Robert Naiman wrote: > Your counter-factual - bringing back the draft - is, politically, > highly implausible.
I agree, but the possibility of bringing back the draft says something is amiss with criticisms of the military for being too "capital intensive." > It's also highly implausible that the military would be made less > capital-intensive. The long-term trend is precisely the opposite. Part of that is due to the Vietnam syndrome: if we can't draft people, we have to hire them, but we can't get enough of them, so we need to be high-tech (along with hiring mercenaries and an expensive privatized supply corps). Of course, it's also partly due to the political clout of the military-industrial complex, which pushes for that trend. > Pollin used a standard I/O model. I don't think his paper should be > dismissed so lightly. I/O models are static. The world is dynamic. > I have substantive questions here on the economics and I would really > appreciate it if some people who follow this area could give a > substantive response that addresses the questions on macroeconomic > models as they are generally used and understood. I tried to be substantive, but you didn't like my answer (on one little piece). By the way, I wouldn't trust "macroeconomic models as they are generally used and understood" since they have been highly influenced by bogus "dynamic stochastic general equilibrium" models. Eugene Coyle wrote: > The whole POINT of military spending is to provide a market for high tech and > other capital goods. So why fantasize a scenario with more spending on > people?< the whole POINT for _whom_? Obviously, for those with a lot of political power (ignoring differences of opinion within that group). But can't that power be undermined? -- Jim Devine / If you're going to support the lesser of two evils, you should at least know the nature of that evil. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
