Max Sawicky wrote: >Tsk tsk. Really Walker. > >We (I, at least) were talking about macroeconomic policy, real and >mythical, with the grand moniker "military Keynesianism," for which the 80 >percent is irrelevant, however poignant. Furthermore, it's not the 3 >percent which matters, but the change in that amount vis-a-vis the biz >cycle, if we're talking fiscal. It's not just the 3.5 percent that matters, it's the absolute magnitude compared with some other magnitude. If you simply assume that the 8 trillion dollars dropped from the sky or was pulled out of the hat as the level of U.S. GDP in 1999, then there's not much more to say about it. But if you'll admit for a moment that the general magnitude of current goods and services output, if not the precise amount, is to some extent the cumulative result of a long term industrial growth agenda then the "small" relative size of military expenditure is tautological. Conceivably (easily conceivable to me) the U.S. could have a much, much lower level of economic output combined with a much, much higher quality of life. Imagine an alternative (there is no alternative?), in which there is full employment, the standard work week is 20 hours a week, everyone gets six weeks vacation a year, mothers and fathers spend a lot of time with their children, neighbours get together regularly to play music and sing and dance. People share and help each other and are kind and make art and gambol through the warm woods with hardly a care tossing wild flowers in the air, all on a GDP of 1/4 the physical size just because folks don't need to have piles of heavily advertised crap to sooth their edgy, anal-retentive souls. Please don't puke at this maudlin idyll, Max, I'm just conjuring it up to try to make the mundane point that the same absolute level of military spending could be relatively four times larger compared to a GDP that was 1/4 as big. Does the GDP measure quality of life? No. Does growth in the GDP measure Genuine Progress? No. So it matters what we're comparing the level of military spending with. Go back and read the national think tank economic planning treatises of the 1950s and 1960s, Max. Go back and read the Rockefeller Commissions and the Brookings Institute studies on comparative growth and the Council for Economic Development manifestos. They explicitly acknowledge the choice between more leisure and more industrial growth and explicitly choose growth for the clearly stated purpose of insuring U.S. global industrial and military dominance. Don't take my word for it, Max. Take theirs. Elsewhere, El Maximo wrote, >If 'planning regime' is intended to describe our present system, I'd say off >the top of my head that you have a formidable challenge in motivating any >but the most broad notion of planning. Its hard to imagine our elites >planning anything. Yeah, sweetheart. While you're at it, don't bother reading the Kissinger chaired 1958 Rockefeller Commission report or Brzezinski's _Between Two Ages_ or Crozier, Huntington & Watanuki's Trilateral Commission _Crisis of Democracy_. Or any of that 20th century fund stuff from the 1940s or 1950s or Brookings Institute stuff from the 1960s or anything by the RAND Corporation and you can continue to "make it hard [for yourself] to imagine our elites planning anything." Some of it may sound stilted, but it's not stupid. And considering who's doing the fucking and who's getting fucked, I wouldn't shrug it all off as luck. I guess it's just an congenital American weakness to disrespect one's opponent. Tsk tsk. Really, Sawicky. regards, Tom Walker http://www.vcn.bc.ca/timework/covenant.htm
