On Wed, 13 Apr 2005 15:48:29 -0700, John DeBudge wrote > Applying opportunity costs to something like government spending on > war is a great way to use a bunch of unknowns to prove your side of > the argument. Unfortunately it will not be of much use to someone who > disagrees with the basic cost/benefit analysis of the war in the > first place.
I wasn't proposing that this be the only argument. Far from it. What is "unknown" about the reality that we are seeing all sorts of cuts in social spending as a direct result of the war? Even medical and educational benefits for the veterans of this war! > Any benefit you claim for increased spending in some government > agency could easily be countered by a claim that failure to have > spend the money on war would have led to XYZ bad things. That argument is already being made, not as a counter-point, but as a justification for the war. > There are no guarantees in life, and just because we might be able to > do something with more funding does not mean it will happen. I was talking about actual cuts in social spending. You seem to be talking about failing to increase spending. Perhaps "opportunity costs" is the wrong phrase, since it raises the idea of things we might have done. Trouble is, in this case, it refers to things that we have been doing. I don't think there's any question that the cost of this war is resulting in greater poverty, fewer people with a decent education, etc. There's little money left for those things. There's an old saying that if you want to know what your priorities are, look at your checkbook and your calendar. Our national budget shows that war has become a higher priority than feeding hungry children and other social programs, as money is moving from the one to the other. It's not an additional priority, it's a higher priority. Nick _______________________________________________ http://www.mccmedia.com/mailman/listinfo/brin-l
