More Timely Than Ever!

Tuesday, September 09, 2008

Priorities -- Please!

It is curious that people who obsess over a $400 million "bridge to nowhere" favor spending $10 billion a month in Iraq -- indefinitely. That bridge probably wouldn't have killed anyone.

4 comments:

The Atomic Rockhound said...

If the government is building it you can be sure someone somewhere died for it. I mean, $400 million in taxes probably killed someone.

Anonymous said...

Dr. Higgs,

I think you are underestimating (or overestimating) the American people. Many would have no reluctance in slaughtering white people in faraway lands with similar customs and not so incomprehensible languages.

Sheldon Richman said...

Not if they had a choice about ponying up the money voluntarily, would they? I think Mencken was right about people not going to war if their misleaders and public self-servants didn't whip them into a frenzy.

Anonymous said...

I think that compulsory taxation, more than any other factor, is what drives the American war machine. Politicians can wage war while taxpayers and other innocents pay the price. As Roderick Long said in his article Anarchism as Constitutionalism: A Reply to Bidinotto, "The bloody history of the world is the result of governments buying war at less than the market price by shifting the costs to their subjects."