"...that much of a missile."
Econ 201: Lessons in Macroeconomics
In November of 1980 I cast my first vote in an election. I don’t remember my choices for down-ballot candidates for political office, but I do recall that as I considered my choices between a B-movie actor and a peanut farmer, both of whose credibility as competent administrators was based on holding the office of governor in their respective states, I cast my lot with the peanut farmer. It seemed a more noble profession than movie acting, and besides, I had the uncomfortable presentiment that the Hollywood movie actor might just send young, draftable-age me to die on some beach somewhere, if only for the cinematic value it would add to the production.
As it turned out, that did not happen. I’m still here. But one thing that did result from that change of administrations was that the modest stipend for college that I received from the federal government in my first semester at the university — not much, but it covered the cost of my books and if I recall correctly, a few pizzas besides — was abruptly halted.
I remember talking about this bummer of a situation with the business partner of the recording studio where I was working at the time. I can still see his face leaning toward mine as we stood talking in the parking lot.
“Do you know what your college education just turned into?” he said, his eyes a little wild. He paused for dramatic emphasis and held up his hand with his thumb and index finger not even an inch apart before answering his own question: “It turned into that much of a missile!”
I didn’t take a class in economics until a couple years later, so you could say that was my first introduction to the fundamental macroeconomic concept known as “guns and butter”. Basically, the idea is that the productive capacity of any given society is only able to generate so much stuff, so that in the end we have to choose, as a nation, where we devote our resources.
Here’s a frequently cited, pithy quote along these lines: “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.”
The person who spoke these words was of course noted peacenik President Dwight D. Eisenhower, who also incidentally served as Supreme Allied Commander in the European Theater of Operations in World War II as a five star general. What I found online is that this quote came from an address titled "The Chance for Peace" delivered by President Eisenhower for the American Society of Newspaper Editors on April 16, 1953. If you want to hear what an American president from a previous era could sound like, the audio is linked here.
Of course, that speech happened years before my time. However, as it turned out, decades later it was President Reagan, the guy I didn’t vote for, who was widely credited with ending the Cold War and hastening the demise of the USSR through his hardliner stance and prolific military spending. The space-based defense research colloquially known as “star wars,” for example, reportedly spooked the Soviets, and of course the Soviet state’s reckless military adventurism in Afghanistan didn’t help that country, either. Just a guess: the “guns n’ butter” macroeconomics equation wasn’t penning out very well politically in the Soviet Union as the 1980s progressed.
Thus, my minor, very passive and entirely unwilling contribution to the apparatus of the US defense establishment may have in a very indirect way helped bring the down what the president at the time called “an evil empire.” And given the horrifying and ongoing pattern of atrocity in the USSR, that characterization was kind of hard to argue with. Fine, then, and good riddance to it. And I didn’t even have to bloody a beach. Fair enough.
Fast forward a bit, although we didn’t hear about it much during the 20 years that a steady stream of US soldiers were taking the long flight home in boxes from our very own war in Afghanistan, my recollection is that all the way up through the 1990s the Taliban was a line item in the U.S. federal budget, with funds being allocated annually for the suppression of opium cultivation there. Next thing ya know, however, Surprise! Surprise! Surprise! the USA decided to pursue its own protracted and ill-fated military incursion into that country, fighting folks trained and equipped, advised and subsidized by US tax dollars not so very long before. It’s almost like someone here said, “Well, it worked to destroy the Soviet Union. Let’s see how it goes with our own.” Two decades. Four US presidents of alternating political parties. Come come now: You can’t tell me that we’ll never see bipartisan cooperation here in the United States.
Meanwhile, those in the halls of power in Washington DC came to talk about the United States as the “exceptional nation”. Those involved in keeping the juggernaut of international humanitarian catastrophe rolling evidently believed the USA could indefinitely sustain the ongoing hemorrhage of pursuing multiple protracted military operations around the world, plus a notoriously inefficient and self-serving military industrial complex here at home. And yes, President Eisenhower warned the nation about that, too. No matter. Guns and butter and the lessons of history and economics be damned! And that's not even counting the loss of standing in the global community after all this. That can show up on the balance sheet, too. Funny how when you squander your political capital, next thing ya know, buying friends can start to get prohibitively expensive.
Besides, going back to the butter side of the gun n’ butter equation, we can’t seem to afford to pay the real costs of manufacturing many of the things we need here to keep an industrial society functioning. We’re now utterly dependent on sometimes unfriendly trading partners for everything from essential machine parts and equipment to housewares and medicines. Oh well, we do have electronic gaming, toxic food and a firehose of pornography and endless social media distraction to direct into the shocked and awed faces of our home population.
Same basic recipe worked for Rome.
The whole scenario has suggested to more than a few observers that there are probably some folks, perhaps better positioned and better informed than many whose faces we see on TV, who must have realized what a problem a nation founded on the principles of the USA would be to their own long-term plans and decided to methodically pursue the time-tested and reliable method of imperial overreach abroad and officially sponsored distraction and debauchery at home as a preferred means to dismantle this nation while pretending to serve and defend it.
It’s almost as if some mobster said, “Hey, Tony: Make it look like an accident.”
And for those with short memories, yeah, I guess it’s probably looking that way.
Whew! Truth!