Fair warning: today is going to be "Budget Day" here at Asymmetrical Information, as we contemplate what's ahead after the elections.
Small point, to start. Libertarians are fond of saying "War is the health of the state". So how does war compare to financial crisis at ratcheting up government spending?
Looking at government spending as a percentage of GDP, only vaguely well. The biggest permanent leap comes not during World War II, but during the Great Depression; spending went from 3.4% of GDP in 1930 to 10% of GDP in 1940, and never again fell below that level. By contrast, in 1948, the federal government's share of GDP had fallen back to 11.6%, after soaring higher than 40% during the war. Thereafter, the permanent increases (rather than temporary war spending) don't track wars very well, unless you define the entire period from 1945 to 1989 as one big war. Spending goes back up to 15.6% by 1950, and hits 20.4% in FY1953 as we wrap up the Korean War--but by 1956, it's back down to 16.5%. By 1966 it has drifted up to a new bottom of 18%, which is not that much lower than the 18.7% we find it at in 1974. It ratchets slightly right around the two Gulf Wars, up to the current 20%--but those wars both occur near recessions, which to judge from the 1970s, do a better job at explaining upward creep than wars.
This makes sense to me. Social Security and Medicare, which together now account for more than half of the budget, were not sold as wartime measures; one does not usually tout spending on the elderly as critical to military preparedness. One could argue that regulation expands during wartime, which it assuredly does . . . but as far as I can tell, it also expands in peacetime. It's hard to quantify, of course, since there's no good proxy for the absolute level of regulation in society. But much regulation is imposed by courts and state governments, neither of which peg most of their activity to the military.
A better term might be "crisis is the health of the state", which seems almost definitionally true; a crisis is something that private efforts have failed to stem. To be sure, the government may be behind the crisis, but even if that's so, we have to look to the government for action.
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What? "War is the health of the state" is a libertarian motto? I didn't know that. That's pretty damn offensive; I guess "Arbeit macht frei" was already taken.
Lampwick,
I wonder if you've misunderstood. Libertarians who say that (I don't) are not advocating for more war. They're advocating for a less healthy (or smaller) state.
The analogy to "Arbeit macht frei" is inapt.
--CF
"To be sure, the government may be behind the crisis, but even if that's so, we have to look to the government for action."
That has a convenient recursiveness for advocates of bigger government. Take a somewhat simpler example, higher education. College is expensive, and more people should have access to a college education, so government needs to provide cheap credit and grants to make college more affordable; shockingly, tuition costs rise faster; therefore, government needs to provide more cheap credit and grants to make college more affordable.
Uh.....MM, 1945-1989 was the duration of the Cold War, if you mark the end as when the Berlin Wall came down......
JWH,
I'm not sure that's quite what most libertarians mean when they say that. It seems like quite a stretch to call the entire period from 41 to 89 a long war (or two).
Now, if you consider the war on fat (about which MM just blogged), you could argue that we're still in a state of war, but there is hope for victory (and a smaller state--with smaller people) soon!
--CF
I think there is a mistake to assume that libertarians are only using it in mere terms of government spending. Sure spending increases, but it also is about how intrusive the government becomes in EVERYTHING. For example, warrantless wiretaps, encroachment on free speech, suspension of habeus corpus, etc. The war becomes the excuse for more encroachment into the everyday lives of individuals and it is done in the name of "safety."
The term "War" can also be in regards to the used to produce a crises. War on drugs, war on poverty. Crises begets more state power, not less.
This post makes the implication that libertarian support for Obama should be quite odd.
With respect to the war, Obama is more libertarian than McCain. But, McCain is more libertarian (err..slightly less socialist?) than Obama with respect to social and domestic spending.
So, if war spending is more temporary than social spending, wouldn't Obama potentially have a longer term effect on the relative size of the state?
P.S. Neither of the current candidates will really stall the expansion of the state, so shouldn't the libertarian question be: which one of these knuckleheads will expand government less in the long run?
Matt C. has it right. War results in the augmentation of many forms state power, not just spending as a percentage of GDP. Think of the Patriot Act and the Japanese Internment Camps.
I take Megan's point to basically be correct, though: crisis is generally good for the state.
Budget deficits are exploding now, and will only escalate over the next several years. You could easily see a 2 trillion dollar deficit in 2010 if unemployment tops 9% and we resort to make-work programs in futile attempts to increase employment.
I'll second the notion that we don't "have" to look to the government for a solution in crisis... sometimes the government solution is worse than the crisis. Maybe if people did less looking to the government and more looking to themselves, we might not need as much government intervention.
sometimes the government solution is worse than the crisis.
