It Is Dangerous to Be Right When the Government Is Wrong - Andrew P. Napolitano [101]
To make the government’s theft and deceit even more glaring, the Defense Department’s accounting practices are a disaster. The Department of Defense has never been able to fulfill the government’s auditing requirements because its records are in such disarray. To date, no major part of the Department of Defense has been able to pass the test of an independent audit.25 In other words, the government consistently breaks its own laws! (As Mark Twain once remarked, Congress truly is “America’s only native criminal class.”)26 Instead of focusing on the flaws of its own system, the federal government chooses to go on a witch hunt against corporate America, demonizing the likes of Enron, WorldCom, Xerox, and Arthur Andersen for their accounting practices in the full view of the public. While these companies grossly misbehaved with billions of dollars, the federal government has grossly misbehaved with trillions of dollars.27 Only the government can prosecute, with a straight face, entities for engaging in the same behavior as it does.
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Equally important as the amount of waste is the identity of its intended recipients. With war, the government forms a criminal organization with large business to transfer money away from taxpayers fraudulently and place the lives of innocent soldiers at stake. General Smedley Darlington Butler, one of the most lauded marines in U.S. history, wrote and spoke extensively on the nature of this criminal organization in War Is a Racket:
In the World War a mere handful garnered the profits of the conflict. At least 21,000 new millionaires and billionaires were made in the United States during the World War. . . . And what is this bill? This bill renders a horrible accounting. Newly placed gravestones. Mangled bodies. Shattered minds. Broken hearts and homes. Economic instability. Depression and all its attendant miseries. Backbreaking taxation for generations and generations.
The military-industrial complex (a term coined by President Eisenhower, another decorated war hero, no less) is the biggest, bloodiest, and most culpable criminal organization in American history. It grows fat off of the blood and gold of everyday Americans, and continually evading justice, has no incentive to cease its piracy during our lifetimes or our children’s.
Despite the fiscal irresponsibility and waste which necessarily accompany war, progressive historians and Keynesian economists have argued that war actually creates prosperity (as opposed to simply transferring it to the fortunate few). This argument, however, is flawed. As economist Ludwig von Mises noted, “War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or plague brings.”
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This argument’s strongest case for war prosperity is based on the drop of unemployment rates and rise of gross domestic product during World War II. To be fair, unemployment numbers did in fact plunge, falling from 14.6 percent to 1.2 percent between 1940 and 1944.28 However, there is a simple answer to this analysis. The unemployed were drafted by the feds to serve in the armed forces; unemployment rates only fell because the government was conscripting its very own unemployed population. Of the sixteen million who served in the armed forces at some time during the war, ten million were drafted. Many of these men volunteered so as to avoid the draft and the likelihood of assignment to the Army infantry.29 With this line of reasoning, shall we reinstate the draft to alleviate our high unemployment rate today?
The war prosperity argument will