Nevertheless, if you've got potential candidates who make stuff that the rest of the world is willing to pay for, maybe you should hire them either way. They'll pay for themselves after all.
And if you're going to hire them either way, why fire the sailor? (Unless of course it's the sailor you want to hire for a more productive endeavor...)
If the greeks were putting scarce resources into the military, e.g. using metal that could build productive machines to build useless ships and aeroplanes, then that would be a deadweight loss. But in Greece right now, labour is the opposite of scarce. It does very little harm to keep them employed.
While an army is a useful insurance policy in a variety of situations, the best case scenario is really that these people do nothing. Believe it or not, it does not make the Greek people any more prosperous to have many people standing around doing nothing, unless the money you pay them to do it comes from somewhere other than Greece and isn't ever going to be paid back.
-- which, to be fair, is a tactic that works once every few generations! One could make a case that it is a simplified version the story of Greece the past decade. You see these debt renegotiation promises in the news now.
More broadly, though, the economy is about producing valuable things (or services), not about money. It is trivially obvious that an idle soldier is not producing much of value at his post and cannot assist the economy in any way. Even middle-management at IBM at least pretends that they're helping accomplish something worth money to someone.
And nowhere in the history of the world has ever been able to fix economic stagnation or crisis by spending more money on the military, though it has run great empires into the ground.
Sure, but a person needs food and clothing whether they're serving in the army or sitting around unemployed. Arguably the army can feed n people (who have to follow orders, show up at the mess hall at the same time and so on) more cheaply than those n people would by themselves.
> More broadly, though, the economy is about producing valuable things (or services), not about money. It is trivially obvious that an idle soldier is not producing much of value at his post and cannot assist the economy in any way.
Sure. But what would the soldier be doing if they weren't in the army? As I said, if labour in Greece were scarce then I'd be worried about the army wasting it. But 25% unemployment.
> And nowhere in the history of the world has ever been able to fix economic stagnation or crisis by spending more money on the military
What about the New Deal / WPA? I mean sure, they built some bridges and so on, but that was a pretty marginal benefit; the big value of the programme came from the Keynesian stimulus effect of giving money to those who were otherwise unemployed.