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True Conservatives are ANTI-War
A myth has arisen that true conservatives are pro-war, and only "weak-kneed liberals" are anti-war.
The truth is very different, however.
For example, Ron Paul has very strong conservative credentials. Paul won the Presidential straw poll at the Conservative Political Action Conference last year. And yet Paul has repeatedly spoken out against the war in Iraq and all other unnecessary wars. See this and this.
Paul points out that the Founding Fathers disliked foreign intervention, and those who advocate military adventurism are imperialists ... not conservative Americans.
As Wikipedia notes:
Thomas
Paine is generally credited with instilling the first
non-interventionist ideas into the American body politic; his work
Common Sense contains many arguments in favor of avoiding alliances.
These ideas introduced by Paine took such a firm foothold that the
Second Continental Congress struggled against forming an alliance with
France and only agreed to do so when it was apparent that the American
Revolutionary War could be won in no other manner.George Washington's farewell address is often cited as laying the foundation for a tradition of American non-interventionism:
The
great rule of conduct for us, in regard to foreign nations, is in
extending our commercial relations, to have with them as little
political connection as possible. Europe has a set of primary interests,
which to us have none, or a very remote relation. Hence she must be
engaged in frequent controversies the causes of which are essentially
foreign to our concerns. Hence, therefore, it must be unwise in us to
implicate ourselves, by artificial ties, in the ordinary vicissitudes of
her politics, or the ordinary combinations and collisions of her
friendships or enmities.John Adams followed George
Washington's ideas about non-interventionism by avoiding a very
realistic possibility of war with France.***
President
Thomas Jefferson extended Washington's ideas in his March 4, 1801
inaugural address: "peace, commerce, and honest friendship with all
nations, entangling alliances with none." ...In 1823, President
James Monroe articulated what would come to be known as the Monroe
Doctrine, which some have interpreted as non-interventionist in intent:
"In the wars of the European powers, in matters relating to themselves,
we have never taken part, nor does it comport with our policy, so to do.
It is only when our rights are invaded, or seriously menaced that we
resent injuries, or make preparations for our defense."
Another reason that Paul opposes unnecessary wars is that - as I have repeatedly demonstrated - they are bad for the economy.
For example, Paul said in a 2008 speech on the House floor:
In
the last several weeks, if not for months we have heard a lot of talk
about the potential of Israel and/or the United States bombing Iran.
Energy prices are being bid up because of this fear. It has been
predicted that if bombs start dropping, that we will see energy prices
double or triple.
Indeed, the fact that war is bad for the economy is a very strong rationale for conservatives to oppose unnecessary wars.
As
noted conservative Thomas E. Woods Jr. - a senior fellow at the Ludwig
von Mises Institute and New York Times bestselling author - writes in the March 2011 issue of the American Conservative:
To
get a sense of the impact the U.S. military has on the American
economy, we must remember the most important lesson in all of economics:
to consider not merely the immediate effects of a proposed government
intervention on certain groups, but also its long-term effects on
society as a whole. That’s what economist Frédéric Bastiat (1801–50)
insisted on in his famous essay, “What Is Seen and What Is Not Seen.”
It’s not enough to point to a farm program and say that it grants
short-run assistance to the farmers. We can see its effects on farmers.
But what does it do to everyone else in the long run?
Seymour
Melman (1917–2004), a professor of industrial engineering and
operations research at Columbia University, focused much of his energy
on the economics of the military-oriented state. Melman’s work amounted
to an extended analysis of the true costs not only of war but also of
the military establishment itself. As he observed,Industrial
productivity, the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is
eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.
…Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the
state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national
purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of
the currency, and that diminishes the decision power of all
institutions other than its own.***
Yet
these politicians and intellectuals [who warned against a cut in
military spending as being bad for the economy] were focusing on the
direct effects of discontinuing a particular spending stream without
considering the indirect effects—all the business ventures,
jobs, and wealth that those funds would create when steered away from
military use and toward the service of the public as expressed in their
voluntary spending patterns. The full
cost of the military establishment, as with all other forms of
government spending, includes all the consumer goods, services, and
technological discoveries that never came into existence because the
resources to provide them had been diverted by government.
