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War Is a Racket (1933)

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131–140 of 235 posts

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#131
post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Do you believe that a just war has ever been waged?

Do you believe there is some objective thing called "just"?

Pretty simple really. If you are being invaded without provovation and every attempt at diplomacy has failed, and going past form, you know that if your enemy succeeds in overrunning you, then your women wiil be raped and you and your children killed then you've no option other than to fight with all your might.

That's the extreme case, at what point on a sliding scale the options change is moot and subject to vigouos debate. That's where things become complicated, not far down the scale you'll be faced with a serious moral dilemma.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#132
post #120

I started paying attention to this when I lived close to DC around 2002. Bush was cutting the top tax brackets while ramping up for the Iraq invasion, the defense contractors made record profits (I remember one CEO making around 30 million) and the DC metro was plastered with ads touting the patriotism of the defense contractors. I thought "these guys are making record money, are getting their taxes reduced, try to l…

> Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going. It is an interesting thought but ... if the government tells the industrial chain "you aren't getting paid for this" then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost. Being optimistic, maybe it could work for one war. Then the next war people ask "where are our weapons?" and the answer is "there are none". There is…

...then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost.

That is the status quo. USA military has not won a war in my parents' lifetimes. USA military is optimized to consume resources, not to accomplish traditional military objectives.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#133
Please read your military history.

Soldiers who have never fought are less capable in battle. It doesn't really matter how much they train or how many drills are run. Nothing really prepares you for the trauma of watching your friend of many years die by getting his head blown off next to you, or worse, bleeding out while crying for his mother. There are two kinds of people who witness that: those who curl up and pray for it all to stop, and those who pick up their weapons and keep fighting. Generals never know which kind of men they have unless battles weed out the first kind, by death or discharge. And militaries with too many of the first kind lose wars.

Yes, it's horrible. It's gut-wrenching just to think about it. We'd all be better off if we could resolve our conflicts without war. But in the world we live in, there are too many military and paramilitary actors who are not guided by such Enlightened ideals. What will we do if we are not prepared and they come knocking on our door?

Maybe you don't believe that the same irrational forces that first manifest as teenage graffiti, then grow into organized crime, could ever result in organizations the size of militaries. Maybe you don't believe that, in societies which have abolished all adventure, the only adventure left is to abolish that society. That's fine. I respect that. But what if you're wrong? Shouldn't society hedge that bet, considering the cost? Can no such hedge possibly justify its cost?

There's a reasonable discussion to be had about where the line (i.e. cost) should be drawn, and what shape the line should take. But the opinion that it is worth it to pay some cost should be relatively uncontroversial. And if you understand that society should pay some cost to maintain an effective military, you ultimately understand that, until the diplomats can succeed at building a genuine global peace, war is inevitable.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#134

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>WW1 was thought to have been impossible to happen ahead of time because of the losses in business and trade would have been too great. For conventional business and trade, that is true. We're talking about war profiteers, a different type of businessman who profits from the churn .

Do conventional businesses, of which there are far more than defense contractors, lack lobbying ability of their own?

They don't have a budget from a Trillion dollars per year of revenue at higher than average profit margins to defend.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#135
post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going. It is an interesting thought but ... if the government tells the industrial chain "you aren't getting paid for this" then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost. Being optimistic, maybe it could work for one war. Then the next war people ask "where are our weapons?" and the answer is "there are none". There is…

...then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost. That is the status quo. USA military has not won a war in my parents' lifetimes. USA military is optimized to consume resources, not to accomplish traditional military objectives.

Hey what about Grenada? I remember this movie https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Heartbreak_Ridge celebrating the victory!

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#136

I started paying attention to this when I lived close to DC around 2002. Bush was cutting the top tax brackets while ramping up for the Iraq invasion, the defense contractors made record profits (I remember one CEO making around 30 million) and the DC metro was plastered with ads touting the patriotism of the defense contractors. I thought "these guys are making record money, are getting their taxes reduced, try to l…

The music stops the day USD losses it’s reserve currency status. Which there is a good chance of us seeing in your lifetime.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#137

Succinct and timely as we watch the US media and political class breathlessly try to rally us all to go to war with Russia. Even the Ukrainians aren't as eager and worked-up; NATO, in fact, has not stood up any forces so far. It's insane.

