The economics of war and the priority of ending it

Every so often, you see a series of apparently unrelated articles with a common thread running through them.

UNICEF recently reported that children in the United States and Britain have the worst standard of living of kids in any industrialized country.

The report for the first time measures and compares overall child well-being across six dimensions: material well-being, health and safety, education, peer and family relationships, behaviours and risks, and young people’s own subjective sense of their own well-being. In total, 40 separate indicators of child well-being – from relative poverty and child safety, to educational achievement to drug abuse – are brought together in this overview to present a picture of the lives of children.

Not surprisingly, children in "socialist" northern Europe have the highest standards of living.

Not surprising because those countries have policies which facilitate a pretty high standard of living for everyone.

Then, I read how thousands of Army humvees designed to reduce U.S. troop deaths from roadside bombs lack the armor necessary to do the job. They are designed to protect the type of weapon that is now causing some 70 percent of American casualties in Iraq. The upgrade is not scheduled to be completed until this summer.

In 2003, the US shipped some $12 billion ($12,000,000,000) in cold hard cash to Iraq and watched it vanish with not one iota of accountability.

That number might be unfathomable to some. You might be tempted to write it off as a drop in the bucket comparatively. But with the total cost of the war quickly approaching $405,000,000,000 (probably more by the time you read this), $12 billion represents almost a month and a half's worth.

So that means in just the year of 2003, about 12 percent of all the US taxpayers' money spent in Iraq just vanished into thin air. Just in the year 2003.

The Army 'couldn't afford' to upgrade their equipment sooner. The VA 'can't afford' to properly take care of veterans. Americans in general 'can't afford' policies that provide children with a dignified standard of living. But the federal government can afford to throw away $12,000,000,000 in a single year in a chaotic foreign country with no strings attached and without anyone apparently noticing until year's later.

In reality, 'can't afford' mean 'choose not to prioritize.'

'Defense' contractors have made sure their profits are prioritized.

If you take Economics 101, you'll learn about opportunity cost. Normal cost factors in the expense of taking an action. Opportunity cost expresses the cost of NOT doing something else.

The insanity in Iraq has a gigantic cost that can be easily expressed ($405 billion and counting). But the OPPORTUNITY cost of spending that $405 billion on senseless war and destruction, as opposed to, say, veterans' benefits and child well-being programs, is much higher. Spending huge amounts of money on an atrocity instead of spending on something constructive has a cost to society that's immeasurable.