hipsterkittypostingteenybopper:

cartnsncreal:

Our government prefer killing people over preventing death.

The basic point is sound, but it’s a little more complicated than that.

Military spending is what keeps our economy afloat. No one has figured out how to substantially cut it with bringing our economy to a grinding halt. There are entire communities whose economies rely on military bases; a lot of our citizens are employed in the military, or doing work for the military, or building things for the military, and there’s no ready-made solutions for if we cut that funding. A lot of people aren’t qualified to do much else. You would see a lot of the United States collapsing overnight if we cut funding to the military.

The reasons for this are also complicated, and they date back to the years following World War II, when we slowly realized that wars were changing and that we could no longer drive our country into war production. Wars were too short and too sudden for that, in the modern era; what we had at the beginning of them was what we had, period. The United States’ imperialism emerged from a basic conviction that we deserved to have the best weaponry and equipment, and that we deserved to be on top of things, that we alone were qualified to run the world. Worth noting, Eisenhower specifically warned us about what would happen if we did this, but the realpolitik of the situation overrode him. Quoth Eisenhower’s farewell to the Union speech, bolding Wikipedia’s:

This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence—economic, political, even spiritual—is felt in every city, every statehouse, every office of the federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society. In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or unsought, by the military–industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists, and will persist. We must never let the weight of this combination endanger our liberties or democratic processes. We should take nothing for granted. Only an alert and knowledgeable citizenry can compel the proper meshing of the huge industrial and military machinery of defense with our peaceful methods and goals so that security and liberty may prosper together.

The proper way to understand the modern-day situation is that it’s essentially Faustian in nature. We’ve sold our country and its livelihood over to the military-industrial complex, and if it collapses, we collapse. There are a lot of politicians who would like to cut funding, but haven’t found any politically viable ways to make this happen. Not only are the domestic economic implications staggering, cutting foreign military funding leaves power vacuums, and the empire that is the United States can’t stand the thought of not having fingers in every pie. Our military is part of the “greatest nation on Earth” mythology.

Fixing this problem requires us to confront our cultural biases, our economy, and entrenched corporate oligarchy. It is not as simple as moving some funds from column A to column B, it would entail a radical restructuring of our entire economy.

Which needs to happen, to be clear – this is not a defense of the United States’ military by any means. It’s just an attempt to properly contextualize the scope of the problem.