War is socialism. Your country’s government seizes private property and turns it into weapons, ammo and armies. It then uses those armed forces to destroy the private property and armies, usually also the civilians, of the enemy, perceived or real. The enemy, perceived or real, then does the same to your country’s property, armies and civilians. Civil liberties also are curtailed on both sides.
When the war ends, even if some private property and liberties are restored by your government, not all are. Each war causes successive, and cumulative, reductions in property and liberties. This is the “ratchet effect” described by Robert Higgs in his 1987 book “Crisis and Leviathan.”
Trump now is campaigning against “communism” and “socialism.” I’ll leave out the profanities. He said yesterday in Las Vegas:
These people are dangerous and frankly, they are lunatics. They’re crazy, and we can’t let them get into office. Communism is the greatest threat to our country in its history, including even World War One, World War Two, Pearl Harbor, 9/11. I think it’s the greatest threat.
Would you like a free house? We’ll take one from your neighbor. Would you like free rent? We’ll take it from whoever. We’ll take your building away from the landlord. What they don’t say, and what Republicans should say, is that at the end of the year, you’ll have nothing but death, squalor, poverty. You’ll have a life of hell.
Actually, that’s what he’s delivered to Americans – and the world – in his second term: Hell. He has stolen our money, socialist-style, for his foolish wars, which he refuses to end even though he could. The Department of Defense – ludicrously renamed the Department of War – has requested $117 billion for his Iran Forever War – so far.
Brown University’s Iran War Tracker estimates Total Consumer Burden since the war’s start, especially energy inflation, at $80 billion so far. It’s $44 billion from higher gas and $36 billion from diesel, which powers trucking. Per household, the hit is $602.
I’m sure you’re feeling it. I sure am. That’s more proof war socialism also always causes inflation.
And war brings higher debt. In 1999-2000, we finally enjoyed a “peace dividend” from the end of the Cold War, and the government actually was starting to pay down the national debt. Then 9/11 struck in 2001, Bush panicked and took us into the Iran and Afghanistan War debacles. Combined cost: $8 trillion. $8,000,000.000,000.00. All borrowed. We’ll never pay it down.
Trump was reelected on promises of paying down the debt, “no regime-change wars” and reducing Biden’s high cost of living. He’s given us the opposite: war socialism.
Here’s the interest payments on the national debt, from the St. Louis Fed. Notice it was $400 billion a year when Trump took office in 2017 and now it’s triple that, more than $1.2 trillion a year. Sure, most of the recent increase hit under Biden. But in both Trump terms, it never went down, always up. War socialism.
Trump and other Republicans are decrying the socialism of such Democrats as Abdul El-Sayed, who just won the Democratic primary for U.S. Senate from Michigan. But they won’t say the Republican nominee, Mike Rogers, is a big supporter of Trump’s Iran Forever War – that is, of war socialism.
That’s the choice we’re being given now: Bernie Sanders-AOC-El-Sayed-style “democratic” socialism vs. Republican war socialism.
No matter whom we vote for, we always get socialism.
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