Time for the Left to Give Up

When I hear someone asking what a politician has done or proposes to do, I am always tempted to throw out JFK's line: "Ask not what has my country done for me, but what I have done for my country.
I am afraid of politicians who "do" things. I much prefer politicians, like Reagan, who take naps and let me be.
A politician can only engage the coercive powers of government; can only reconfigure the Police. To ask what a politician has done is to ask what he's done with the Police. But it has always seemed to me that if there is any such thing as progress in politics, that the goal is to eliminate the Police as much as possible, realizing of course that human nature may require some minimum of force to corral the perennial miscreants, both blue and white collar.
As for the acts of the politicians, I realize that a man of letters is apt to see communication itself as an act and to value highly those politicians gifted with speech, but the ultimate goal of a free people really ought to mean, in Marx's words, a "withering away of the state". As eloquent as Pericles and Cicero were, their very existence was a flaw in their bodies politic, as they might very well concur.

On a different jag:
The people's ownership of the means of production--another Marxist goal--is being met. But the Marxists cannot acknowledge this, because they must fetishize their dialectical method and preserve their tired analyses of "surplus value".
However, do 401ks not accomplish popular ownership of the means of production? Do the people not thereby own the stocks of the very companies they work for, and then some? Is not stock ownership now open to all? It is indeed as anyone who's been paying any attention will realize.
Seems to me the Left's work is done. Time for it to go home and stop its yapping. Back to the REAL contest between East and West.

The Myth of the Militarized Economy

I am perennially exasperated by facile Leftist cant about American imperialism/militarism/hegemonism/etc. Yes, the U.S. is a big country with a big economy. It's also rich on a per capita basis. And, yes, like all other major powers, it has been involved in its share of wars. But the Left's charge is that America, like Britain before it, specifically owes its riches to military adventure. The opposite, however, is the obvious truth.

I don't know why people fail to understand that taking our resources, then making ammo out of them and then shooting that ammo into the enemy is somehow a major benefit to the economy. Sure, the ammo makers have jobs, and those jobs--like all jobs--have a multiplier effect (I spend my pay, which becomes someone else's pay, which gets spent, etc.). BUT, the ammo itself does not end up being used productively, as, say, food is. Or software, or steel, or machine tools, etc. The economic effect of making ammo ends with the ammo, except of course if the ammo was shot in order to defend ourselves and our allies from being attacked or to push back from a previous attack.

I think several things are floating around in the confusion of Leftist crania:

1. World War II ended the Depression, thereby giving rise to the modern myth that war benefits the economy. WW2 was very unusual economically, however. Most of the time, a war will result in a depression, or at least a series of harsh recessions. That's what happened after every one of our wars EXCEPT WW2. Remember Vietnam and then the recessions of 1969-71 and 1973-75? Such downturns result from a sudden fall-off in economic activity once all the one-time military expenditures cease. It's not as if the money spent on military hardware can be said to be "invested" for a future return. (Generally, military action is taken to restore a status quo ante, not to extend national boundaries.) I am of course aware of the series of founding wars, especially those battles with the Plains Indians in the 19th Century, but those really may be regarded (a) not so much as wars of the type complained about by the Left today and (b) did not involve the kind of military industrial complex so reviled in Leftist mythology today.
In the case of WW2, the Depression actually preceded the war. So, the normally inflationary effects of war in this case followed a severe DEFLATION. In other words, the Depression had already occasioned enough pent-up demand that once wartime earnings were deployed, the result was to trigger a sustained economic expansion in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, after an initial, chaotic period of immediate adjustment.

2. Wars are often fought over natural resources. Again, the Left misunderstands how economic growth occurs. The Left is susceptible to zero-sum thinking: The rich man's gain is the poor man's loss. This is yet more evidence that most Leftists never got beyond 2nd grade arithmetic in their quantitative dealings with the world.
In any case, the Left confuses early modern mercantilism as practiced by the European colonial powers of the 18th and 19th centuries with America's current economic might and that power's global economic effects. For a good critique of this aspect of the problem, check out Michael Medved's piece on Townhall.com, here

Indeed, one could argue that it is precisely statist impulses that have--sometimes in right-wing hands, but very often in Leftist hands--resulted in war where mere economic competition would have been better. Look at Japan in the 1930s. It wanted to expand economically and felt it needed physical control over its raw materials suppliers--the rest of East Asia and the Pacific. We put a stop to that idea, but look at what happened to Japan from 1945 to the present. It boomed despite not having physical control of its resource base, and boomed much more rapidly than if it had had the dead weight of a major military to support.

3. Some companies, which tend to be large industrial firms (that is, rather visible companies with big, visible products like aircraft carriers and bombers and tanks), make money by supplying arms to governments. True enough, but does the left understand such firms' actual roles in the economy? Large defense contractors are generally not terribly profitable compared, say, to media companies or software giants. Nor are they a very large part of the economy as measured by market capitalization. The financial sector is far larger. And I dare say that providing titillating entertainment to young folks is a far more lucrative business than messing around with government red tape, security clearances, and dealing with complex production lines, as defense hardware manufactures must do.

This is all heresy to the Left, but that's because the Left is a kind of secular cult, a group of nuts who develop comforting political stories for themselves because they either 1. cannot make it in the actual world of work or 2. have been so insulated from the actual world of work that they refuse to dirty themselves with work. In other words, the Left is composed of an unholy combination of losers and snobs. Do not expect their ideas to change, however.