***
Measurements
of “economic growth” can be misleading if they do not differentiate
between productive growth and parasitic growth. Productive growth
improves people’s standard of living and/or contributes to future
production. Parasitic growth merely depletes manpower and existing
stocks of goods without accomplishing either of these ends.
Military spending constitutes the classic example of parasitic growth.
Melman believed that military spending, up to a point, could be not
only legitimate but also economically valuable. But astronomical
military budgets, surpassing the combined military spending of the rest
of the world, and exceeding many times over the amount of destructive
power needed to annihilate every enemy city, were clearly parasitic.
Melman used the term “overkill” to describe that portion of the military
budget that constituted this kind of excess.
***
The
scale of the resources siphoned off from the civilian sector becomes
more vivid in light of specific examples of military programs,
equipment, and personnel. To train a single combat pilot, for instance,
costs between $5 million and $7 million. Over a period of two years,
the average U.S. motorist uses about as much fuel as does a single F-16
training jet in less than an hour. The Abrams tank uses up 3.8 gallons
of fuel in traveling one mile. Between 2 and 11 percent of the world’s
use of 14 important minerals, from copper to aluminum to zinc, is
consumed by the military, as is about 6 percent of the world’s
consumption of petroleum. The Pentagon’s energy use in a single year could power all U.S. mass transit systems for nearly 14 years.
Still
other statistics illuminate the scope of the resources consumed by the
military. According to the U.S. Department of Defense, during the
period from 1947 through 1987 it used (in 1982 dollars) $7.62 trillion
in capital resources. In 1985, the Department of Commerce estimated the
value of the nation’s plants, equipment, and infrastructure (capital
stock) at just over $7.29 trillion. In other words, the amount spent
over that period could have doubled the American capital stock or modernized and replaced its existing stock.
Then
there are the damaging effects on the private sector. Since World War
II, between one-third and two-thirds of all technical researchers in
the United States have been working for the military at any given time.
The result, Melman points out, has been “a short supply of comparable
talent to serve civilian industry and civilian activities of every
sort.”
***
Meanwhile, firms servicing Pentagon needs have grown almost indifferent to cost. They operate outside the market framework and the price system:
the prices of the goods they produce are not determined by the
voluntary buying and selling by property owners that comprise the
market, but through a negotiation process with the Pentagon in isolation
from market exchange.
Beginning in the 1960s, the Department of
Defense required the military-oriented firms with which it did
business to engage in “historical costing,” a method by which past
prices are employed in order to estimate future costs. Superficially
plausible, this approach builds into the procurement process a bias in favor of ever-higher prices since
it does not scrutinize these past prices or the firm’s previously
incurred costs, or make provision for the possibility that work done in
the future might be carried out at a lower cost than related work done
in the past.
This is not nit-picking: advancing technology has
often made it possible to carry out important tasks at ever-lower
costs, yet rising costs are a built-in assumption of the
historical-cost method. Moreover, if some piece of military equipment—a
helicopter, plane, or tank, for example—winds up costing much more
than initial estimates indicated, that inflated price then becomes the
baseline for the cost estimates for new projects belonging to the same
genus. The Pentagon, in turn, uses the resulting cost hikes to justify
higher budget proposals submitted to Congress.
***
Melman also
found administrative overhead ratios in the defense industry to be
double those for civilian firms, where such a crushing burden simply
could not be absorbed. He concluded:From the personal
accounts of ‘refugees’ from military-industry firms, from former
Pentagon staffers, from informants still engaged in military-industrial
work, from the Pentagon’s publications, and from data disclosed in
Congressional hearings, I have found consistent evidence pointing to
the inference that the primary, internal, economic dynamics of military
industry are cost- and subsidy-maximization.***
“In
one major enterprise,” Melman reported, “the product-development
staffs engaged in contests for designing the most complex, Rube
Goldberg-types of devices. Why bother putting brakes on such
professional games as long as they can be labeled ‘research,’ charged
to ‘cost growth’ and billed to the Pentagon?”
