[ALawPoker]

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If you want to get mathematical, China's slope is at least trending towards less authoritarianism and unilateralism while the US slope is trending towards more authoritarianism and unilateralism. And China's economy is growing and becoming more influential, meaning it will need to rely less on force, while the US is relying more on force as it's eceonomic swagger is on the decline relative to other powers.

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A fair enough attempt, but you assume that these "trends" are occurring without some force of rhyme or reason drawing them to eventually reach the same destination. The reason Chinese people are trending away from authoritarianism is that authoritarianism is counter intuitive to human prosperity, and they are realizing it. If it's bad for Chinese people then it's bad for American people for the same reasons, and all human societies will trend towards realizing it even if the route is different.

Since liberty sort of relies upon your neighbors recognizing it too, I would say that it's a big challenge to maintain a free society in the context of a world that hasn't accepted it yet. There will always be such strong temptations to give in to temporary security. The Constitution came really close to hammering the lesson home, but it apparently didn't quite stick. It still makes sense to too many people that centralized forces can be +EV, so people will gradually reject the Constitution's message since it was such a bold attempt. Our prosperity serves as a good example for other people to emulate, so our attempt at a free society rushed the world's capacity to accept liberty, but enough people do indeed need to accept it before it will stop being compromised. What appears to be a predictable "trend" now might simply be trials helping to expose the error, and (since there is some rhyme and reason to why humans make the decisions they make) it's unknowable when we could bounce back to the direction that's most beneficial to our prosperity. Your argument basically assumes that authoritarianism and libertarianism are equally viable, when the truth is that different actions have different consequences and some will naturally be more in line with what's beneficial for human prosperity than others.

It's kind of like playing Super Mario Kart. When you're way behind, it becomes easy to make up ground because the computer is designed to stack your items and make you go faster. If two equal competitors are playing and one is rapidly making up ground on the other, you can't interpret that to mean that in 3 minutes the person gaining ground now is more likely to be ahead. You have to realize that if they take the lead then they will simply face the same obstacles that the current leader faces now.