People sharing this sentiment might be amused by clicking here
A better term might be "crisis is the health of the state", which seems almost definitionally true; a crisis is something that private efforts have failed to stem.
What if there really hasn't been a chance to see if the private efforts would resolve the crisis, given enough time? And I am not trying to tie this just to the recent financial problems, although that is a possible case.
I do think the government tends to grow in crises. But I think, given that, there then becomes a problem in defining a crisis. Because if the government is more likely to take action in response to one, then anyone looking for government intervention is going to try to define their pet cause as a crisis.
anyone looking for government intervention is going to try to define their pet cause as a crisis.
A crisis bubble! What happens when it pops?
Politicians will try to reinflate it.
The term "War" can also be in regards to the used to produce a crises. War on drugs, war on poverty.
I get a perverse chuckle out of the Orwellian uses of the term war by politicians, and then the total refusal of Congress to take their Constitutional duties seriously enough to actually declare war. "Sure, we'll call it the Iraq War, but we won't actually declare war. Then we'd have to take responsibility. Much better to pass a resolution authorizing the use of force and then call this Bush's war."
Much like 'genocide' in the UN, the term 'war' means everything but what it actually means. God, I hate politicians.
"To be sure, the government may be behind the crisis, but even if that's so, we have to look to the government for action."
Did you really think that, and then type it? Wow, Megan. I've been reading you since the early post-9/11 days, and I think I might finally agree with some of your critics. Along with sagely nodding while your buddies in the financial industry telling you that a bailout had to happen! Immediately! - it seems you have completely disconnected with any thread of Libertarianism.
interesting to hear that cited as a libertarian motto. it was the futurist artist/fascist sympathizer f.t. marinetti who called war "the earth's only hygiene" in 1909.
Looking at government spending as a percentage of GDP, only vaguely well.
Megan: the numbers you supply only give federal spending. I realize you're aware of this, but I've always thought it better to talk about the public sector as a whole, because otherwise we're getting a rather incomplete picture of the size of government. IIRC state/local spending is we're the real action has been of late when it comes to the expansion of government. Although FWIW I've always found it difficult to find such consolidated numbers online.
By the way, does anybody else find the projections for federal outlays incredibly unrealistic? It doesn't seem remotely likely that Washington's take of GDP will be a couple of percentage points smaller five years from now...
So Naomi Klein was not only wrong but approximately 180 degrees off? Shocking.
"War is the health of the state"
First we must distinguish between the "state" and the "people. Louis XIV said "L'etat c'est moi". Therefore, the term "state" refers to that part of government which is autocratic, totalitarian and uncontrollable- the part of the state which is a cancerous growth on the body politic; a cancer that steals nourishment from the people and eventually reduces free people to starving, huddled masses yearning to be free.
War feeds this cancer because in war time all efforts are aimed at fighting the enemy and very little in battling cancerous growths. But this cancer also grows fastest in times of crisis - again, because the body politick focuses totally on overcoming the crisis and the cancer balloons unnoticed.
There is only one way to kill the cancer - kill the patient. For this reason there will never be another Egyptian empire, nor another Roman empire, nor another Inca Empire...
But the cancer lingers forever tempting men to find it a new home, a living virus preserved in philosophy classes, taught in madrasses and history books, displayed in Museums and movies about the past.
To destroy this cancer we must recognize it for what it is.
The only war libertarians think is worth fighting is the war on government fat. That war is lost. If Obama/Pelosi/Reid win, it will be like Hiroshima/Nagasaki combined, with disastrous consequences for generations. If McCain should pull it off, it'll be slightly more manageable, like the burning of Atlanta. But, in either case, the war is lost. Government obesity is here to stay. And, as is pointed out elsewhere on this blog, poverty and obesity go together. Goodbye, prosperity; hello, bloated bureaucracy.
Megan, as a libertarian who's used Bourne's phrase repeatedly, let me assure you that current spending levels only partly characterize what I mean when I think of the health of the state.
Rather, war (and crisis in general) are the times when the uncodified constitution of the state is changed radically. The effects of these changes are often small, initially. But the precendents are set, and any contrary principles held by mass parties are surrendered. The long-term effect is what matters.
In any case, the reason why many libertarians including me like to use "War is the health of the state", as versus "crisis", is not because we don't think crises are important. But crises are not predictable, nor controllable by us, whereas most wars are. We can very easily not invade other countries. We cannot easily avoid the next crisis; we don't even know what it will be.