***
The
American machine-tool industry can tell a sorry tale of its own. Once
highly competitive and committed to cost-containment and innovation,
the machine-tool industry suffered a sustained decline in the decades
following World War II. During the wartime period, from 1939 to 1947,
machine-tool prices increased by only 39 percent at a time when the
average hourly earnings of American industrial workers rose by 95
percent. Since machine tools increase an economy’s productivity, making
it possible to produce a greater quantity of output with a smaller
input, the industry’s conscientious cost-cutting had a
disproportionately positive effect on the American industrial system as a
whole.
But between 1971 and 1978, machine-tool prices rose 85
percent while U.S. industrial workers’ average hourly earnings
increased only 72 percent. The corresponding figures in Japan were 51
percent and 177 percent, respectively.These problems can be accounted for in part by the American machine-tool industry’s relationship with the Defense Department. Once
the Pentagon became the American machine-tool industry’s largest
customer, the industry felt far less pressure to hold prices down than
it had in the past.
***
In the short run, the
American machine-tool industry’s woes affected U.S. productivity at
large. Firms were now much more likely to maintain their existing stock
of machines rather than to purchase additional equipment or upgrade
what they already possessed. By 1968, nearly two-thirds of all
metalworking machinery in American factories was at least ten years
old. The aging stock of production equipment contributed to a decline
in manufacturing productivity growth after 1965.
***
Another
factor is at work as well: the more an industry caters to the
Pentagon, the less it makes production decisions with the civilian
economy in mind. Thus in the late 1950s the Air Force teamed up with
the machine-tool industry to produce numerical-control machine-tool
technology, a technique for the programmable automation of machine
tools that yields fast, efficient, and accurate results. The resulting
technology was so costly that private metalworking firms could not even
consider using it. The machine-tool firms involved in this research
thereby placed themselves in a situation in which their only real
customer was the aerospace industry.
Some 20 years later, only 2
percent of all American machine tools belonged to the
numerical-control line. It was Western European and Japanese firms,
which operated without these incentives, that finally managed to
produce numerical-control machine tools at affordable prices for
smaller businesses.
***
Economist Robert Higgs wonders:
“Why can’t the Department of Defense today defend the country for a
smaller annual amount than it needed to defend the country during the
Cold War, when we faced an enemy with large, modern armed forces and
thousands of accurate, nuclear-armed intercontinental ballistic
missiles?”
In fact, a great many military experts have begun to
conclude that the enormously expensive and complicated equipment and
programs that the Pentagon has been calling for would be of limited
help even in fighting the Second Generation Warfare with which the
American military seems most comfortable, and a positive detriment to
waging the kind of Fourth Generation Warfare of which the war on terror
consists. William Lind, a key theorist of Fourth Generation Warfare,
says the U.S. Navy in the 21st century is “still structured to fight
the Imperial Japanese Navy.”
***
The Department of Defense is the only federal agency not subject to audit.
***
It
is not uncommon for the Pentagon not to know whether contractors have
been paid twice, or not at all. It does not even know how many
contractors it has. Meanwhile, so-called fiscal conservatives, who know
nothing of this, continue to think the problem is excessively low
military budgets. This, no doubt, is
just the way the establishment likes it: exploit the people’s
patriotism in order to keep the gravy train rolling.
***
Higgs suggests that the real defense budget is closer to $1 trillion.
Winslow
Wheeler reaches a comparable figure. To the $518.3 billion, he adds
the military-related activities assigned to the Department of Energy
($17.1 billion), the security component of the State Department budget
($38.4 billion), the Department of Veterans Affairs ($91.3 billion),
non-Department of Defense military retirement ($28.3 billion),
miscellaneous defense activities spread around various agencies ($5.7
billion), and the share of the interest payments on the national debt
attributable to military expenditure ($54.5 billion). When we add the
roughly $155 billion for the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan to Wheeler’s
tabulation, we arrive at a grand total of $948.7 billion for 2009.
And
we’re worried about trivialities like “earmarks,” which comprise such a
small portion of spending that they barely amount to a rounding error
in the federal budget?
