Comments by "Jim Luebke" (@jimluebke3869) on ""The Last Election" - How D.C. u0026 Hollywood are Being Disrupted by Outsiders" video.

  1. Defense contractors don't need actual war to make money. The Cold War proved that. Just the fear of war is necessary, which is something every reasonable person will probably have forever. Margins on bullets and bombs are awful. National customers whose working-age population is getting killed (and not working) are not good customers. Dead people don't have any money. Countries getting their infrastructure reduced to rubble, are not good customers. Who wants to be paid in rubble? Debt-financing of war has a way of wrecking the international order. (See: the 20th century). On the other hand, the best margins are on major cutting-edge defense systems. These are usually for deterrence, and never actually have to be used. Countries can decide how much money they have to spare for them, making them much more stable long-term customers. Spinoff technologies gave us the personal computer and the Internet. Countries that don't have a lot to spend on them, clearly do not have their economies in good order. They will come under the influence of countries that do have their economies in good order, without even a shot necessarily being fired. As long as this influence is imitative -- as long as it spreads the better economic ordering -- this is a very good thing. It's not a bad thing for defense contractors to make money (even, make LOTS of money) especially advancing technology that might not have an immediate commercial application, but whose long-term implications are massive. Microelectronics and networking before the networks are fully deployed, both fall into this category. Research in the context of defense (rather than just basic theoretical research) raises the stakes, giving some signals of which research to prune back as ineffective, and which to reinforce as fruitful. Simply demonizing defense contractors as warmongers ignores the healthy part they can play not only in an overall economic ecosystem, but in the defense of that system, which is (obviously) essential for its survival.
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