Collective Corruption and the War Machine

Learn more about this collection of essays and obtain your copy of the book at:
miketermaat.com/BROKEN

Less than a year ago, my mother passed away. Throughout her adult life, she suffered from numerous autoimmune afflictions. Lupus and rheumatoid arthritis had certainly taken their toll. Her own body was essentially destroying itself. I’m grateful that, despite these challenges, she remained caring and kind to all around her. Of course, one can easily imagine a person with such diseases becoming embittered, hostile, and cruel. What makes the difference? Why does one person lash out under such circumstances, and another adopt introspection and humility? Why is one person refined in goodness, and the other corrupted, destroying others? The cruel irony is that the one who lashes out only compounds their own stresses, heightening the pathogens’ ability to wreak bodily and even mental and spiritual havoc within the victim.

It is precisely this sort of person, the enraged, angry, and belligerent malcontent whose internal dynamics of destruction are turned outward that provides us with an apt illustration of the modern US war machine. The destruction that it inflicts on other nations and peoples are a symptom, not the immediate cause of its own inward and final decay. To borrow a phrase from economist Thorston Polleit, the imperial war machine is the consequence of the collective corruption of US political and private society.

This brief essay will describe the nature and consequences of collective corruption along with its cure. This social pathogen arises when the ruling class commits and then justifies domestic property rights violations. These encroachments will eventually spur militarism and foreign interventionism, which in turn generates a greater flouting of property rights at home. This process will continue ad infinitum, unless it is halted by serious and influential actors. They must deliberately restore property rights to their fellow citizens.

If left unchecked, the collective corruption taints the political character of a polity, and in the personal vices of individuals. This leads to the destruction of a nation, the consumption of its capital structure, and a devouring of others at home and abroad. When this process runs its course, the nation comes to ruin and becomes debased to the point where, to quote St. Paul’s letter to the Christians in Rome, “they together become worthless.”

Defining Collective Corruption

According to Dr. Polleit, collective corruption can be defined as, “action that violates, or threatens to violate, others’ physical property rights, or leads to implicit theft, and individuals’ self-interest results – once collective corruption is set into motion – to ever greater violations of individuals’ property rights. This is a development in which the rule of law is destroyed, human rights are undermined, and peaceful and productive social and economic development is greatly hindered or even made impossible”.

To apply this principle of collective corruption to the military industrial complex and its current manifestation, it requires us to parse out Polleit’s definition a bit further. The fundamental axiom that drives collective corruption is the belief that property rights violations are permissible. The ancient Sumerians, the Hebrew law, and in more recent centuries, John Locke have all articulated that humankind is a unique property-controlling creature.

What is it then that drives men to violate the essential rights of their neighbors? What excuses this behavior? In a word, the state. Modern nation states are made of individuals in the ruling class who give themselves the “legal” ability to do what is immoral and unlawful, that is to commit serial trespass with impunity. If these rulers allow for suffrage, then they create a nation full of accomplices in the looting. Not only that, they portray the act of voting as a civic duty. Therefore, in a modern nation state with the ability to vote, it becomes a duty to expropriate one’s neighbor!

This explanation of how property rights violations are shared as collective corruption harkens back to Frédéric Bastiat’s 1848 essay, “The State.” In it, he explains that the state is, “the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.” Bastiat observes the nature of the state itself. By it’s very nature, it requires neighbors to loot their fellow citizens to provide operating revenue for the ruling class’s objectives. When this corrupt practice is justified by the masses, collective corruption has a firm grasp over the internal, political life of a nation.

This raises the question: If citizens view it as their duty to use whatever means they have (in this case, the ballot box) to expropriate their own countrymen, then how likely is it that they will use whatever means they have to expropriate foreigners? The answer: quite likely.

It has been argued that foreign affairs guided by militarism and imperialism will eventually destroy life at home. However, if property rights violations are normalized in a nation’s internal polity, it stands to reason that such a people wouldn’t hesitate to seize the property of foreigners with equal or greater gusto. The argument here is that, all else equal, that the disdain for the property rights of one’s neighbor makes the violation of the property rights of foreigners on the other side of a border more likely.

