.

It is obviously easy to criticize Kardashian.  Her husband can be a bit obnoxious at times, and he has a big ego (similar to Trump).  Kardashian has gained great fame in being a sex symbol and a television reality star.  Sometimes she doesn’t sound that bright, but I can assure you that she has much greater business acumen than most.  She may act stupid at times, but she definitely has some intelligence.

But aside from the question of her intelligence, I really give credit to Kim Kardashian for not being a goat in the herd.  Hollywood is very anti-Trump, and it is not good business these days to stand beside Trump.  If you are a country singer in Nashville, then you might get away with saying nice things about Trump.  But most celebrities will go out of their way to criticize Trump because it is the easy and popular thing to do, at least as seen by the establishment media.

Kardashian may have posed for a photo with Trump, but she wasn’t really building him up, or at least that doesn’t seem to be her motivation.  She saw an injustice in the world, and she did something about it. She has a platform as a celebrity, and she used it.  She met with the one person who could do something about this injustice, and she made it happen.  And she did it likely knowing that she would be on the receiving end of criticism for even daring to talk to Trump in a civilized manner.

The Hollywood celebrities don’t need to praise Trump, but they could take a lesson from Kardashian if they really cared about justice and making a better world.  They could lobby Trump to take on a less interventionist foreign policy.  They could lobby Trump to be a stronger proponent of civil liberties.  Unfortunately, most of them don’t really care about these issues, or they don’t care enough about them to stop criticizing Trump for his mean comments on Twitter.

Some people just can’t get enough libertarian information.  We are surrounded by the establishment (often called mainstream) media that repeats its talking points, mostly in favor of big government.

Fox News is considered to be an alternative to most of the rest of the mainstream media (at least on television), but Fox News promotes militarism and even Keynesian economics at times with Trump as president.

Libertarians should be quite thankful that we live in an age of the Internet and a technological age that is quickly advancing.  Therefore, we have so many outlets now that didn’t exist 2 decades ago.

Still, the word libertarian is thrown around loosely now.  This is evident just in looking at the presidential candidates for the Libertarian Party of the last few presidential cycles.  There are many other organizations that call themselves libertarian, yet they oftentimes fall short on some key issues, especially when it comes to moral issues.

Below is a list of 10 resources for radical libertarians to enjoy (in addition to this site).  I consider them to be both highly informative and entertaining.  Most people reading this are likely to be familiar with at least a few.

• The Mises Institute – A great resource that focuses on Austrian school economics.
• The Tom Woods Show – This is a podcast (hosted by Tom Woods) with a new episode released almost every weekday.
• GaryNorth.com – Gary North’s emphasis on religion may turn some people off, but he is a great resource for politics, economics, homeschooling, and just overall good life advice. The forums and some of his articles require a subscription to gain access.
• Contra Krugman Podcast – This is a podcast hosted by Tom Woods and Bob Murphy that is released once a week. The show debunks the many errors of Paul Krugman by teaching economics. The hosts are humorous with their back and forth banter.
• LewRockwell.com – This is a must-visit website that has 12 new articles, 6 days per week.  Not all of the writers are libertarian, but most of the articles have a libertarian theme, or else some kind of entertaining or useful information for your life.
• DownsizeDC.org – This organization was co-founded by Harry Browne and seeks to downsize Washington DC, just as its name suggests. You can sign up and use the website in its campaigns to lobby Congress by just typing a short message for a particular issue. But this organization is not just looking for tax cuts and small spending cuts that tinker around the edges.  The Downsize DC Foundation has a project called ZAP (Zero Aggression Project) that seeks to move towards voluntaryism.
• Ron Paul Institute – This website promotes the ideas of Dr. Ron Paul, which is enough said.
• ConsultingByRPM.org/blog – This is Bob Murphy’s personal blog where he writes about economics, politics, religion, and anything else that comes to his mind.
• HarryBrowne.org – Even though Harry Browne passed away in 2006, this is still a great resource with articles indexed by topic.
• LRC Blog and Political Theatre – This is part of Lew Rockwell’s site (see number 5 above), but these gems deserve their own mention. The blog has many contributors with commentary that tends to focus on current happenings in the world.  The Political Theatre portion is updated by Lew Rockwell himself with links to interesting stories.

There are, of course, many other resources out there including books and other websites.  The 10 mentioned above are some of my favorites, and I think any hardcore libertarian is sure to get something out of each one of them.

There are a lot of libertarians who are pessimistic.  They see big government all around them (correctly for the most part), but they fail to see our gains in liberty in certain areas.

To be sure, there are many reasons for a libertarian to be optimistic.  Despite all of the calls for more gun control, gun ownership continues to increase, and there has been little success for the left in trying to ban guns or even control them more.

