Economics should be fairly simple, but simple doesn’t get $500k Wall Street salaries or tenured professorships. Here’s a straightforward and excellent explanation of why military spending is, for the most part, a waste. From Jorge Besada at unz.com:
[A shorter version of this article was published as ‘Osama bin Laden’s Secret Weapon: Economic Literacy’ on 2/14/2025 at the Ludwig von Mises’ ‘Mises Wire’ publication. Article can also be listened here.]
Future historians will one day likely recognize Osama bin Laden as the greatest military leader of all time. With minimal resources or technology, Osama bin Laden managed to create immense socioeconomic damage and nearly destroy both of his main enemies, the “Godless” communist Soviet Union and the Zionism-supporting United States. Bin Laden achieved this using only one simple weapon, a basic understanding of economics and thus the immense harm that military spending does.
Trump’s increases in military spending, leading to the creation of a 6th branch of the US military dubbed the “Space Force” is one of the most socioeconomically destructive things going on in the entire planet. Trump keeps delighting Osama bin Laden because he is destroying the United States via military spending exactly as Osama bin Laden hoped as we will show later.
A simple economic concept is all we need to understand why most military spending is horrendous. Every living order, whether it’d be a single cell, or a collection of them like a human being, or a collection of humans like a community or a company, is in a constant cycle of the production and consumption of wealth. A lion produces wealth by hunting a zebra which it then consumes and uses its wealth in terms of useful energy and nutrients to further produce another meal and so on. A surgeon produces wealth in terms of surgeries which he exchanges for money which he then exchanges for the wealth he consumes in terms of housing, energy, food, and so on. Production increases the world’s economic pie of wealth and order, while consumption reduces it. If the government taxes people and uses the money to hire 100 laborers to work on digging holes and then refill them, the laborers have not produced or increased the economic pie in terms of useful wealth, yet they trade their wages for, and then consumed, cars, energy, food, etc. (civilian goods that lead to life-enjoyment-order) leading to an obvious net shrinking of the economic pie to the great detriment of the taxpayers who were deprived of the wealth they sacrificed a part of their lives to create. Action must be coordinated in a manner that leads to profitability, in other words, more production (sales revenue or paycheck) than consumption (costs), otherwise you are consuming more wealth than producing, destroying order, whether it’d be biological or socioeconomic. This vital coordination requires precise knowledge and incentives and is something only millions of free individuals and businessmen can achieve by using profit-loss calculation at the individual, household, and corporate level IN the private sector.
With the above in mind, let us now look at military spending. Every year, about 1.5 trillion dollars worth of wealth in terms of homes, cars, food, materials, energy, etc. (an amount similar to the entire yearly productive output of Spain which has the world’s 15th largest economy at $1.58 trillion GDP), is consumed by the millions of people employed by the national defense bureaucracy and its associated contractors as they produce push-ups, military drills, jets, nukes and other weapons. There is a MASSIVE consumption of real useful wealth tax-payers were deprived of and production of push-ups, weapons of destruction which in no way improve the lives of Americans. Should the USA be invaded, the production of the aforementioned would have been well worth the 1.5 trillion dollars of wealth consumed, but since there is 0 chance of anyone attempting this, and they themselves not being completely bankrupted by the attempt, the push-ups, drills and most if not all the weapons are worthless.
Orwell called WAR a form of tax and denial of resources.