War! What Is It Good for? By Declan Hayes

The answer to Edwin Starr’s iconic lyrical question comes from another iconic song: Pink Floyd’s “Money.” From Declan Hayes at strategic-culture.su:

Though Edwin Starr’s version of WAR! was a Vietnam War era blockbuster hit, it was much stronger on the musical than on either the economic or factual fronts. According to its lyrics, war is good for “absolutely nothing” because “it means destruction of innocent lives”, “tears to thousands of mothers’ eyes when their sons go off to fight and lose their lives”. War, according to Starr, is an “enemy to all mankind”.

If all that was the case, then war would have ended with The Great War, “the war to end all words”, as its pimps marketed it, or at some other important historical juncture.

Because wars just as terrible as Vietnam and that cynically marketed war to end all wars are still with us and will remain with us for many years to come, there are clearly many important policy makers, like Dick Cheney, and enforcers, like Smedley Butler or U.S. Defense Secretary (ex Raytheon and future POTUS) Lloyd Austin who benefit from NATO’s endless wars.

Although there is a ton of empirical evidence to back that up about each and every one of NATO’s wars, economists look at this from the guns and butter trade off perspective which tells us that, given a certain amount of resources, one can produce only a certain amount of guns or butter or, as the Bible puts it, swords or ploughshares. If one wishes to produce more butter, one must produce less guns or, alternatively, as Black Rock helpfully explains with regards to NATO’s Ukrainian war, steal more resources with the use of such guns.

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