Homeschooling is another area to be optimistic, as it has increased dramatically in the last couple of decades with the utter incompetence of the government school system.

A third area where we have seen substantial gains in liberty is with the partial legalization of marijuana in many states.  While it is still regulated and considered illegal by the federal government, it has nonetheless been essentially decriminalized in many places.  While the overall war on drugs remains, we have at least made great progress with marijuana.

In addition to all of these specific areas, also consider that libertarianism is far more widespread now than it has been in any of our lifetimes.  If you think the percentage of libertarians is low now, you should have seen it a couple of decades ago.  With the last two Ron Paul presidential campaigns, coupled with the internet, libertarianism has spread considerably, even if the number of hardcore libertarians is still a tiny percentage.  If you hold a liberty event in a medium-sized city, you can at least fill a classroom, if not an auditorium, with people.  In the past, you may have been lucky to get five people.

With all of that said, there is one area where I am rather pessimistic, and that is with the incredible worship of militarism in the United States.  We are supposed to stand and applaud all of the heroes for “serving” our country.  Just by signing on the dotted line, you are forever regarded as a hero unless you do something really egregious.  Of course, even there it is open to debate.  If you kill innocent people in a foreign country, you may still be regarded as a hero in America.

I recently saw an article on Chelsea Manning (formerly Bradley Manning).  The article described how Manning was threatening suicide and showed a picture of Manning’s toes on a ledge (as if threatening to jump).

Right before leaving office, Obama granted clemency to Chelsea Manning, which cut short the prison sentence for turning over government secrets to Wikileaks.  While I think Obama did too little too late and that he probably did it because of pressure from the left, it is one of the few good things Obama did while in office.

In the recent article on Manning’s threatened suicide, I read the comments section.  It was really depressing because it showed me just how many nasty people there are out there.  Even worse, I’m guessing many of the commenters would call themselves Christian.

There were some comments and discussions over transgenderism, which is to be expected.  Some thought that Manning is mentally ill, which resulted in a gender change.  Obviously Manning has mental problems, or there wouldn’t be threats of suicide.  But most of the comments were just linking mental illness and transgenderism.  There was only one commenter I saw who pointed out that Manning endured severe torture while being held captive and that this could have led to major mental problems.  In fact, it is hard to imagine not being mentally damaged after having to endure prolonged torture.

But then many of the comments, one after another, were just nasty.  They continuously called Manning a traitor, and many people were making comments such as, “I’ll help push you along” or “I’ll give you a little push.”  They were teasing the situation saying that, not only do they not care if Manning commits suicide, but that they are actually hoping that Manning does commit suicide.

To me, this is just despicable.  I made a comment to the article to the effect that it is disappointing that so many people consider Manning a traitor and do not care about the murderers that Manning exposed (who shot innocent people from a helicopter in Iraq).  I said that Manning was exposing the government’s hiding of criminality.  I received two replies to my comment, both of which were negative and nasty.  One of the responses said that there is room on the ledge for me as well (to commit suicide).

The article was linked on Drudge Report.  Even though Drudge’s site mostly just links news articles, it is a site frequented mostly by conservatives.

I tend to get more fed up with the left and the political correctness and the class warfare and the hypocrisy.  In the age of Trump, it is especially infuriating to see the left in such an outrage when Trump says something mean, yet they have nothing bad to say when he bombs Syria or threatens Russia.

On the subject of militarism though, the political right is the worst, and it is probably the most important issue.  The political left is certainly hypocritical and not anti-war by any means, but the nasty comments really come from the right when militarism and patriotism are the subjects.

I find in most areas that the political left tends to be much nastier with words and far more intolerant of diverging view points.  But when it comes to the military, everything changes.

The crazy thing is that the most militaristic people are probably many of the same people who you’d most want to deal with in your day-to-day life.  Most of them wouldn’t hurt a fly if given the chance. Many of them go to church and pray.  Unfortunately, many of them also worship militarism and all of the death and destruction that comes with it.

Ultimately, I think the U.S. military is going to contract (decline) from its overseas “commitments”.  Unfortunately, I don’t think it will be for moral and ethical reasons.  I wish the wars and interventions would end because people came to the realization that it is immoral to kill innocent people, even if they look a little different and act a little different in a foreign country.

The reason that the U.S. empire will decline will be for economic reasons.  At this stage, it is unsustainable to continue to spend hundreds of billions of dollars per year on maintaining a vast empire overseas.  When the choice comes between cutting Granny’s check for Social Security or withdrawing forces from Syria, we can all hope that Granny will see the light and take the Social Security check.