Where is major media in the US commonly arguing in favor of a US war with Russia? They're certainly talking about Russia re Ukraine frequently. I've seen a lot of the headlines spilling out of NY Times, WaPo, Fox, MSNBC, et al. and they're not arguing in favor of the US going to war with Russia. That's a very rare argument. Almost exclusively the arguments are about how to respond after Russia invades Ukraine, in ter…

The idea that Russia is about to invade Ukraine is pure Western propaganda. This is not Russia's plan, and is not in Russia's interest. That this unlikely event would be breathlessly trumpeted from every corner for weeks is itself a puzzle.

Some have speculated that the war-pig plan is for certain fringe Ukrainian neo-Nazis who have received training in southern USA to commence a "reign of terror" against ethnic Russians in Donbas. Supposedly Putin will be unable to resist coming to the rescue. However, recent events in Artsakh have emphasized Putin's composure in such situations. American chatterers have poor mental models of Russian leadership.

Why is Kazakhstan no longer in the news?

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#138
post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Hi, I'm a Social Democrat. I want all of those things and a capitalist system. I don't think markets solve every problem, however. For example, I think universal healthcare is a good idea.

I think universal basic income is the best compromise between capitalism and “socialism”. What if there were only private health care, parks, libraries, school, elder care… but everybody was “rich” (enough to easily afford them all).

How does that solve the problem of capital-owners simply raising prices to match new general level of income? For example, if renting housing previously cost $X, and UBI was implemented giving everyone an additional $Y dollars, I would expect leasing costs for housing to immediately jump by, say, 0.75*Y, and the costs of other goods to rise similarly. UBI would then just be a general transfer of money from the poor and middle classes (through taxation) to the capital-owning classes.

Obviously, this can't be captured in the limited "scale model" research economists do because a temporary UBI given to a small segment of the population is not comparable to a permanent and general UBI that landowners can fully exploit. In all the arguments I've seen for UBI, I've never seen someone address the issue of the response of the landowners without relying on full-blown communist control of prices by the government.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#139
post #120

I started paying attention to this when I lived close to DC around 2002. Bush was cutting the top tax brackets while ramping up for the Iraq invasion, the defense contractors made record profits (I remember one CEO making around 30 million) and the DC metro was plastered with ads touting the patriotism of the defense contractors. I thought "these guys are making record money, are getting their taxes reduced, try to l…

> Since then I honestly think there should be no profit in making weapons while a war is going. It is an interesting thought but ... if the government tells the industrial chain "you aren't getting paid for this" then there is a pretty high chance the war will be lost. Being optimistic, maybe it could work for one war. Then the next war people ask "where are our weapons?" and the answer is "there are none". There is…

I don't disagree, but I think you're neglecting to consider that there is a relationship between defense contractors making money and politicians making war. Not per say causal, a more complex one than that, but incentives can align and push things into happening even in the absence of explicit quid pro quo. Eg, defense contractors can spread projects out over many states to maximize the political impact of their economic activity; politicians observe that war brings money into their state; their incentives have become more aligned, but no laws were broken or bribes exchanged.

There are many ways for this to happen, and all of them occur (to some degree) simultaneously and the impact is cumulative.

The result is that you cannot create a lasting solution by addressing one side of the equation or the other. You have to address them both, simultaneously, or the system will form again for exactly the reasons if formed before.

Re: War Is a Racket (1933)

#140

This talk from 1933 aged poorly. America's initial lack of intervention in WW2 resulted in Pearl Harbor and German conquest of most of Europe. Smedley Butler can stay forgotten as a footnote in the dusty annals of history.

America's initial lack of intervention in WW2 resulted in Pearl Harbor and German conquest of most of Europe Europe's refusal to follow Wilson's Fourteen Points plan and instead punish Germany as hard as possible is what created WW2 in the first place. Exactly how many of Europe's messes was the US supposed to help clean up before saying "No more"? Smedley Butler can stay forgotten as a footnote in the dusty annals o…

Let's not give Wilson too much credit. He could have simply kept his campaign promises to keep USA out of WWI. At the start of 1917, all combatants were ready to negotiate peace. Wilson's perfidy on behalf of armaments manufacturers invigorated the bloodlust of the English and (especially) French ruling classes, lengthened the war, and through the "Spanish" (really Kansan) flu epidemic killed tens of millions. Later at Paris, he made a show of resisting their excesses for about a week before he contracted the flu (karma!) and lost the intellectual capacity to affect negotiations.
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