Just wanted to add something to your analysis. And that is, that the disadvantag

http://www.forbes.com/sites/markadomanis/2013/12/03/would-absorbing-ukraine-make-russia-a-superpower-no/Mark,

Just wanted to add something to your analysis. And that is, that the disadvantage of an aging population is one of perspective. It’s pretty hard to argue that keeping people active and working, even in simple jobs, very late in life, is better for them then paying them to stay home waiting to die, given that the alternative is immigration from less advanced societies that place extraordinary political and social burdens on that society.

Just beasue social democracies have chosen to treat the state as a corporation rather than as the administration of a nation – an extendeed family and culture, does not mean that there are not other ways. Japan, Russia, China, South Korea have intentionally chosen the NATION (people), rather than the STATE(corporation) model.

When Putin makes this statement in his own language, he is not making an artificial claim. He, Russians, Chinese, South Koreans and Japanese as well as western conservatives, would prefer to remain a NATION – a family, rather than a CORPORATION.

And this is not an irrational, emotional, or ignorant position. This is what middle america wants too. It is what middle England wants. It is what conservatives in Germany want.

To act in furtherance of their family and culture, not the corporate state.

And it is very hard to argue against this point of view as anything other than conquest and exploitation of those people who prefer the system of intergenerational cooperation we call ‘family, savings, and interest’, than the system of intergenerational redistribution we call ‘social security’, when it is dependent on the consumption of the gene pool and the culture and millennia of history to support it.

The neo-cons were wrong of course. The world did not need another Rome. Just the opposite. But conservatives do underestand the value of moral capital, and the reproductive structure of the family as inseparaable and inalienable from the high trust society. I would have thought differently, but I my work has led me to appreciate Emmanuel Todd’s findings on the nature of the family in relation to political structures. And without the absolute nuclear family that was a required method of conformity into the American system, the american high trust society cannot persist. Period.

Russians aren’t stupid. They don’t have a high trust society, So they don’t take cooperation for granted. They have to work at it.

We take it for granted. that’s why we’re losing it.

Curt Doolittle

The Propertarian Institute

Kiev