re: Congrats Ark on beating the kneeling idiots.

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Greatest by what metric?

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Just my personal opinion, it really depends on your value spectrum and how you define "greatness".

1) Its the world's longest standing democracy and has been tested many times over the centuries

2) Worlds largest GDP and 5th highest GDP per capita, along with top 5/top 10 economic freedom indexes, depending on your metric, driven a shockingly diverse range of sectors from commodities to the highest value add technology

3) Most importantly, 1) and 2) were able to be achieved with an extremely heterogenous society. This cannot be overstated. Brief studies of history, or even present day show how hard this is.

4) An extreme plethora of natural resources, massive farmland, and close too 100k miles of warm water coastline touching two oceans. The warm water coastline issue can't be overstated either, see: Russia

5) Only two neighboring countries on our land borders, both of which we have solid relations with and are economically dependent on us

6) Related to 2), and really the cause of 2), is the foundation of entrepreneurship that is built on some of the world's most clear and fair bankruptcy laws in the world.

7) By far the world's deepest financial markets, and its not even close

We kind of hit the jackpot geographically, then got extremely luckily economically with WW1 and our bankruptcy laws that built the era of entrepreneurship. There are a lot of things wrong with the US, specifically with education, which has driven most of the racial disparity and inequality were talking about today. But no country has a combination of economic strength, depth, and dynamism, combined with a long tested democracy (tested key word), geographic jackpot, unmatched financial markets, all within a heterogenous society (I really can't underscore how hard this is) like the US.

Sidenote, I give not one frick that some kids kneeled/protested or that message board people are rustled. I would care if either was not allowed to happen. The foundation of the US is that both sides of the argument are allowed to tell the other side to go frick themselves.