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 top 2,500 R&D-spending companies, which make up about 90 percent of worldwide R&D spending—companies like Amazon, Toyota, Google, Microsoft, and Volkswagen—spent, and thus consumed, about $1.44 trillion dollars as they sustained their research, production, and innovations which are truly transforming the world right before our eyes. Thus, the US’s national defense-related yearly consumption of wealth is similar to that which is consumed in corporate R&D by the entire planet.
According to one estimate, by Grok (X-Twitter’s AI chatbot), creating all the buildings and infrastructure of a city in the US that could house 500,000 people like Miami, would cost about $250 billion dollars. From this, we can crudely estimate that about six Miami-sized cities could be built each year if—instead of consuming $1.5 trillion in wealth toward military spending—we produced the cities.
One can also imagine the private sector—not being taxed the $1.5 trillion and allowing it to consume the wealth to produce these 6 cities every year—and then nuking them out of existence. The outcomes are similar: consuming the wealth that could have produced the cities to make weapons is the same as consuming the wealth to produce the cities and then destroying them. This is one of the main reasons why China creates many Miami-sized cities full of skyscrapers every year, while the US goes deeper in debt and has us where we are today, where about 20 percent of our taxes go just to pay the interest on the massive $36+ trillion debt.
If military spending-consumption actually led to economic growth, the always backward and poor former Soviet Union and today’s North Korea—with their relatively large militaries—would be prosperous. However, simple economic logic easily helps explain why they were not so. If military spending-consumption is bad for the economy, then all-out war is even more so. How can having even more people stop producing free market goods, reducing the economic pie in order to increase the amount of weapons, which are then used to destroy wealth, lives, and infrastructure possibly be good? Yet this is precisely what many naïve mainstream economists like 2008 Nobel Laureate in economics Paul Krugman believe. He once famously mentioned:
Think about WWII…it brought us out [of the great depression]. If we discovered that, you know, space aliens were planning to attack and we needed a massive buildup to counter the space alien threat…this slump would be over in 18 months.
The very existence of such a large military is just a sign of the economic ignorance and tribalism of the American public and its democratically-elected politicians. It is a reflection of a flawed ideology which erroneously believes that the fellow humans in other parts of the world are somehow so different from us—so irrational, potentially malicious, and unwilling to use reason and logic to discuss potential intellectual differences—that it makes all the militarism necessary.
Imagine if we divided the 535 members of Congress into five groups of 107 people, and every three months each group alternates between spending a week visiting politicians and their families in other countries, and hosting foreign politicians in the US. In just one year, these five groups would get to significantly interact with fellow humans from 20 countries, doing infinitely more to overcome the mythical good versus evil ideology which kept Europeans slaughtering each other across the trenches from 1914 to 1918 in World War I for reasons not one out of a million today know or care about.
Obviously a basic understanding of economics is the key to realizing just how disastrous our military-related expenditures are, and this is precisely what Osama bin Laden had. As a young man, Osama bin Laden studied economics and business administration at King Abdulaziz University and his understanding of economics became his main weapon. He tells us his strategy in a message to the American public on November 1, 2004:
…we, alongside the mujahidin, bled Russia for 10 years until it went bankrupt and was forced to withdraw in defeat….
So we are continuing this policy in bleeding America to the point of bankruptcy. Allah willing, and nothing is too great for Allah….
All that we have to do is to send two mujahidin to the furthest point east to raise a piece of cloth on which is written al-Qaida, in order to make generals race there to cause America to suffer human, economic, and political losses without their achieving anything of note other than some benefits for their private companies….
…every dollar of al-Qaida defeated a million dollars, by the permission of Allah, besides the loss of a huge number of jobs.
As for the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
As for the size of the economic deficit, it has reached record astronomical numbers estimated to total more than a trillion dollars.
And even more dangerous and bitter for America is that the mujahidin recently forced Bush to resort to emergency funds to continue the fight in Afghanistan and Iraq, which is evidence of the success of the bleed-until-bankruptcy plan…
And it all shows that the real loser is…you.
It is the American people and their economy.
What an embarrassment to what remains of freedom and capitalism in our nation. Some guy in a cave thousands of miles away that has been dead for many years has managed to let American tribalism and economic ignorance destroy us from within. Not only is our economy being destroyed, but so are our freedoms as this kind of criticism becomes “unpatriotic” or “antisemitic,” and thus, potentially “hate speech” since most of America’s recent military interventions in Iraq, Afghanistan, Libya, Yemen, and Syria have been done to destroy entities hostile to Zionist ideology.
Why does mankind keep making the same warmongering mistakes? Because the economic ignorance remains the same. In the words of the great historian John Toland: “It is human nature that repeats itself, not history.”
