Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon: Economic Literacy
While acknowledging his great evils, future strategists and historians will one day likely recognize Osama bin Laden’s strategic acumen. With minimal resources or technology, Osama bin Laden managed to create immense socioeconomic damage and nearly destroy both of his main enemies—the “godless” Communist Soviet Union and the Zionism-supporting United States. Bin Laden achieved this using only one simple weapon, a basic understanding of economics, and thus, the immense harm that military spending does.
A simple economic concept is all we need to understand why most military spending is so detrimental. Every living order—whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a community or a company—is in a constant cycle of the production and consumption of wealth. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries, which he exchanges for money, which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, and so on.
Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes, only to then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie in terms of useful wealth, yet they trade their wages for—and then consume—goods and services (civilian goods that lead to life, enjoyment, etc.). This leads to an overall net shrinking of the economic pie to the detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of the wealth which they sacrificed a part of their lives to create. In order to realize overall economic growth, action and social cooperation must be coordinated to facilitate more production than consumption.
With the above in mind, let us now look at military spending. Every year, about $1.5 trillion—an amount similar to the entire yearly productive output of Spain, which has the world’s 15th-largest economy at $1.58 trillion GDP—is consumed by the millions of people employed by the national defense bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills, jets, nukes, and other weapons. There is a massive consumption of real wealth taxpayers were deprived of and production of goods which do not improve the lives of Americans. Should the US be invaded, the production of the aforementioned would have been well worth the $1.5 trillion dollars of wealth consumed. But, since there is no chance of anyone attempting this, and they themselves—not being completely bankrupted by the attempt—the materials created would all be virtually worthless.
Also consider the following: in the year 2022, the world’s t
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LewRockwell.com is a libertarian website that publishes articles, essays, and blog posts advocating for minimal government, free markets, and individual liberty. The site was founded by Lew Rockwell, an American libertarian political commentator, activist, and former congressional staffer. The website often features content that is critical of mainstream politics, state intervention, and foreign policy, among other topics. It is a platform frequently used to disseminate Austrian economics, a school of economic thought that is popular among some libertarians.
