Maturation to Extremism

           One of the main dangers facing the international community in the modern age is the threat of Islamic extremism and the willingness of its believers to sacrifice their lives to strike at the “infidels” embodied by Western and secular societies.  Islamophobia has become more prevalent in the past decade, particularly in America due to the events on September 11, 2001.  This completely irrational has struck everywhere in American society, from the heights of government, where former Attorney General John Ashcroft stated that Islam is a religion in which “God requires you to send your son to die for him,” to the everyday people, as highlighted by a 2006 Gallup poll which found that 39% of Americans felt Muslims should be required by the government to carry special identification which marked them as Muslims.  If that does not sound familiar, I suggest you look up the early stages of the Holocaust.

The Cycle of Social Issues

            Every topic discussed in election cycles can be broken down into one of three categories:  economic issues, foreign policy issues, or social issues.  While many of these will inevitably overlap, the fundamental “elements” are always present within political stories of any kind.  However, the three topics vary in intensity of emotions they elicit.  Economic issues, while arguably the most important of the elements, are abstract and complicated to a degree where most of the electorate, although they will have opinions, do not fully understand them.  For a clear illustration of this, view my previous post about national debt.   Foreign policy, especially in the age of American predominance on the international stage, also carries significant political weight; although this is tempered by a certain degree of unity within the American populace.  While differing ideologies certainly vary on priorities, there is a certain sense of unification “at the water’s edge.”  Social issues are a completely different story.

Capital Punishment's Detrimental Impact on American Foreign Policy

             In recent years the news, across the differing mediums of newspapers, magazines, television shows and websites, has been dominated by various issues such as the economy, our two undeclared wars, Arab uprisings, WikiLeaks, and the death penalty.  While it may not appear so at first, all of these news topics are connected by their impact on international relations.  The one which would most likely draw second glances from the above list is the death penalty, but it does indeed affect our dealings with other nations.

Globalization and National Economy

            Globalization as a process has occurred in waves throughout human society, beginning as far back as the “Out of Africa” migration many millennia ago.  While political and social integration on a national scale have occurred in varying intensities over human history, economic globalization has only recently begun to impact the world in a day to day manner.  While many social scientists, namely Jürgen Osterhammel and Niels Petersson, believe that the height of economic integration came in the period leading up to the first World War (1880-1910), I will focus on the current wave of economic globalization which came in the wake of the second World War. 

Socialism or Patriotic Duty?

            While my goal at the Federalist Farmer is to be as unbiased and non-partisan as possible, there is a current debate milling around this election which I would like to briefly discuss.  A point that President Obama has brought in both debates, as well as at several speeches and rallies, is the tax rate on the wealthy two percent of Americans.  He, along with many other Democrats, believes that the “mega-rich” have a duty to pay more taxes to support their unfortunate countrymen.  Former Massachusetts governor Mitt Romney, along with a large faction of the Republican party, believes that such a tax increase would punish success, reward laziness, and take a big step towards a socialist United States.

National Debt and the Mythical Creditor Nation

            National debt is a staple of global society in the current age of economic and political interconnectivity.  The conventional wisdom holds that acquiring debt is fairly cheap, leading nations to essentially sell their debt to other nations.  Virtually every single nation on the planet has a national debt, whether it be America’s nearly twelve trillion dollars or Poland’s three hundred eighty billion dollar debt.  Even China, much maligned as it is today as “owning America’s future” has a large national debt, most of which in fact is owed to the United States, after the Chinese government defaulted on a loan provided them in 1990.  In this entry, I would like to argue that, theoretically, a nation would be much better off without debt.