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polymathwannabe comments on Crazy Ideas Thread, Aug. 2015 - Less Wrong Discussion
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What is the U.S. waiting for to annex Cuba?
If you break it, you have to fix it. Annexing Cuba would mean having to spend a lot of money on it and generally dealing with it. The population is Spanish speaking and currently the prospect of getting more Spanish speaking immigrants isn't popular in the US.
Why is Cuba a better target of annexation than, say Mexico? Or Puerto Rico? Or the whole lot of Caribbean islands? (I assume imperialist fat cats want beaches for their model girlfriends to tan on)
Puerto Rico?! But Puerto Rico is already a US territory!
We'll make it a double territory.
Minor details :-P
That just went bankrupt. Maybe they can show us how it's done.
If you are going to conquer a country make it a rich one. Ignoring morality, the best target would be Canada.
Would the rest of NATO be obliged to defend Canada?
Also, I assume the idea is to annex failed states, not functioning ones.
Yes NATO would be obliged to defend Canada, but the U.S. would probably give them an out by saying that we are not really invading but fulfilling the long-held desire of true Canadians to join the United States.
Canada would totally work, they have oil! X-D
One could say that the US has tried before, and it didn't work out well for them. The time to do it would have been after the Spanish American War; instead of a Cuban republic, absorb it into the US as a state (or collection of states).
It is unclear whether nations are better off trying to have high average value (per capita gdp, say) or high total value (total gdp, say). If a nation is pursuing the first strategy, then they wouldn't accept a petition for a lower-value region to join. One could try to ask whether or not the US is better off with Puerto Rico than it would be if Puerto Rico were independent, for example. If a region has an economy dominated by agriculture and tourism, for example, a country whose economy is dominated by services and manufacturing will find any wealth redistribution schemes flowing out of the developed part to the undeveloped part. It's probably better to let the businesses do that with their own funds, rather than have the government play a part.
As well, the general rule since ~1950 appears to be that countries should only become smaller.
But we also took Texas and California, and all Americans would agree that at least one of these acquisitions worked out for us.
Well the population of those regions was replaced/swamped with Anglos.
Yep, Texas has been a great acquisition.
I meant that the invasion plan failed, not that if the invasion plan had succeeded, it would have been worse than the mainline history.
If we had absorbed Cuba in 1902 instead of letting it go, I think it would have worked out well (but not as well as Texas or California--it probably would seem comparable to Florida as a state).