The most extreme version of the mindset behind big-government stimulus ideas is the notion that the government can create economic growth by paying people to dig ditches and fill them back up. Second only to that in absurdity is the notion that we should pay soldiers to just be soldiers, and that that is good for the economy.
Conservative hawk Frank Gaffney is pushing the “military-spending-creates-jobs” theme, my colleague Conn Carroll reports. Carroll’s headline buys into the Gaffney-Keynes line: “Defense cuts to cause one million job losses.”
Military spending either keeps us safer or it doesn’t. I happen to think that over a million active-duty military personell, war after war, and a bloated military-industrial policy is more militarism than our safety requires. So much of that spending is wasted. Sure, it “creates jobs,” but government can always “create jobs” in this way. The Soviet Union had full employment, after all.
But military jobs, if they’re not needed to keep us safe, are unproductive jobs. Spending money on them makes society less prosperous as a whole. If not paying for extraneous personell and infrastructure, that money could be used for cutting taxes or reducing the deficit — both of which aid prosperity.
Conservatives understand this when it comes to solar panels and government bureaucrats. It’s the same with soldiers, too.
