re: Regardless of your political affiliation what concerns you most today?

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2,3,4, & 5 are mostly tin foil hat stuff.

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LOL if you think eroded trust in govt is even approaching tin foil territory

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Sure, we could always say frick having computers to run basically everything in our society—including our defense systems—and let Chile and Japan and China and India keep the minerals we use to build them.

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Do you know where the silica to make those products comes from? It comes from Spruce Pine, North Carolina. It might take us a little while to build out the industrial complex to compete, but that's already underway.

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Regardless of your political affiliation what concerns you most today?

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That our government is way too eager to sent billions of dollars overseas instead of trying to improve the lives of Americans.

1. Debt - govt programs and MIC
2. Illegals
3. Bill of rights erosion
4. Educarion system where it is brainwashing and kids are not taught the exceptionalism of USA

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2) Mass cultural Marxist indoctrination of children and young adults via the US educational system.

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If MAGA wants to be convinced that a college degree is useless and digging ditches in summer heat is the way to go I for one is all for it.
My children are competing for graduation placements at prestigious universities and you want your kids to clean my kids toilets.

1. Our idiot politicians starting a completely unnecessary nuclear war.

2, A bloody and violent civil war caused by dissatisfied, purposeless, economically desperate young men rising up and burning everything down.

3. The consolidation of every economic sector into small colluding cartels intertwined with the government.

4. The loss of civilian control and oversite over government decision-making.

5. The slow creep of a strangling authoritarian police state cyberpunk dystopia the East German Stazi could only dream of.

6. Regulatory changes in agricultural policy and energy triggering an artificial famine.

7. The quickening destruction of the middle class and small to medium sized businesses. Illegal immigration, inflation, outsourcing, consolidation, automation, etc all play into this.

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1. Our idiot politicians starting a completely unnecessary nuclear war.

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This is Russian propaganda talk. Only a lil F** Soi Boy would utter these words. Go protest with the rest.

Cowared

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Our ballooning debt

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This is the correct answer. If you believe otherwise, you are financially obtuse.

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Do you know where the silica to make those products comes from? It comes from Spruce Pine, North Carolina.

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That's great, but it's my understanding that it takes another 15 or so minerals that DON'T come from Spruce Pine, NC (or anywhere else in the US) to completely make those products.

That's kind of the point. We may have the silica, but Japan has some others, South Africa has others, Chile has some others, etc., etc. The world has become interdependent. This isn't the 1300s any more.

And that's just one example. I don't know enough about all industries (and neither do you) to give an exhaustive list of reasons why we can't just roll up our sidewalk and put out a CLOSED sign on the US, but I'm confident that it's not that simple.

You sound a lot like me in my 20s and 30s when I thought libertarianism was a profound discovery that the average person just wasn't intelligent enough to adopt. As I got older it started dawning on me that the world has become so complex and there are so many details and contexts of so many things that I have no idea about (and again, neither do you...nobody has an exhaustive knowledge like that) and the world is full of people who know a lot more about their own individual corner of the world than I do. It finally occurred to me that me thinking I could account for all of the variables necessary to declare certain sweeping pronouncements of the type that we're discussing here was arrogant folly, and I began to consider something else.

I thought maybe...just maybe...if I knew everything that XYZ person knows about ABC, I might come to the same conclusion that they did.

This has particularly informed my consideration of foreign policy because that is one area in particular that I can GUARANTEE you that the people in charge of responding to it ALWAYS have all kinds of information that we do not have as members of the general public.

See, we've only thus far touched on the practical economic realities of complete isolationism (and by "touched on," I mean barely scratched the surface). There are international political realities too.

In short, simplistic populist solutions based on a tiny fraction of the data necessary to evaluate the efficacy or feasibility of such huge departures from the norm do not strike me as being likely to end in anything other than a disaster these days.

Even things like, "REEEEEEEEEE, We need to require a balanced budget!"

Does any country in the world even approaching the size of ours have a balanced budget in 2024? I'm not aware of one, but there may be one. If so, how do they do it and what would we have to give up in order to achieve the same outcome? Is it something we'd be willing to give up? If no country in the world of a similar size has one, what makes us think we can figure out how to do it?

See, it's possible that in the context of current economies, it may be practically (not theoretically) impossible to achieve that goal. In fact, I think it's likely.

The populist answer to everything is that politicians are idiots who intentionally go around looking for ways to frick things up. What if our demands as constituents make it nearly impossible for them to act otherwise? What if you knew everything they knew. Might you not act similarly?

Again, I think that's more than possible. I think it's likely.