Also, we like the phrase because we are hoping to influence many libertarian-leaning conservatives, who hold what we regard as contradictory positions. That is, these sorts of libertarianish conservatives:
(a) support our foreign wars without reservation, want "victory" without definition, etc.,
but
(b) want smaller government.
Our point is to say: choose one; you cannot have both.
Wars generally end, and then much of the justification for bloated military spending and police state measures end with them. In that sense, war is more like a short vacation with a lot of junk food for the state--the state might get a bit fatter, but ought sooner or later to return to a more sensible diet. By contrast these social programs tend to be permanent obligations taken on by the state. Once a few thousand voters depend on some program continuing, it's very hard to get rid of it, just for logic-of-collective-action reasons. Get a few million voters depending on it, and it's almost hopeless to get rid of it--even changing it in relatively small ways is painful.
The cold war was somewhat different, because it went on for so long. I think it's interesting how quickly, post-9/11, the mental model of so many people went right back to a decades-long state of low-grade war as the right place from which to deal with terrorism. My guess is that this is comfortable to people who like state power. If we're in another several-decade war, we'll just have to keep spending billions on it and giving up civil rights for it "for the duration," which ends up meaning "effectively forever." And just as the end of the cold war didn't get us to actually shrink our military to the point we needed to defend ourselves, the end of the war on terror (which my kids may see, one day) will not result in handing back all those civil rights, or getting rid of the DHS, or any of that sort of thing.
A few points, although I will readily acknowledge that, as with most slogans, the statement "war is the health of the state" is a drastic oversimplification and overstatement.
First, I'd be much more interested to see a calculation that shows defense spending as a percentage of GDP during that period of time.
Second, I think the numbers you give us actually do show a pretty strong correlation between war and the growth of government. To be sure, the New Deal programs were the most rapid expansion of government. But what those numbers also show is that, although expenditures decrease substantially after a war, they never decrease back to or below their pre-war levels. This actually aligns well with political theory about the growth of executive power during wartime - the power of the Presidency almost universally increases during wartime, and almost always decreases once the war is over, but never does it decrease to its pre-war levels.
So I would agree with the premise that any individual war does not, in the long run, dramatically increase the power and "health of the state." But the evidence does show that each war, in the long run, leads to at least a marginal increase in the power and "health of the state." Aggregated over multiple wars, these marginal increases add up to a substantial growth of government power.
The cold war was somewhat different, because it went on for so long. I think it's interesting how quickly, post-9/11, the mental model of so many people went right back to a decades-long state of low-grade war as the right place from which to deal with terrorism.
An ongoing state of low-grade war may not be the greatest solution, but possibly some of those people noticed that the terrorism-as-law-enforcement approach practiced by the US during most of the 1990s didn't quite do the trick.
Uh....so far "'Budget Day' here at Asymmetrical Information" is kinda weak. I mean, not to bitch or anything, I'm just saying.
Scott: "With respect to the war, Obama is more libertarian than McCain."
I doubt it. If Obama is a libertarian at all, why did he pick Biden for his VP?
Note: for those who don't know about Biden, a quote: "I drafted a terrorism bill after [actually before] the Oklahoma City bombing. And the bill John Ashcroft sent up [the PATRIOT ACT] was my bill..."
Biden has also pushed bans on Turing machines (1), encryption, online sales of cold meds, bittorrent, and nightclubs taking precautions against overdoses.
http://news.cnet.com/8301-13578_3-10024163-38.html
(1) For those who don't know, a Turing machine is a general purpose computer such as a mac or PC (as opposed to a DVD player or locked down cell phone).
Whoops, scott, misread your comment. Doh! Didn't notice you qualified libertarian as "with respect to the war." Totally my bad.
You may wish to read a fascinating look at this phenomenon in history: Bruce Porter's "War and the Rise of the State" (http://www.amazon.com/War-Rise-State-Bruce-Porter/dp/0743237781/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=1225313925&sr=8-1).
In essence Porter argues that (1) wars are expensive, (2) existing means of revenue raising generally prove to be insufficient, (3) governments therefore act to increase and make more efficient the ways by which they raise revenue. This has consequences which are generally centralizing and "efficiency enhancing".
Porter looks at three watershed eras in history and their transformative effect: (1) the Thirty Years' War and the rise of absolutism, (2) the Napoleonic Wars and the rise of the bourgeois state, and (3) WW1 and the rise of the welfare state. He also addresses Anglo-American exceptionalism and what he considers to be the failed German and Italian states of the early 20th century.
To tie this back to Megan's question: it's not so much that state spending rises during wartime (though it does), but that the institutional framework of government ratchets upward, becoming more centralized and more "modern" each time.
"one does not usually tout spending on the elderly as critical to military preparedness."
