Remember:
- Hitler and the National Socialists openly vowed to retaliate and punish the Jews and others who stabbed Germany in the back. After 5 years in power (1933->8), finally they committed a mass, undeniable general incident against the Jewish population, of the severity that people who pose this argument would accept. Even the Nazis, with an openly hostile agenda, took 5 or more years.
- The Maoists promised improvements from the KMT regime when they took control of the 22 provinces in 1949. Over the course of their first ten years in power, the Beijing mafia led by Mao Zedong implemented a series of agricultural reforms, and even may have alleviated some famine during that time. Yet, in 1958, the orders that came from the top led to a mass famine that killed something on the order of 35 million people. In other words, it took almost ten years for a known evil dictator’s meddling with the economy to turn horribly lethal.
- The Chavistas in Venezuela took power in the late 1990s, and only in the later 2010s did their economic policies and conspiracy with the Cubans and drug traders annihilate the relatively prosperous Venezuelan economy. People identify the reductions in oil prices as the initiator of the downfall, but the disinvestment in state industries and replacement of competent officials had started many years before, to no obviously apparent consequence.
- In the 1980s, Greece began to take on more and more national debt. For roughly 20 years, there were no apparent consequences, and at the end the nominal economic activity looked impressive. Then they went into financial panic.
- In the late 1980s, the American Empire and its allies financed an anti-Soviet campaign in Afghanistan, then let the victorious mujahideen fight amongst themselves. As it happened, a movement called the Taliban emerged to control a large amount of the territory, and harbored one of the Americans’ previous allies, Osama bin Laden, and his al-Qaeda organization. Despite repeated attacks, the Americans decided the problem was not severe enough decisively to resolve, until finally in 2001, al-Qaeda operatives succeeded in launching a major attack across several of the 48 states.
- The post-Napoleonic order in Europe lasted for almost 100 years, notionally ended by the First World War. Conventional wisdom had it that the European powers were not stupid enough to start another bloody continental conflict – but a large number of factors that led to the escalation, easily were observable and anticipated even at the time, as being hazardous. Even forewarned, the belligerents sent millions of their own people out to die for nothing.
People always say, “but in this case, we have factors X, Y, and Z, that differ from those previous situations, so you can’t say they are the same, these bad outcomes will not happen”. In its narrowest sense the first assertion of that statement is correct; indeed no two historical situations, almost by definition, are exactly the same. Yet the patterns hold despite these differences in each particular situation, and so the conclusion is false: belligerence and bad government lead to bad outcomes, profligate spending leads to economic ruin. These relationships hold, despite a huge number of factors being different e.g. the post Napoleonic order. These tragedies happen despite these (sometimes major) differences, so the fact, that these factors are different, does not predict better results.
Speaking more generally to the structure of the argument: if you consider all possible situations, for example in workplace safety, you easily could find situations in which people never slipped off ladders, fell into pits, etc. and you also could find situations where they have. “Risk”, means that a situation is not guaranteed to end in a problem, but that it sometimes does. To assert that the problem hasn’t happened yet and therefore never will, is to deny all risk to that activity – which is a quantitative answer that more or less exactly can be answered based upon the framing/classification of the situation.