Manufacturing Broken Windows, One Tank at a Time
June 19, 2008
A peculiar sort of tragedy of the commons is the not in my backyard argument, used to forestall or prevent certain “undesirable” developments (like airports, Wal-Marts, nuclear reactors, or oil derricks). On the one hand, the tragedy of commons asserts that when property rights are not clearly defined, the property in question will be over-utilized, depleted, destroyed, etc. The NIMBY argument is kind of the opposite: when property rights are not clearly defined, NIMBY properties won’t be utilized, used, or developed at all, instead they sit idle.
It’s queer that the NIMBY argument is used against noisy, pollutive or other undesirable plants, but not generally applied to military development. For example, a lot of people really hate war, but they don’t get up-in-arms about the Tank Plant down the street that’s churning out the latest in mass-murder technology (permalinked PDF):
General Dynamics, which has operations also in Sterling Heights and other parts of the country, is working on a $2-billion contract to help develop combat systems being built over the next five years.
The goal: Make everything more agile, more lethal and less reliant on manpower by 2015, when the Army’s 14-part Future Combat Systems is to be integrated.
“It’s a new way of fighting,” said Paul Mehney, associate director of communications for the program.
To review:
America’s chief export is war — and practically all of the countries that “hate us” are running a massive trade deficit in that department. — America’s Chief Export, 10-23-2007
The new weapon will allegedly be able to fire shells up to eight miles away. Boasts Mehney, “We’re going to be able to hit what we can’t see.”
Yeah, nothing like tossing volley after fucking volley of depleted uranium eight miles into the distance. If military accountability with regards to “collateral damage” and haphazard murders is at an all time low (and it probably is), prepare for it reach new depths of indecency.
But nobody cares. Nobody ever says “Not in my backyard!” to a military base or a tank plant. They generally don’t hate it when General Dynamics or Lockheed Martin begins development of new superweapons in their backyards. Probably because they thing that GD or LM are creating jobs. In actuality, these developments make us all worse off.
Behold the fallacy of the broken window.
A tank plant simply can’t be measured in terms of the employment it provides, because it is a net-negative value proposition. A tank plant must be measured in the terms of death and destruction it produces, and is the sort of thing that nobody, anywhere, ever, should be happy about.
General Dynamics, of course, employs a certain number of people here in Sterling Heights, or at the Warren tank plant (is that still around?) But these companies are effectively paid for with money that everyone else has earned, but which has been stolen from them through taxes. In the absence of confiscatory taxation, people would be spending their money on something else, and those employed in the war-making industries would be doing something other than wasting scarce and valuable resources on the production of goods the only purpose of which is to cause death and destruction, brown people in far away lands wouldn’t have to worry about depleted uranium shells screaming through their front windows in the middle of the night, they wouldn’t hate us, and we’d have more stuff and leisure and time to enjoy. Money not directed towards the production of mass-murder would instead be directed to some productive endeavor, and we’d be better off, as a result.
Everything that’s used in the creation of weaponry has other uses, as well: the engineers could be designing cars or refrigerators, the laborers could be welding bicycles together instead of rivets on armor, the metal components and raw materials could be used to make a million-and-one other things. And the only way to divert these resources towards the production of tanks instead of cars or refrigerators is by paying more for them than they’re otherwise worth. Everything the government procures is necessarily, and by definition, overpaid for!
See, it’s just not as simple as “the people employed by GD would simply be employed somewhere else, with no net effect.” It can’t be this simple, because what General Dynamics creates has a cost in measured in terms of real resources, and eventually is designed to destroy real resources. The actual cost of an Abrams tank is the sum of the resources used in its creation and maintenace, plus the resources and lives it destroys during its useful life, plus the opportunity costs associated therewith.
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Nobody sees the death and destruction. The simply see that the glazier is employed, and they smile. Forget about the fucking glazier. Imagine a world where windows don’t break, or better yet, a world where there are no windows.
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