Guns or Butter?

It is the odd situation in history and in circumstance that would allow a country to prosper economically if it were simultaneous waging a major conflict far from home. . All you have to do is consider the treasury going into the waging of the battle.

Take the same amount of money and invest it in the production of consumer products that enhance people’s lives or invest it in infrastructure that benefits generations of people and you'd have a tough time making the positive economic argument for the war time economy.

Even more distressing is the so-called guns or butter issue. Given that a government has limited income and resources, one would expect that a country at war would be expecting its people to make sacrifices, giving up some things in order to finance the war. This was certainly true during WW II. My mother was rationed for meat, sugar and many other things we don't even think twice about consuming. My dad had to be concerned about the tires for the car and gasoline. With the conflict we are involved in today, we are not asked to sacrifice aything if we don’t have a family member involved in the combat.

Technically, we are not at War today, (Congress did not authorize a declaration of war) although I'm sure our service men and women in the Middle East don't know the difference. What we are involved in is a contest with terrorists. This contest is for the hearts and minds of not only the people in the Middle East, but every citizen of the world.

It’s a given we have the strongest military on the planet. We have a successful economy and our form of government is a model for freedom in the world. But what everyone is wondering is can we lead as well as we can produce. Can we walk the walk or do we just talk?

My observation is that we are letting the world down. Our leaders state that if another nation is not with us they are against us. We feel we have the right to wage preemptive war any place we choose, because we can always seem to make the case that it is in our security interests.

John Kennedy always said in dealing with the Russians that "...what was theirs was theirs and what was ours was always negotiable." And so it seems, we’ve turned the tables there is no place in the world that we can't claim as being vital to our security interest and nobody who can define that interest, except us.

The conflict in Iraq we are fighting is costing us millions of dollars a day, while our infrastructure is slowly rotting underneath us. We do not have the resources to deal with that rot because it is being spent on this ill conceived venture. However the American People are being shielded from the sacrifice because we are not paying for the war out of pocket. We are charging it and the bill is climbing at an amazing rate.

It seems that if we are willing to continue to put this conflict on our national credit card, we can continue to pretend that we can afford the guns and the butter. Who is going to pay the credit card bill? I don’t know but given the current state of political will, I’d say the kids that are just starting grade school.