> For years, economists have defined the economic health of a country by its gross domestic product. Trouble is, every time a forest falls, the GDP goes up. With every oil spill, the GDP goes up. Every time a cancer patient is diagnosed, the GDP goes up. Is this how we measure economic progress? Economists must learn to subtract.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.... This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chance_for_Peace_speech#The_...
Complaining about this fact is as productive as complainig about gravity: if only we could float around effortlessly, imagine how much we would save on bridges and roads and fuel!
It can still be argued that it's worth the expenditure. But the cost should be weighted against the alternatives. Neither Russia or China can be said to threaten the US with their military, except with nuclear weapons, but no defence budget protects against those.
Also, the US Navy protects vital global sea lanes that benefit US trade.
Also:
> Neither Russia or China can be said to threaten the US with their military
China is arming up at a huge pace, even outside of nukes.
No one suggested that it isn't beneficial.
What I said is that the benefit has to be weighted against the alternative benefits.
> China is arming up at a huge pace, even outside of nukes.
I'd argue that one large reason they're doing so is the threat they perceive themselves to be under from the large US military.
Don't fall into that trap.
That sounds like a difficult position to maintain...
Are you from China?
They don't have a real need for a bigger army, they could for sure defend themselves against any neighbor, even India and Russia, with "just" the military from 20 years ago.
what?!? what do missile defense systems do then? nothing?
An article I picked at random:
https://breakingdefense.com/2022/02/no-us-missile-defense-sy...
To strive for peace is not near sighted, it is the only way forward.
You can’t prove that regional conflicts would erupt should the US become more isolationist but any history book should quickly show you human’s propensity for war.
It also turns out that human’s tend not to outright attack foes that will immediately decimate them.
The USAF is the greatest stabilizer this world has as far as I can tell, missteps and outright awful moves like Iraq taken into account in this calculation.
Both the US and Russia have used their weapons to decimate other economies. It is very hard for us to prove or disprove your point.
Americans don't even know what genuine "national defense" feels like. Instead, we have a world-class propaganda complex dedicated to rationalizing our unnecessary overseas military adventures and proxy wars.
The idea that blowing up a government or tribe in Africa or Asia to open up resource extraction (natural or financial) for a Western MNC will benefit the "freedom" of the average American is totally absurd.
I think it glosses over too much complexity to simply state that, because part (not all! Geography is the other part) of the reason why we are so secure is that people know that we have that strong military. If the US were known as a soft target, who had neither the will nor the means to defend itself, we would probably see other actors much more willing to do things to us, such as piracy, etc.
There's an in-between the US and Somalia when it comes to control of territory.
We spend far more than we need to, and Eisenhower is 100% correct in the things we are giving up when we overspend on military.
I'm curious what you know about Eisenhower and his career — it's hard to imagine anyone in the past century whose background and experience made him less myopic than he.
Do you think that Eisenhower, a professional soldier and 5 star general, doesn't understand that? You're not understanding / misrepresenting what he is saying in that quote. It's about the cost of a military and how it has to be balanced against the productive and social needs of a country. A country that is grossly over-spending on the military, as Eisenhower perceived it already back then, and particularly in the case of the US, when that military is used for force and power projection, not defence, is strangling the society that it pretends to protect. This has been the history of the US over at least the last 50 years (when Eisenhower made this fore-warning speech).
But that, while possibly more important than what I'm about to say, is not what I really did want to say. Which is --)
Eisenhower uses a phrase of considerable rhetorical power here --
> those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
-- because he is essentially quoting the Beatitudes, and anyone who is familiar with them will fill in the rest.
Slightly less powerful to me (because it seems to equally reference William Jennings Bryan), but still very strong is
> humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
which is again extremely Christian imagery.
I'm not sure these phrases resonate so strongly with people today, but in those days they went straight to the heart of the question: What is it that is good?
I also really like the sentence,
> This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense.
because it focuses on the dichotomy of life vs. death, which again I think is very important. One could go in very positive green directions also from here. Some adjacent words would be: flourishing, abundant, fertile, growing. Frankly pagan things.
And, things that our economic metrics again tend to discount.
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parable_of_the_broken_window
This isn't totally farfetched: in some countries if you own your house you pay tax on the rent you would have paid to yourself [0]. Taxing someone for feeding or educating himself seems like a small and natural next step.
Yes, obviously so! Diagnosing cancer early is one of the best ways to save someone from it. The cancer is there anyway, it's a natural occurrence. The economic activity that leads to and follows a cancer diagnosis is what economists call wealth: the things we do for each other than make each side mutually better off.
All the examples are like that. Nobody wants oil to spill, but accidents are a fact of life. The GDP created by mopping it up on the other hand leads to a cleaner environment, which is another form of wealth.
> smoothly transporting oil without incident makes less GDP than spilling it.
Oil creates huge economic activity when used. It does no good spread over the ocean. The cleanup generates activity, but it's clearly far better for GDP to smoothly transport oil around than constantly lose it, if only because ships constantly sinking would cause people to transport things way less and so markets would be less efficient, yielding less wealth.