Two big threads from 2016, for the curious:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13068641
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11236553
A bit from 2010: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1897856
War Is a Racket (1933)
51–60 of 192 posts
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#52According to CBO analysis the total cost of Afghan & Iraq wars is going to be something like $2.5 trillion for the US. Imagine if this sum would have been used mostly nonviolently for bribing and buying influence in the region. Depending how the money is distributed, it would have been: * $35k per each person in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you divide it into households maybe something like $100k - 150k per household. *…
Corruption is not dependable. There's always the option to simply just take your money, and not hold up to your end of the bargain. War ensures the outcome you desire.
(Read my comment in the context of the article. War ensures the cycle perpetuates, and our modern version of this article is maintaining the current status quo with the military industrial complex, ala the desired outcome of more wars.)
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#53"There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. War for any other reason is simply a racket." By that logic, six years later, were Britain and France wrong to declare war on Nazi Germany when it attacked Poland? Should the U.S. not have joined them in 1941 in declaring war in Germany, which had not attacked the U.S.? And even regarding our fighting…
Are you saying what the US has been involved in for the past 70 years isn't a racket? This man called it first, and he knew what he was talking about.
All articles need to be read in their historical context.
In 1933, the "next war" to come was WWII, roughly 1939 through 1945. Was WWII a "racket" ?
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#54This is mostly about the WWI era, and WWI was indeed a racket, fought for elites at the expense of everyone else. I'm curious if he would write the same article after WWII.
Yes. War is a racket ESPECIALLY in the post-WWII era, when America became both the world’s armory AND the world’s bank. Every single conflict that America has been in since has been a war of choice designed to pursue capitalist interest. Our wars are imperial wars designed to perpetuate American hegemony. That hegemony is designed to continue/enable the pilfering of global wealth by a relative handful of elites. It i…
I have exactly the same feelings you do here, but I struggle with one thing in particular. What is the real alternative to American hegemony? I believe it's likely Chinese hegemony. China, on the one hand, is an ethno-state which is rounding up the Muslim (Uyghurs) men, tossing them in concentration camps, and assigning rapists to live with their families to re-educate them into being good Communists. On the other hand, the Chinese are also committing mass murder to fulfill orders for human organs. That's just what they're willing to do to their own people. I wonder if it's possible to thread the needle such that we temper the US while not letting China take over. I think that will be difficult, and China is likely to win in the long run anyways. What are your thoughts on the real alternatives to American hegemony?
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#55It's a lot of paragraphs that can be summed as "War is expensive and suppliers can earn a lot of money", but he doesn't really discuss the strategic or ethical value of war until the very end with this blurb: > Well, eighteen years after, the world has less of democracy than it had then. Besides, what business is it of ours whether Russia or Germany or England or France or Italy or Austria live under democracies or m…
> Surely anyone who knew about the Holocaust saw our involvement in WWII as a moral imperative To be fair, we didn't go to war for this reason.
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Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#56According to CBO analysis the total cost of Afghan & Iraq wars is going to be something like $2.5 trillion for the US. Imagine if this sum would have been used mostly nonviolently for bribing and buying influence in the region. Depending how the money is distributed, it would have been: * $35k per each person in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you divide it into households maybe something like $100k - 150k per household. *…
Corruption is not dependable. There's always the option to simply just take your money, and not hold up to your end of the bargain. War ensures the outcome you desire. (Read my comment in the context of the article. War ensures the cycle perpetuates, and our modern version of this article is maintaining the current status quo with the military industrial complex, ala the desired outcome of more wars.)
Unlike good ole' bombing, raiding and shooting, which has clearly been so effective over the last 19 years?
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#57Earlier quoted context omitted.
but what's the ROI on money for weapons and military contractors?
I find it helps to think of the military as a socialist style make-work jobs program. That's not it's only function, but it is an important one. For the poor (boots on the ground types) it educates them, feeds/houses them, teaches them self discipline. During peace time it's an important economic ladder. For the middle class, it's about creating work for engineers, programmers, and scientist types. During peace-time,…
The military has and will continue to be the politically-correct [to them] means of implementing a welfare state for republicans. I mean you get free high-quality insurance via tricare, free college via the post911 GI bill, subsided home loans via the VA — all the trappings of the welfare state but politically acceptable to most Republicans and centrist Democrats. The military-industrial-congressional complex is alive and well.
IMO there is no reason we should be killing people outside our borders or even have military outside our borders when there are much larger domestic problems that are unaddressed. I walk by homeless people shooting up right next to million+ dollar houses (yay Seattle + AMZN/MSFT) every day and fixing this shoes not seem to be the priority as the defense contractors and American people themselves are from this porkbarrel.
Yes, war is a racket.
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#58His statements seem clear but upon further reflection they are not clear. There are only two things we should fight for. One is the defense of our homes and the other is the Bill of Rights. Okay, so this was written in 1933. The obvious question to me is, would the author have supported US involvement in World War 2? I guess with Pearl Harbor, the US was attacked. But the Japanese at the time might have said that the…
>don't think there is any clear-cut answer of when a war is really for self-defense
In many cases, there is.
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#59According to CBO analysis the total cost of Afghan & Iraq wars is going to be something like $2.5 trillion for the US. Imagine if this sum would have been used mostly nonviolently for bribing and buying influence in the region. Depending how the money is distributed, it would have been: * $35k per each person in Iraq and Afghanistan. If you divide it into households maybe something like $100k - 150k per household. *…
Much of the money for war flows right back into the American economy. You pay American soldiers and contractor salaries. You buy weapons and technology from American companies. Bribes don't have the same economic effect. For these large dollar amounts, how you spend it matters as much as how much you spend.
That is the wrong way to look at it. By this token digging holes in America is a profitable enterprise. If you pay hole diggers in America, hey all the money goes the American economy.
Whenever talking about an economic issue people have to stop thinking in terms of money and start thinking in terms of goods and services made.
The point of an economy is not to circulate money for kicks and giggles. Money is just to facilitate exchange of goods and services.
A working economy creates a large number of goods and services which the inhabitants wants and needs. You pay a worker to build a car and he makes something people benefit from. You pay a worker to make a missile and he makes something which does not improve the lives of anything. It is a complete waste of time and effort.
Re: War Is a Racket (1933)
#60> Beautiful ideals were painted for our boys who were sent out to die. This was the "war to end all wars." This was the "war to make the world safe for democracy." No one mentioned to them, as they marched away, that their going and their dying would mean huge war profits. No one told these American soldiers that they might be shot down by bullets made by their own brothers here. No one told them that the ships on wh…
WW1 and 2 were the same conflict. The apparent stupidity of WW1 is really a function of how accustomed we are to modern industry, communications, and some of the things hard-won by that conflict.
End of the day, it was all about resources, and is no different than today’s conflicts, which boil down to oil on the supply and the control of money on the demand side.