The Military Gravy Train

There’s something very odd about the United States military that makes many of the most budget-hawkish fiscal conservatives turn into starry-eyed, big government welfare pushers. The hypocrisy is breathtaking; at the same time as many conservatives are talking about “America’s descent into socialism” they are pushing their own brand of military socialism to ever more absurd lengths.

At a whopping $581 billion per year, the United States already spends more than the rest of the world combined on its military. However, even that number doesn’t represent the entire picture. As Robert Higgs has shown, when everything is included (from the Department of Veterans Affairs to the nuclear weapons expenditures in the State Department to the net interest on past debt-financed defense outlays, etc.) that sum is actually over one trillion dollars. Despite this, every Republican presidential candidate is pushing to increase the military budget. Even Rand Paul proposes adding $76.5 billion to the defense budget — which by itself is more than the military budgets of all but two other countries in the world (China and Saudi Arabia).

Perhaps Steyn should have rephrased it as the “great sucking maw of military spending would be transferred to the great sucking maw of social spending.” And what exactly the Iraq War, for example, did to make the world less dangerous or America less vulnerable is — for good reason — left unstated.

And of course the biggest question is left altogether undiscussed; why does the United States need either a bloated welfare state or a bloated warfare state?

And this boils down to the heart of it; the two parties have little more than two slightly different versions of big government they want to foist on the American people and use to line the pockets of their favored interests. Only slightly of course, because it’s not like the Republicans reduce welfare spending or the Democrats reduce military spending.

In the end, it’s not very complicated; a small government with a massive military is an oxymoron. It’s about time that fiscal conservatives figured this out.

Note: The views expressed on Mises.org are not necessarily those of the Mises Institute.