The
Triangle Of Global Power
Defense is not a "public good".
The benefits are unevenly received. Particular groups who
benefit heavily are resource owners in the overseas area we police.
These include caciques, European and Japanese firms, and U.S.-based
multinationals.
U.S. force is especially important to resource
owners, because their prime concerns are tenure, taxes, and avoiding
competition, matters in the domain of politics. "Aggressive
imperialism, which costs the taxpayer so dear, which is of so little
value to the manufacturer and trader, is a source of great gain
to the investor" (Hobson, 59-60, quoted in Lenin, 120).
U.S. multinationals have acquired huge assets
overseas. The sources of the assets are not so much capital
flows from the United States as they are plow-backs, appropriation,
and appreciation. Ownership of these assets is more concentrated
than that of domestic assets, high as the latter is. The assets
are heavily concentrated in resources. The owners benefit
from U.S. force because it firms up and protects precarious tenures
and helps appropriate loosely held or unfenced resources.
Private appropriators often lead the flag, securing bargains for
themselves but imposing great costs on the public in the form of
contingent military liabilities. These have grown so large
as to prejudice national solvency and lead us into dangerous confrontations.
U.S. force is also deployed in the interests
of cartels whose customers include U.S. consumers and the military
itself. Recoupment of the military subsidy through taxation
of beneficiaries is nil. On the contrary, overseas investments
enjoy tax treatment so favorable as to constitute an additional
subsidy.
Labor as such does not gain from military spending.
Offshore U.S. industry is capital-using, not labor-using.
Access to cheap foreign minerals is not of great benefit to U.S.
labor. The frontier safety-valve analogy does not apply to
our present mercantilistic stance. The Marx-Lenin doctrine
of imperialism based on underconsumption is belied by inflation
in the United States.
As for direct military employment, the military
enterprise absorbs more capital than labor because of the lag between
expense and recovery. It is a social investment of deferred
payout, requiring long-term financing. It sucks capital away
from domestic uses of quicker payout and therefore of higher complementarity
to labor.
Consumers do not benefit from the foreign trade
created by Pax Americana. That trade is more distorted
than facilitated by military pressures. Instead, consumers
suffer from inflation caused by wasteful use of capital overseas
and from high taxes to subsidize that waste.
Military contractors do gain. The gain
is not macro-economic and general, but redistributive. Losses
are diffused and hard to pinpoint, hence, under-appreciated.
Gains are concentrated in a few hands, contractors being larger
than the average firm. Waste and corruption abound.
For most Americans, the benefits of military
spending are to be found in reducing it and reshaping it so as to
diffuse the gains, promote national and world security, and indeed
justify calling it a "public good". Perhaps we can
yet learn, as the British did not, from their Nobel laureate's
"Recessional":
"Far-called our navies melt away
On dune and headland sinks the fire
Lo--all our pomp of yesterday
Is one with Nineveh and Tyre.
Judge of the Nations, spare us yet
Lest we forget--lest we forget.
--Rudyard Kipling
|
