Letter Never Sent

The Myth of War Prosperity by Rep. Ron Paul

There is a commonly-held myth that war creates prosperity. Many believe that World War II ended the Great Depression. Unemployment went down because hundreds of thousands of men were drafted, and factories at home busied themselves with war production. This provided the illusion of a bustling wartime economy. But in truth the economy shrank and GDP plummeted. The hidden costs were enormous, because so much human energy and human capital was expended fighting the war rather than doing productive, specialized work back home. …

The greatest economic cost of war, however, comes from the expansion in the size and scope of government. Government always grows during wars and other crises. As economist Murray Rothbard noted, government uses crises to “Engineer the great leaps forward,” in the size of the state. When the crisis ends, government never returns to its former size. As government expands, individual liberty necessarily shrinks. True prosperity cannot exist without individual liberty and its corollaries of limited government, property rights, and free markets. Ultimately, war leaves us with less freedom at home. The sad irony is that while our soldiers have fought for the freedom of Europe, Korea, Vietnam, Kuwait, and Iraq, the government uses war to steadily diminish freedom here at home. While we fight a war in Iraq, we must also fight to maintain and restore individual liberty in America.

From Antiwar.com: MTV Refuses Antiwar Commercial: Mtv has refused to accept a commercial opposing a war in Iraq, citing a policy against advocacy spots that it says protects the channel from having to run ads from any cash-rich interest group whose cause may be loathsome.

Most networks and media spigots have policies of non-advocacy yet they run advertisements for the military and promote all sorts of ‘patriotic’ ie. nationalist crap. It’s hypocrisy.

Our government has been peddling a pack of lies. The whole case against Iraq amounts to a deception. As Heather pointed out, the US intelligence that Iraq had been seeking nuclear materials for a nuclear weapons program was fabricated. In other words, our government used false information because it suits their purposes and then tried to fool the rest of the world with it to garner support for their military takeover. The government has been trying to link Hussein to bin Laden since 1993 after the first WTC bombing. With a budget of trillions they have found NOTHING. It is a lie. As for regimes supporting terrorist, we have been guilty of that. When bin Laden was our ‘terrorist’, a mujahadeen fighting against the Soviets using the same guerrilla tactics, he was a freedom fighter. When we funded the Taliban and helped build Islamic training schools in Pakistan to ‘destabilize’ the Soviet Union with terrorism we were supporting ‘freedom’. Our freedom loving government brought Islamic radicals to the US to learn ‘sabotage techniques’. Now to me, this means terrorism.

If you think for a moment, you’ll realize that governments will always use ‘terrorists’ or guerrillas or partisans as proxies. This is the reality of warfare now. When you use or support ‘terrorists’, which most governments do, you make it very difficult to trace who did what and you can launch covert wars without any governmental or public oversight. To the military and to war planners terrorism is a beautiful thing so long as it is not used against you. The US funds terror groups. At the very least, they have in the past. We funded bin Laden a few years ago to do the same things he has been doing now against American interests. He was just as much of a zealot then as now.

Our government has no ethical problem with terrorism. That must be clear. Any claim to the contrary is a lie. We have supported narco-trafficking fascist guerrillas in Central America, narco-trafficking Islamic radicals in the Mideast, narco-trafficking Albanian Islamic ‘freedom fighters’, the Phillipine’s Abu Sayyaf, terrorists in Italy, even White Russian guerrillas against the Bolsheviks way back in 1918. Terrorists everywhere owe a debt to the US government.

According to most sources around 185 million people (185,000,000) died in all the wars, massacres, slaughters and oppressions of the Twentieth Century. Using this equation, that’s 573.5 million pounds of brain matter, 231 million gallons of blood, 14 million tons of bone and flesh, 8.5 billion years of life that will never be lived, and untold millions who will never be born. The cost to human civilization and progress due to war is too high to pay. We cannot stand by quietly while those who purport to speak in our name and with our voice gird themselves to spill more innocent blood and prepare to wreak more havoc and more man-made armageddon against their fellow men. It’s sickening and I dare anyone to justify any of it.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. This is not a way of life at all in any true sense. Under the clouds of war, it is humanity hanging on a cross of iron. – Dwight Eisenhower