Of course, it is possible that if a nation is suddenly thrust into a war fever, that they become all the more eager to raise taxes on their countrymen, and require their sons (and now daughters) to march off to glorious oblivion. However, the ability to make such decisions about their neighbors’ lives and property are presupposed. In other words, the willingness to take from one’s neighbor, whether it be their treasure or children (or both) to expropriate others in lands far away is already assumed. Put still another way, in the modern nation-state, one can safely assume that if war breaks out, voters already have the ability to commandeer their neighbors’ property to conduct acts of militarism. Internal interventionism comes first, followed by military adventurism, which spurs greater internal interventionism, and so on.

The Incentives that Foster Collective Corruption

Once the taboo of trespass is broken by a nation-state’s rulers, and once they have enshrined this injustice into law, a moral line has been crossed. Instead of upholding property rights, when a nation’s leaders dismantle them, the people are given tacit if not explicit permission to do the same. Cultures that are more individualistic – where businesses and households push back against property rights violations – are still susceptible to this corruption. How much more then, are the collectivist cultures prone to looting their countrymen? It seems that this would be an especially prevalent attitude among those who believe that all property has an element of mutual ownership. In these cases, the descent into more profound property rights violations is a greater threat. Regardless of the cultural predisposition, political action becomes a willful act of plunder. As H.L. Mencken once put it, “elections are an advanced auction on stolen goods.”

Under such conditions, wealth redistribution schemes are part and parcel of political activity. This applies to both households and firms. For example, arms manufacturers who can plunder the treasury are incentivized to seek exclusive sway over markets, blocking their would-be competitors from gaining access to government coffers. As another example, it is common for firms to seek and receive indemnity from the ruling class to protect them against litigation. These predatory behaviors might appear justified as a necessary expense for defending a nation’s borders. However, history teaches us that the looting and violence rarely ends there.

In the US context, it is a well-known strategy for arms manufacturers to create nation-wide supply chain systems that spread across many locations to develop various armament products. Indeed, a Brown University study indicated that Lockheed Martin’s infamously expensive F-35 jet project had subcontractors in 45 separate states. The report’s authors explained, “What President Eisenhower dubbed “the military-industrial complex” involves the collaboration of the uniformed military and the arms industry in promoting spending that serves their bureaucratic interests and corporate bottom lines…The tools of influence used by the arms industry include not only lobbying and campaign donations, but also a revolving door of people who cycle between jobs in Congress, the Pentagon, and private corporations”. Together, these separate entities all dip into the treasury, expropriating the wealth of their fellow countrymen. If they were to stop the systemic looting, their own livelihoods would be lost, not to mention those of thousands of subcontracted employees. As a result, the collective corruption persists to the point of institutionalization.

In an even more recent and concrete case within the US, a Senate analysis of funding for the conflict in Ukraine revealed a startling degree of political manipulation. By February of 2023, approximately $70 billion in spending on behalf of the Ukrainian military had been spread throughout 38 states. Once again, politicians insisted that the spending was necessary to prop up American businesses and their employees. Such naked admission of war profiteering faces little resistance aside from a few anti-war voices. Indeed, the general public nods along, recognizing that there is truth to the statement, without realizing its long-run implications.

Exporting and Importing Domestic Plunder

If politicians, weapons manufacturers, and Pentagon officials are content to plunder their own domestic residents, there can be little doubt of their willingness to plunder foreigners. Knowing this, the citizens themselves are altered in their personal character. They are desensitized to the economic plight of other nations who come under attack, not to mention the cold and callous responses to more morbid forms of suffering. Because domestic residents are themselves used to living as subjects, they silently endure tax rates that would have the Founders rolling over in their graves. Indeed, there is little resistance to ongoing tax hikes, not to mention the lost purchasing power that comes through inflationary monetary policy. Domestic victims of this plundering become, in a word, servile. And if they themselves are mere subjects, they won’t mind seeing others subjugated in other nations. Through this set of actions and attitudes, domestic plunder is easily converted into military interventionism whenever the mood strikes the military industrial complex.