Meanwhile, $250 billion is spent every
year maintaining a global military presence that includes 865
facilities in more than 40 countries, and 190,000 troops stationed in
46 countries and territories. It is not “liberal” to find something wrong with this.
***
Out with the phony conservatives, the Tea Party movement says. We want the real thing. But the real thing, far from endorsing global military intervention, recoils from it.
The conservative cannot endorse a policy that is at once utopian,
destructive, impoverishing, counterproductive, propaganda-driven,
contrary to republican values, and sure to increase the power of
government, especially the executive branch.
***
As
Patrick Henry said, “Those nations who have gone in search of grandeur,
power and splendor, have always fallen a sacrifice and been the
victims of their own folly. While they acquired those visionary
blessings, they lost their freedom.”
Note: While many civilians believe the myth that conservatives are pro-war, the truth is that many of the most highly-decorated military men in history - including conservatives - became opposed to war after seeing what really goes on. See this, this and this.
Indeed,
I have spoken with some very high-level former military and
intelligence officers. They are true patriots, who dedicated their life
to protecting our country. They are also very passionate about not
starting unnecessary wars, because they reduce America's national security and cause many more problems than they could possibly solve.
Those who call themselves "conservative" but advocate military adventurism are really "neoliberals" ... and they are not really conservatives at all.
Obviously, I am not advocating complete disarmament. We should be ready to defend ourselves
if we are attacked. But I am opposed to attacking other nations unless
it is urgently and absolutely needed or engaging in endless war. See this, this and this.
- advertisements -
;-)
Ronald Reagan: Of the four wars in my lifetime, none came about because the U.S. was too strong.
Military strength is a great deterrent.
Or as St Rumsfeld put it, weakness is a provocation.
I couldn't disagree more vehemently. The wars in Reagan's life had nothing to do with our strength or weakness.... it had to do with a small number of military families and industries making a literal "killing" off our good people killing other good people and not mind our own business. If any of you real men want to step up and put an end to this communist government taking over right here in the u.S. OF A ..... go for it. Don't send some other poor brown man's sons and daughters over to disasterstan to show the world how big your dick is.
This GW is a total AH but Afghanistan has become pretty pointless. Islamofacism should be stopped at the border, airports should profile, political correctness is destroying the West, etc etc.
I could see some arguement for Afghan when Bush was there but now we have a Saudi bowing puppet in the white hut aka GW's hero. His orders are to grind down the US Military to destroy it and our soldiers deaths amuse the Saud royalty. The are targets and a buffer to protect Sunni Saudis from Shia Iranians. The Sunni and Shia hate one thing more than Jews and Christians - that is each other.
GW's bowing hero's other orders are to bankrupt America. GW never has an unkind word for Hussein.
Obama is identical to Bush: they both serve the military-industrial complex that Eisenhower warned us about (but we didn't listen):
"All In All It Appears That Eisenhower’s Worst Fears Have Been Realized And His Remarkable And Unique Warnings Given For Naught"
Obama - exactly like Bush - also serves Wall Street.
I passionately dislike Obama for the exact same reasons I passionately dislike Bush.
Bye ... thanks for playing
Birds of a feather...
Bush is the All-American Tackle and Obama is the Heisman Trophy RB, taking us straight to hell it seems.
Well said George. There's nothing conservative about a fascination with slaughter for greed.
Ron Paul is a Libertarian, you Libtard.
Conservatives and Libertarians match in many ways; one of which is that Libs must die.
Conservatives aren't pro-war, but they are definitely anti-pacifist.
Most conservatives are not imperialist, but they definitely anti-isolationist.
This is because it is small planet. To conserve liberty at home we must act abroad from time to time at least, to keep tyrants and tyrannical movements on notice and in check.
Why does Tyler let this idiot keep posting Huff Po leftwing bile? It is really tedious crap he posts.
I like Tyler, William B, Turd, et al, but GW is a fool. It is Cheney this, Palin that, Rummy this.
GW lectures us daily on "conservatives" when he is an Obama apologist. GW should f**k off. His hero Obama has done nothing to bring American troops home. His hero has doubled the debt in 18 months.
