One of the reasons I discuss stuff like this on Hacker News is that the rule of law and stability are important to the kinds of things we do (look at what the end of the IPO exit has done in the last ~ 10 years). If the Republic truly falls, it's going to have serious knock-on affects to startups in the US, whatever the path that follows, e.g. tyranny and/or civil war.
All the productive action in the PRC tells us the rule of law not as critical as many think, then again, there are limits to what they're achieving, and it took the ending of the period of endless "revolution" for all that to get started (Mao/The Gang of Four being replaced by Deng).
There's also this detail about investing and doing business, from Richard "Wretchard" Fernandez (http://pjmedia.com/richardfernandez/2013/05/16/the-lying-kin...):
"[...] The president may not realize the cost of reducing the trust content of his actions. Perhaps they teach that lying has no cost in Chicago, but in reality trust’s absence exacts a very definite price.
"The first thing to remember is that trust exists for very good reason, even among gangsters. In ordinary commerce its value is obvious. Many products rely on trust: the security of our communications and data storage; the integrity of accounting; the impartiality of the public institutions. Whether we are using Office 360, email, or Google Drive, a medical storage device that stores our sugar levels and blood pressure numbers or files an income tax return, the presumption is that the information we generate is reasonably private. Once that expectation is destroyed, once we are certain that a political hack whose principal qualification is snooping has been appointed to head Obamacare, then an economic cost is inevitably incurred.
"Lying isn’t free.
"One of the reasons that the United States has remained the last refuge for money fleeing instability abroad is that those investors trust its institutions. They believed — reasonably until now — that in America the rule of law reigned supreme. They thought — until the administration cast the question into serious doubt — that America was not the banana republic that the possessors of those fortunes sought to flee. That’s why the money comes to America and not, let us say, to the Congo."