The next external military crisis may be stirred up by any number of causes. There may indeed be hostile actors. There may just as well be governments who are interfering with so-called American interests abroad. For students of history, these interests are what the word suggests: profit-bearing business dealings. Multiple US interventions during the twentieth century were spurred by threats to corporate interests.

For starters, the 1953 Iranian coup that removed Mossadegh after the nationalization of the Anglo-Iranian Oil company was one of the most infamous cases. That was followed just one year later with the overthrow of the Guatemalan government on behalf of the United Fruit Company. In that case, the US Secretary of State, John Foster and his brother Allen Dulles, then Director of the CIA, along with the US Ambassador to the UN, Henry Cabot Lodge Jr., all had ties to United Fruit. Political power, personal profits, and access to the military and intelligence tools formed an unholy trinity of incentives for these men to instigate the Guatemalan coup against the Arbenz government. In swift order, United Fruit’s interests through the CIA operation encoded, PBSUCCESS were restored, and land was coercively seized on behalf of the firm. Some might argue that it had been expropriated by the allegedly communist Arbenz regime.

This amounts to an admission that the US government is simply better at expropriating land through its military might than Arbenz and his cronies had been. The final punchline is that all this activity was ultimately funded by the looting of American citizens, who themselves remained docile to the theft of others’ property overseas, as they had been trained to accept it themselves.

Once new conflicts are created overseas, the long-run impacts are imported back into the homeland. There are economic forms of this boomerang effect. The domestic impact of external crises are leveraged against the US public to foster greater levels of taxation and inflation. Under such conditions, especially those of ongoing persistent inflation, people become even more slavish.

But it isn’t just smaller paychecks and lost purchasing power at stake. Economist Jesus Huerta De Soto explains that citizens who continue to grovel under such conditions become “demoralized” in the recognition that they themselves are unable to benefit from such political escapades that are made possible only through connection to the ruling elite and their projects. Once the economic consequences come home to roost, they produce a characteristic spiritual and moral stench that reeks of desperation, polarization, despondency, and disgust. Such demoralized citizens lose their sense of agency, giving rise to resentment, cynicism, and distrust that is often targeted at their neighbors rather than the real culprits in the military industrial complex as well as fiscal and monetary policymakers.

Furthermore, the intelligence apparatus that is first formed in its infancy - in the US case with the FBI - creates a proving ground and a sort of domestic experimentation for foreign intelligence services. In the American case, the Naval Intelligence Services deployed in WW2 (The OSS) would eventually morph into the Central Intelligence Agency. In the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks and with the advent of Silicon Valley’s surveillance capacity, the American citizenry is now subject to a surveillance state, the likes of which would have been unimaginable, even in the late twentieth century. However, this demoralized population seems to have willingly given themselves to such radical oversight in exchange for technological convenience. As a result, what were once considered emergency and temporary measures under the USA PATRIOT Act continue to be extended with only minor revisions, with little more than a handful of naysayers in Congress or elsewhere.

People subject to pillaging by governing officials to ever greater heights are enduring what Robert Higgs called the “ratchet effect.” A process whereby each crisis leads to more and more intervention. New interventions spawn the next crisis, and thereby further intervention. This effect leads to the erosion of society’s typical institutions for problem-solving. Rather than voluntary associations that form to mitigate the effects of crises, the people come to rely on government solutions, to the problems that the government often caused in the first place. Local mutual aid societies crumble, even the family institution is brushed aside, and made more difficult to obtain when the culture of interventionism ramps up.

