The Pentagon System (1993) | Hacker News Reader

The Pentagon System (1993)

thirdworldtraveler.com

29 pointsthewarrior7 comments

Pretty good read.

The amount of interventionism, control and central planning involved in what and where gets spent, how tarrifs, and international agreements work is staggering. And this was of course written before the massive bailouts during the housing crisis.

There is also a need it seems to constantly protect the political and economic ideology. Cannot simply, for example, institute basic income, that's too socialistic sounding, and it would involved a lot of ideological backpedalling. So to keep it masked, have to first create a threat -- "Terrorism / Communism / Drugs / War", which creates an industry, then shuffle money that way. Then few friends on top pocket some of the money and the rest trickles down as "jobs".

> When asked to identify the largest element of the federal budget, less than 1/4 give the correct answer, military spending

Well maybe it was true in early 90s' But today if you include mandatory (entitlems) or just discretionary spending budget in the pie. Mandatory spending is dominated by medical (medicare etc) and social security. So that part doesn't sound right. Anyone know more?

As a post script, another aspect that is interesting I think, I after reading this, depending on which ideology the reader subscribes to, they will come out with different conclusions. If they are more liberal -- they might say, we need to be more direct in helping out industry and have more transparent control of how money, power and policy gets distributed. Maybe have a New Deal type jobs program to repair infrastructure, or institute basic income, instead of these convoluted systems. But the more conservative reader, will probably look at this say, these manipulations are perversions and failures, had they not taken place, we would have had a more dynamic, faster, efficient system.

"Well maybe it was true in early 90s' But today if you include mandatory (entitlems) or just discretionary spending budget in the pie. Mandatory spending is dominated by medical (medicare etc) and social security. So that part doesn't sound right. Anyone know more?"

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/2013_United_States_federal_bud...

Defense was third, behind Medicare/Medicaid and Social Security. So no, it's not right. They may have been interpreting discretionary spending as the whole thing, in which case defense is the largest single piece.

The DoD is the third biggest agency but does not include Veterans Affairs (3.7% of budget), the State Department (1.6% of budget), Homeland Security (1.5%), or the CIA (1.4%). I don't even include the DoE, which among other things handles nukes, or NASA which launches military satellites, has secret mission itineraries etc.

Then you also have to count that portion of the interest on the debt that was due to past military spending.

The amount of military spending the US government does is higher than what you are presenting.

If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of Energy?), I'd feel entitled to lump together everything that sends out checks, and the military would still be smaller -- much smaller, in fact. Interest on the debt isn't going to help you either, as we'd have to slice out the entitlements portion of that as well.

And, of course, this doesn't even get into the question of whether the amount of military spending is right or wrong. "Look at this huge number! It's bigger than this other number!" isn't a meaningful argument. "This number is bigger than it should be, and here's why" is.

> If you're going to lump together everything even tenuously connected to the military (all of NASA? all of the State Department? all of the Department of Energy?)

I very clearly said I am not going to lump together NASA and the DoE. Now you're claiming to people, who can clearly read my post, that I did lump them in, when I explicitly did not lump then it.

I do lump the State Department in with the military, as it's all more or less the same thing, beyond even that the CIA etc. routinely uses the State Department for cover ( http://voices.washingtonpost.com/spy-talk/2010/06/state_dept... ). Foreign embassies that have the ambassador go out and threaten the other state's executive with US military intervention can't really be considered on the domestic social spending side of this military/social breakdown that is being discussed.

> It's bigger than this other number

The point is that military spending was being presented as smaller than it is - by saying veteran's benefits were not part of military spending etc.

Relatedly, recall that a key empirical study by the Princeton academics has this to say, " ... Multivariate analysis indicates that economic elites and organized groups representing business interests have substantial independent impacts on U.S. government policy, while average citizens and mass-based interest groups have little or no independent influence." [https://scholar.princeton.edu/sites/default/files/mgilens/fi...]

The US was less centralized than the USSR, but not by as large of a margin as most think. It's always -- even going back to the days of Manifest Destiny and such -- been a planned economy where major economic moves and expansions are driven by edict and funded by the state or central banks.

I'm not really aware of a good example of a complex technologically advanced society that isn't centrally planned to a significant degree. Either it hasn't happened yet, libertarianism being a form of political futurism, or central planning is actually necessary to overcome the natural tendency of human societies and economies toward conservatism and inertia.

But you still have the mythology of America, land of the free, where everything is grassroots. You can even see this mythology at work in popular accounts of Silicon Valley. In reality most of the fundamental bedrock innovations that created the Valley were funded by DARPA, NASA, and other state sources in the 1960s, and the existence of the Valley as a concentration of tech talent dates from the concentration of radar and signals intelligence industries there in WWII. Look up a talk called "The Secret History of Silicon Valley" on YouTube. In more modern times there are still strong hints of a deep connection, such as the ties that may exist between large tech firms like Google and the state, though the extent of these ties is a subject of some controversy.

I'd actually be curious to hear an example of a major bedrock innovation (like semiconductors, ICs, orbital rockets, etc.) that has occurred in the past ~75 years and has not been the product of either government research funding or a state-enforced monopoly (e.g. Ma Bell / Bell Labs). Only such entities have sufficient exemption from market realities to permit such long-sighted and high-risk investments.

Therein lies, I think, one of the big fallacies of the freedom myth-- that markets drive innovation. In reality I think innovation requires at least a period of exemption from markets, since markets mandate short-term thinking. At a smaller scale seed and venture capital allows companies to obtain a short reprieve from the market that in some cases is long enough to allow some innovation to occur before everything has to answer to the god of quarterly profit. If markets get really good at providing such funding it's possible that we could see a future of decentralized market-driven innovation, but this would require a further extension and broadening of the seed/angel/VC model and associated financial instruments that properly model the nature of this kind of investment. We need entities able to make 10-20 year investments in small teams of brilliant people to tackle insanely hard problems the way national labs and academic institutes can, but time frames like that are way outside the parameters of your typical fund turnaround time.

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