Military Keynesianism...

...which writer Chalmers Johnson defines as "the mistaken belief that public policies focused on frequent wars, huge expenditures on weapons and munitions, and large standing armies can indefinitely sustain a wealthy capitalist economy. The opposite is actually true."

My guest blogger today makes this point:

"Military spending is a way to erect an unofficial tariff wall. You can't protect your civilian industries because it's 'anti-competitive.' What you can do is shelter an increasingly large part of your economy by putting it into the defense sector, thus defining work which *must* be done by Americans. There is a beneficial side-effect that R&D spending gets subsidised by the government and can be used in civilian applications (which is why Boeing does so well). But you can't keep it up indefinitely -- eventually too large a part of the economy is on a war footing, at which point everything collapses."

Thank you, guest blogger. I should have taken more than one class in Economics so you wouldn't have had to explain this to me.