Ésta es la propuesta de Justin Raimondo en su último artículo en Antiwar. Buena parte del gasto militar no está destinado a proteger Estados Unidos sino a promover otros intereses. Cualquiera que piense lo contrario debería explicar por qué las políticas de defensa son las únicas que no están expuestas a la influencia de grupos de presión que demandan privilegios a costa de los demás o tienen agendas propias que no casan con el interés general.
Consuming nearly half of all government spending, the military budget maintains an overseas empire unrivaled in the history of the world. The U.S. operates a network of bases in dozens of countries, on every continent. The Pentagon is the biggest landowner on earth. This is not only tremendously expensive, but also completely unnecessary and even harmful to our national interests.
Why, for example, do we need bases in Germany, of all places? They are there on account of a war fought a generation ago, and they stayed because of a perceived threat from the Soviets that vanished into history along with Stalin's ghost. The hidden costs of empire are not limited to the CIA's secret slush funds – a much greater proportion of this sum amounts to invisible yet all too real opportunity costs, lost avenues of investment that were, instead, diverted to the military-industrial complex. Militarism distorts not only the economy, but also the progress of science, which is channeled in directions that are wholly destructive, rather than productive. Yes, it's true that military applications have often spun off useful byproducts, but if the original aim and intent of scientific research were directly applied to productive and pacific civilian projects, it 's reasonable to expect the results would have been far more fruitful.
The reason for the huge outlay in military expenditures has nothing to do with America's national security: after all, we don't even inspect all the cargo coming into our ports. How concerned with real security are we, anyway? Not very. What matters, in this game, is the financial security of certain economic interests, as well as the ideological agendas of pressure groups within U.S. society.
Raimondo propone un recorte del 50%, para empezar.
You want a "stimulus"? Forget all those condoms and start cutting back the Pentagon. We could cut our military budget by 30 percent without even feeling it, although I would suggest a 50 percent reduction – to start.
Sound radical? Well, as Ron Paul remarked more than once, you'd be surprised how much of our military expenditures amount to maintaining our overseas empire and really have nothing to do with the defense of the continental United States. Get rid of the empire, and we can finance the rebuilding of the American economy – or, at the very least, our decayed infrastructure – several times over.