Given all the negative effects of the export and re-importation of interventionism, one might wonder why people continue to go along with such a system. Here we return to our original thesis: collective corruption ensnares individuals and societies into their more base instincts, as they are led to believe that the absence of these corrupt systems would bring them greater harm. This attitude is revealed in platitudes such as: “If we don’t fight the communists in Guatemala, they’ll be on our front porch.” Or, “If we don’t spend on the war effort in Ukraine, Putin will run roughshod over all of Europe.” Not to be outdone, “If we don’t intensify surveillance at airports and on the internet, there won’t be a US skyscraper left standing.” The demoralized citizen invites the oppressive regulation, surveillance, taxation, and inflation for fear that if these corrupt property violations aren’t sustained, they will suffer far greater harm. As a result, there is a tacit agreement among the ruling class and the citizenry to let the show go on: Trespass upon trespass, intervention upon intervention, crisis upon crisis, corruption upon corruption.

Curing the Disease: Property Rights Reasserted

The source of collective corruption is both the willful trespass of property rights by interventionists and the tacit acceptance and eventual support of those who are stripped of their property. Since fault lies with a voracious political class, along with a docile public, both groups are in serious need of external and internal reform. This must occur at both the policy and personal level for all involved.

On the policy front, Congress must move to reduce automated spending rules along with built-in increases in expenditures and return to discretionary processes that reduce the reliance on the executive to establish spending priorities. Without discretionary power and the ability to rein-in spending, deficits, and borrowing, there is little hope of reducing the tax burden on the public. Further, given the era of what economists call “fiscal dominance” where Congress’ deficits must be funded by debt, much of which is purchased by the Federal Reserve and turned into money, there is little hope of getting the inflationary monetary authorities to come to heel.

When it comes to the ultimate decision-makers in foreign interventionism and warmaking, the War Powers Act must be enforced to the letter of the law. However, it has its weaknesses and should be replaced with legislation that revokes all existing Authorizations for Use of Military Force (AUMFs).

Further, the Joint Chiefs and President should be required to obtain Congressional pre-authorization for any non-defensive action. Offensive action should require a two-thirds vote in both the House and Senate. These simple measures would severely curtail the aggressive interventionism that have prevailed since the Vietnam era. These would go a long way toward diminishing the ratchet effect and collective corruption that have so thoroughly engulfed American society and culture. Moreover, in addition to limiting open-ended spending on military adventures, the self-ownership of military personnel who are sent into war zones, often with great hesitation, would be held in much higher regard than is currently the case.

Given the current state of affairs, policy change alone is not enough. All people of goodwill should recognize their active or complicit roles in collective corruption. Once this realization sets in, the personal rejection of envy, which celebrates the appropriation of that which belongs to those who are better off, must be rejected. The interventionist mindset that sees government coercion as the only viable problem-solving tool needs to be replaced with a voluntarist ethic that sees the possibilities for genuine social compromise and arbitration of disputes. If the war machine is to be limited, the American people will have to be given a positive vision for a fortress America policy. This would be a unique opportunity to build a safer homeland by eliminating the possibility of blowback. Furthermore, peace candidates should articulate a realistic and winsome vision for the might that is projected by showing restraint and genuine care for one’s own people. Such leaders must publicly de-prioritize the need to shed blood over so-called American interests abroad.

The patient is sick, and projecting illness around the world. The affliction is interventionism and its symptom is collective corruption. Rather than taking that social and political pathology abroad, only to see it harm the American public even more, America can set an example to the world of how a truly free people operate. This will be achieved only with a strong self-defense that simultaneously addresses our autoimmune-like self-destruction in the form of burdensome regulation, taxation, and inflation. These denials of self-ownership are a denial of our birthright as human beings. Mankind alone asserts and defends property rights, and it’s long past time that we remind ourselves of that, before our baser instincts metastasize further. This will require reform at a personal, even spiritual level. It will require the ruling class to end the ransacking of fellow citizens. It will require a return to John Locke’s principles of private property. Only then can we begin to see peace abroad, healing at home, and collective corruption fading away.

Learn more about this collection of essays and obtain your copy of the book at:
miketermaat.com/BROKEN