Photo: AP
If you thought the concept of the United States being the arsenal of democracy is something invented during the United States’ third revolution, you could be forgiven for being wrong. The mythologies of the New Deal and the final overthrow of Classical Liberalism by Progressivism have obscured our history as a free nation.
The concept of the United States selling arms and armament was proposed even before the Constitutional Convention produced the Constitution of the United States. It was proposed by, among others, Thomas Paine, author of the pamphlet “Common Sense” that Glenn Beck says he’s updated.
Here is what Paine wrote:
…Besides, what have we to do with setting the world at defiance? Our plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace and friendship of all Europe … We ought to view the building a fleet as an article of commerce, it being the natural manufactory of this country. … And is that nice point in national policy, in which commerce and protection are united. Let us build; if we want them not, we can sell; and by that means replace our paper currency with ready gold and silver. …Wherefore, we never can be more capable to begin on maritime matters than now, while our timber is standing, our fisheries blocked up, and our sailors and shipwrights out of employ. … Ship-building is America’s greatest pride, and in which, she will in time excel the whole world.
Prophetic words indeed. The irony is that one of the greatest blunders in the foreign policy of this nation is the very thing that preserved and nourished her in tenuous infancy. Armament sales and now shared design and production as with the F-35 are the strongest, most costly, yet least visible restraints on our foreign policy.
Why is it a blunder? It is a major source of fuel for the Perpetual War for Perpetual Peace that’s consumed enormous amounts of the blood and treasure of the planet for the last 100+ years.
“Whiz Kid” Robert Strange McNamara who died today and like-minded technocrats thought they could use efficiency and mass production techniques along with sales of “surplus” armaments to help defray the enormous research and development costs of weapons and weapons systems. They forgot one thing: despite the name “capital armaments,” ships, planes and other weapons are not capital. They do not produce wealth; they burn, sink, and blow up wealth.
We sell arms to other nations, but they don’t really pay us for them. We loan or give them the money they use to buy our weapons, so they pay us with our own money. Thus the R&D costs are never recovered except through accounting tricks and inflation.
This expansion of credit and debt and the resulting generation and recycling of fiat money is called inflation. The regular debt crises that result from inflation cause economic panics, recessions, and depressions. We are living in such a time now.
The same thing happened with agriculture exports, farm welfare and farm equipment development sales and exports around the turn of the 20th century with the resulting credit bubble exploding in 1929.
From a common sense view, why would we even consider selling or giving our weapons and defense technology to potential enemies? It’s insane!
We should keep our weapons for ourselves and continually test, improve, revise, throw away, blow up and otherwise make the the best tools our military can get. Our weapons developers should eat their own dogfood by being members of the military whose lives depend on their work.
Alliances and treaties come and go; nations come and go. Our friend today may be our enemy tomorrow. In the meantime, we provide the means for despots and thugs to oppress their people.
Arsenal of Democracy? Arsenal of Despots is the real face of arms trade.
Stop arms sales to foreign governments and their agents. End international alliances that commit us to wars started by others against others.
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