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Military Industrial Politics
- The military and its supporting business foundation have found numerous
forms of political expression, and we have heard their din endlessly. There
has not been a major Congressional split on the issue of continued defense
spending spirals in our lifetime. The triangular relation of the business,
military and political arenas cannot be better expressed than in Dixiecrat
Carl Vinson's remarks as his House Armed Services Committee reported out a
military construction bill of $808 million throughout the 50 states, for 1960-61:
"There is something in this bill for everyone," he announced. President Kennedy
had earlier acknowledged the valuable anti-recession features of the bill.
- Imagine, on the other hand, $808 million suggested as an anti-recession
measure, but being poured into programs of social welfare: the impossibility
of receiving support for such a measure identifies a crucial feature of defense
spending: it is beneficial to private enterprise, while welfare spending is
not. Defense spending does not "compete" with the private sector; it contains
a natural obsolescence; its "confidential" nature permits easier boondoggling;
the tax burdens to which it leads can be shunted from corporation to consumer
as a "cost of production." Welfare spending, however, involves the government
in competition with private corporations and contractors; it conflicts with
immediate interests of private pressure groups; it leads to taxes on business.
Think of the opposition of private power companies to current proposals for
river and valley development, or the hostility of the real estate lobby to
urban renewal; or the attitude of the American Medical Association to a paltry
medical care bill; or of all business lobbyists to foreign aid; these are
the pressures leading to the schizophrenic public-military, private-civilian
economy of our epoch. The politicians, of course, take the line of least resistance
and thickest support: warfare, instead of welfare, is easiest to stand up
for: after all, the Free World is at stake (and our constituency's investments,
too).