Let's hope the AARP doesn't read this...
War is the last best hope of the incompetent to order the unwilling to attempt the impossible.
In modern history the starters of wars have destroyed themselves, every time.
"War is the last best hope of the incompetent to order the unwilling to attempt the impossible."
Democratic elections seem to do this pretty well, too.
"War is the health of the state" was written by Randolph Bourne, a left wing writer active during the early part of the twentieth century. I'm pretty sure he wrote it in protest against America's entry into WW I. You can find a short, sympathetic account of Bourne in "Nineteen-Nineteen", by John Dos Passos. This thread is the first time I've seen Bourne's slogan used by a libertarian.
War is power. War is power to the state. War is power to politicians. Until they lose a war.
Vietnam was a draw because both parties signed on to the war.Obama opposed the Iraq war. He wins.
Randolph gets it. Go back and read the original essay, Megan.
http://www.bigeye.com/warstate.htm
"To most Americans of the classes which consider themselves significant the war [World War I] brought a sense of the sanctity of the State which, if they had had time to think about it, would have seemed a sudden and surprising alteration in their habits of thought. In times of peace, we usually ignore the State in favour of partisan political controversies, or personal struggles for office, or the pursuit of party policies. It is the Government rather than the State with which the politically minded are concerned. The State is reduced to a shadowy emblem which comes to consciousness only on occasions of patriotic holiday."
The idea is that war intensifies the human identification with the collective in the abstract, and the state is the concrete realization of the collective.
I think it's probably true that also crises somewhat intensify the identification with the collective, but our chimpanzee-brains find violence vs. outsiders a uniquely strong appeal compared to biological plague or financial contagion.
War and crisis create a sense of unity that pushes everyone into the loving embrace of government? Makes sense, intuitively, looking at rough demographic(http://www.census.gov/prod/www/abs/decennial/1940.htm) data doesn't seem to harm the case for it, although I hardly sifted with a fine tooth comb, but looking at employment figures and income nothing jumped out to dispute the figure.
Now if it is true, so what? That question is tricky. The effect of it is debatable, Social security may be a big entitlement program.
Sanjay,
I think Asymmetrical Information got bogged down in the budget process and passed a continuing resolution, so this blog will contain the same number of posts as before. Until this impasse is resolved, we'll have no new posts.
--CF
callejohan:
Have you been paying attention to the last two months? Have you seen how much the budget deficit has exploded the past few months? Hopefully we'll get most of that money back(Which I question), but still.
On the subject of the first world war, The Pity of War by Nial Ferguson is fantastic. The grandson of a Scot who fought in the War, his analysis is that the British made it a world war by mistakenly intervening. The German government prewar was is in a bind in regard to it's tax policies which limited the enlargement of its Army. German military doctrine valued maneuver and Russia was building railroads which could deploy its large Army near what would be the Polish border. Thus it fought a preemptive war in what it saw as a declining opportunity for victory. The British position was to fear a recurrence of Napoleonic European power; the ironic thing is that this discounted the 'Atlantic Alliance' which eventually Britain would fall back on.
See, now, today is Budget Day here at Asymmetrical Information.
GDP consumption is a good marker, but not the only key one; ever-increasing regulation also increases government's cost in a way that's much more insidious and hard to measure...
"On the subject of the first world war, The Pity of War by Nial Ferguson is fantastic."
Ferguson is a compelling speaker as well -- worth catching on C-SPAN's Book TV if you can. BTW, the title "The Pity of War" comes from the poem "Strange Meeting" by Wilfred Owen:
Coming from a guy who just read Crisis and Leviathan a little while ago, my first reaction is that government spending tends to increase less during wartime than during a depression because, oddly enough, wars are even more costly. Because their costs are so huge, the state conceals them by fixing prices for war materials, using conscription rather than a higher military wage, etc. Government costs are always concealed I suppose, but wartime, at least in the United States, has seen the most blatant examples of that.
"War is the health of the state" simply means that during war, the state grabs more power, expunges civl liberties, seizes assets and disposes of human lives in battle and through the slavery known as conscription, as well as the blood shed by innocents in the form of collateral damage. During war time, the expedient justification of an existential threat is used to promote every new burden, confiscation or curtailment of liberty, and these are sadly met with rousing cheers, while any opposition is regarded as treasonous. Whereas during peacetime, a reasonable debate over the measures might be had, during war, debate is not permitted, in fact, dissent is often criminalized, just as Lincoln and Wilson did, to name the first Presidents to pop into my head.
Bottom line, it isn't about the money, it is about the power. Power taken at the expense of human rights and private property.