Sparta-like culture with USA's Resources

If it's going to be a Sparta-esque country, then who's going to be the slave labour force doing all the work? Farming, Smithing, etc.

Who's going to be the Helots?

How are they gong to keep the Helots down in such a wide open country with lots of places to escape to?
 
It wastes those resources on useless wars without creating internal wealth as all commercial spirit is crushed by militarism. Eventually, it falls apart under the weight of economic stagnation, internal rivalry, and external foes.

Something like that wouldn't develop in the first place.
Yup. What they said.

The resources of the US (and the British Empire) are a result of massive commercial and industrial expansion. One of the numerous things that Sparta could not excel at, by the very structure of their society.
 
If it's going to be a Sparta-esque country, then who's going to be the slave labour force doing all the work? Farming, Smithing, etc.

Who's going to be the Helots?

How are they gong to keep the Helots down in such a wide open country with lots of places to escape to?
Traditional slaves, except whites would be enslaved as household servants, miners, and laborers in the North.
 
Advocating this is being a Devil's Advocate twice for me; I don't like the Spartans, and I think Jerry Pournelle was a fascist. But one who could write an entertaining story, in a twisted sort of way. And he of course has the Empire of Man run by New Sparta, a colony world founded in Co-Dominion times precisely to realize a Utopian vision that takes inspiration in part from Sparta itself. Also from neo-Classical economic theory and a whole lot of right-wing memes in general.

The point being, if we want to talk of a USA-scaled Sparta, we must be talking about a modernized Sparta, one run along completely different lines than the ancient one, one which is "Sparta-like" in the sense that what works about it and for it corresponds to what worked for the Spartans.

As noted upthread, the Spartans weren't really all that successful in historical perspective; they could no more make a pan-Hellenic hegemony work than the Athenians could. Worse actually, but on the other hand they were less inclined to try. Historically I guess their biggest success was that they managed to survive a while. And they impressed the hell out of a lot of swooning fans through subsequent history. But they were no Rome, no Alexander, no Han Dynasty, no Mohammed.

So why exactly was Jerry Pournelle among these swooning fanboys? I dunno, I guess it goes with being a certain kind of right-winger, to deplore Athens and praise Sparta. The Sparta he made the most stable and viable survivor of the collapse of the Co-Dominium and founding world of two Empires of Man doesn't look or feel a lot like Greek Sparta to me; it's mostly a romanticized version of 18th/early 19th century Britain, with I guess some universal military service tossed in.

Anyway that's how to do it, I guess, stretch the definition of "Sparta-like" just about beyond recognition.

FWIW if I were called upon to do this as a challenge, I'd make my moderized Sparta expies left-wingers, Communists or the like, stress the universal service meme to extend beyond military into every sphere of human action; enemies would denounce it as "universal helotry" but the Commie-Spartans would laugh that off.

In other words, do exactly the opposite of what Pournelle did.:p
 
Yup. What they said.

The resources of the US (and the British Empire) are a result of massive commercial and industrial expansion. One of the numerous things that Sparta could not excel at, by the very structure of their society.

The US does have a lot of natural resources as well, but still. The kind of society Sparta developed was in utterly different conditions, which do more to determine what kind of society you get than the other way around.
 
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