“That idea of hardships being good for character and of talent always being able to break through is an old fallacy. Talent alone is helpless today. Any success requires both talent and luck. And the “luck” has to be helped along and provided by someone. … Talent does not survive all obstacles. In fact, in the face of hardships, talent is the first one to perish; the rarest plants are usually the most fragile… Are talented people born with tough skins? Hardly. In fact, the ore talent one possesses the more sensitive one is, as a rule.” -Ayn Rand, 1936
We like to tell stories of how adversity makes us better. "That which does not kill me..."
But adversity makes us weaker.
America was less free after WW1 (Permanent income tax). America was less free after WW2 (Taxation went from approx 5% of GDP before WW2 and approx 20% after. It's practically never been below 15% since. JFK's assassination all but doomed us financially (LBJ, Dems unequivocally big govt).
Bad things proceed from bad things, good from good.
Good families make good men and women. Bad families make bad men and bad women. If adversity were good it would be reversed.
Wars in Iraq, afghanistan: 6.5 T, 8 T
More than 7,000 troops and 8,000 contractors died in Afghanistan/Iraq.
Wound rates for troops are perhaps 10x as high, 70,000 troops. I never forget the wounded because some of them were grievously so, only marginally less so than the dead.
Bear in mind the USA, in current dollars, spent approx 4-5 trillion on WW2.
So we are accomplishing less and less with more and more.
We thought too much about how we would be judged by historians or journalists and too little about getting the desired effect.
In closing, adversity can piss up a rope.
"Well I believe that whatever doesn't kill you makes you very, very weak." -Norm MacDonald