Cutting Military Spending

Looking back over world history for the last 3,000 or 4,000 years you find many great and powerful civilizations. Countries which were well educated and accomplished wonderful things in literature, medicine, art, and science. Unfortunately far too large a proportion of these empires have eventually been brought to their knees because of adventurism and excessive military budgets. And once they have declined and fallen, they do not seem to be able to learn from their mistakes and manage to recover. Thousands of years later most are still very poor countries, and are has-been places, living in the past. None that I can think of have ever really recovered. Once they are down, they are out for good.

At least in the past if an empire's military campaign was successful, they were able to plunder great wealth and perhaps add productive citizens and land to their country. Nowadays it is all just spend, spend, spend without getting anything back in return.

The conservative Republican President Dwight D. Eisenhower tried warning the country about the growing “military industrial complex” but to no avail. We were too apathetic to get involved, and this was before the advent of video games, flat screen TVs, and rampant obesity. Once the military contractors achieve a certain level of wealth, they are almost unstoppable. And in America where the legislators are almost all on-the-take (via large campaign contributions), democracy has completely broken down. Human greed and the lust for power are very powerful forces.

It probably is already too late. In the modern vernacular, we are very likely well past the tipping point already. But maybe not. A 40% to 50% reduction in military, defense, and intelligence spending would not make America even a teeny, tiny bit less safe; and it might be enough to prevent us from continuing our fall towards becoming a third world country.

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