Yesterday I got a little exercised about this bit of foolishness from Glenn Greenwald. A couple more points to add. First, Ramesh Ponnuru responded with this:
The analogy isn’t perfect, but: We’d expect the police department to have a budget many times that of all the criminals combined, wouldn’t we? Fire departments spend a lot more fighting arson than arsonists spend. It’s a lot cheaper to break a window than to fix it.
I think it’s a darn good analogy. And I think it’s precisely what John Pike was driving at in our discussion yesterday. Spending too little will have the effect of encouraging competition, and confrontation. If half a trillion dollars is the annual cost of deterring the Chinese (and doing all the other wonderful things that a powerful military allows), that may be a bargain compared with the costs of a direct confrontation. Second, a blogger at Cato takes issue with…the fact that I’ve tried to peg the Chinese military budget in the past?
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