Extra War Money Requested
On April 9, President Barack Obama requested an extra $83.4 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The president does not use the term ‘war on terror’, but that is just another semantic ruse that he has perfected. This misallocation of additional funds, while not surprising, marks another sad day for peace and liberty.
Along these lines, I am amazed still to hear people discuss war spending as some sort of economic perquisite. As most Austrians know, Frederic Bastiat’s broken window parable in That Which Is Seen and That Which Is Unseen (popularized by Henry Hazlitt) demonstrates this fallacy. War spending represents money that cannot be allocated to other resources (food, shelter, technology, whatever). While certain sectors of the economy benefit (my friend at Lockheed Martin perhaps), those immediate benefits are scored at the expense of the rest of the economic agents down the line.
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