Freddie, I resent that my taxes pay to produce the war machine that has everyone in the world hating Americans. I stand firmly with George Washington and Thomas Jefferson in thinking that the military is a parasite off of real production in our country. Our country is fallin for many reasons, but the overextended military spreading "freedom and democracy" wherever they decide to bomb next is a primary and fundamental cause.
I consider myself the ultimate conservative Constitutionalist. Junk away you military war monger. You murderous aggressor. We need to mind our own business and worry about building our OWN country up and getting a little more freedom right here at home.
They don't know what conservative means
conservatism, Political attitude or ideology denoting a preference for institutions and practices that have evolved historically and are thus manifestations of continuity and stability.
Stability - Like not destroying the currency and generating all the attendant woe thru endless unwinnable wars.
To all honest conservatives.
Look at GW's argument. Argue the thesis and its supporting primary documentation written by the Founding Fathers.
If you are honest, you may realize that the ad hominem attacks against this article speak to your conscience that maybe he is right.
The neo-cons are the war advocating tools of today. The neo-liberals are right with them though. The liberals of the early 20th century actually lived up to the name "liberal" as they were liberty advocates whose only surviving kin are the Libertarians. Today's liberals are ironically for a large, powerful, controlling government. In the big picture, there is nothing liberal about that. By the way the "conservatives" want a large controlling government too. Either side wants a powerful government advocating it's interests and it just won't work. Why can't people see this?
+ inf
the ad hominem attacks
from people with no rational argument they can make.
I could just hear some happy crappy like this comin' from 'em
I hate all libs, especially those neo-libs!!
What a partisan twat you are. Where in this piece - or in any of the others he posts - is GW praising Obama?
Let me answer for you, moron - nowhere.
How do you get posting rights on ZH. And who is GW related to? LOL!
You're posting now .. hahahahhahaha and if you want to contribute simply draft your article & submit it to Tyler, if ya got the stones that is
Evidence of hero worship or do you just pull the handle next to your porcelain tank home when you want to spray what passes for discourse?
The wise speak because they have something to say. The fool speaks because he wants to say something.
And since you seem soo sloow witted, the answer to your question directed at Tyler can be found in reading the ZH manifesto.
BTW, why didn't you let anyone know you were a famous navigator, especially back home?
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=iPPBnciNAqI
+1
Epic Fail whenever liberals try to define what it means to be conservative / right wing / free market capitalist.
GW is batting down his own straw men as per usual.
+1. Exactly. This earth biscuit has no business defining conservatism.
So much for life, liberty and the freedom to pursue ones vocation.
Your views aren't conservative, they're anti-American.
good to see you miles. As always, well said
++ Good morning Miles. Nice one bro.
As a Libertarian that appreciates the dynamics of humans in human society, having some POS attempt to define me thusly is simply beyond the pale. Fools such as these trolls should simply learn to speak for themselves and let others enjoy their rights to speak for themselves rather than advocating killing off a fair portion of society just because they happen to disagree with it at present. Advocating such a course of action isn't conservative, it's advocating mass murder. A crime our founders fought hard to enshrine protections against and this clueless fuck seems to have either forgotten, or never bothered to learn.
.
AT&T internet sucks folks don't get it
Miles - I think the problem may have been on the server side because my connection was poor at the same time.
Disclosure: I have no AT&T stock
:D Could well be. I've been fighting a connection that fades in and out for days .. Terrific fun
Thanks Miles. As a Liberal, I'll take a real Libertarian over a fake Conservative every time.
.
Pleasure. All one need do is look at the last comments from John Adams & Thomas Jefferson to appreciate these foundational concepts and real life examples of what closing off consideration, and then reconsidering it, means in our shared American experience. They, and we, appreciate that it takes all of us bringing debate to make it work.
Speak it, I'll listen, consider, join with you or engage in the combat of ideas. Welcome to fight club!
+ Well parsed.
Of course.
The idea that you can rebuild someone else's country is a self aggrandizing fantasy that doesn't fit with a constrained vision of human foibles.