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Comment by JoeAltmaier | Hacker News Reader

Does this even make sense? How does "employing millions of people for a war" become "job loss"?

War doesn't have a lot of returns.

Let's say we spend $100 mil blowing up a neighborhood in Iraq vs $100 building a building in St Louis. Both employ people during the act. But the building in St Louis will be worth something at the end of it. And it will most likely facilitate more commerce. Same with building a highway.

You're forgetting to factor in all the other countries who look at how the hegemony can spend $100M on blowing up a neighborhood like it's nothing, and therefore decide to kowtow to the demands of the powerful, lest they suddenly come down with a case of terrorism themselves.

Great. Azerbaijan will do as we want. That's gotta be worth at least $50 to GDP, right?

I'm being snarky, but what is that X-factor actually worth? And should we then factor in all the people who will hate the USA and do their damnedest to maim & kill Americans?

I don't have numbers, but this doesn't seem like a winning argument.

Have you read Confessions of an Economic Hit Man? Look, they have the money figured out, they're not likely to do something unless they feel they're going to get ROI, and I don't mean ROI for you and me, no no no no. You and I are just on the hook for paying for the welfare checks delivered to these corporations.

Libya was toppled because Libya was key to keeping the West out of Africa, since Gaddafi fell, Western bases can't be built in Africa fast enough. Also, since the fall of Libya the people still haven't had their water works restored, oh but magically the West have graciously given the Libyan people the World Bank and other globalist institutions.

Also, maimed westerners == propaganda material and job security. How have you not figured this out yet?

You don't have the numbers, because your TV ain't gonna tell you them.

Did the article change? Because you put employing millions in a quote as if he said that, I don't see the articles quoting him on that.

But, it is possible to consider that employing millions in this sector could lead to decline of various types in other sectors.

Still, there were not "millions" employed for war. I would require a source on that.

From a random article I googled,

Over 1,400,000 Americans are now on active duty; another 833,000 are in the reserves, many full time. Another 1,600,000 Americans work in companies that supply the military with everything from weapons to utensils. (I’m not even including all the foreign contractors employing non-US citizens.)

What about all the jobs US destroyed. The world is much larger than the US. Bombing the shit out of Iraq totally destroyed their economy.

The ISIS exist because they're US military fucked up big time.

If trump manages to close a number of expensive military programs and put the money in infrastructure, I think that would make the world a slightly better place.

Yes war is bad. The topic was, a strange claim that war caused unemployment. Its been long understood that war created nearly full employment, for all the obvious reasons.

> a strange claim that war caused unemployment

Not really. From the article:

> Chinese billionaire and Alibaba founder Jack Ma believes that improper distribution of funds and hyper inflated US military spending, not globalization or other countries “stealing” US jobs, is behind the economic decline in America.

So the claim is that wiser spending would have resulted a better US economy, to which nojvek's comment seems germane to me.

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