01/28/13 – Christopher Coyne – The Scott Horton Show

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All right, y'all.
Welcome back to the show.
I'm Scott Horton.
ScottHorton.org is the website.
Got more than 2,500 interview archives going back to 2003 there for you.
And our next guest on the show is Christopher Coyne.
He is a professor.
He is the F.A. Harper Professor of Economics at George Mason University and Associate Director of the F.A. Hayek Program for Advanced Study in Philosophy, Politics, and Economics at the Mercatus Center, however you say that.
I don't know.
Welcome back to the show.
How are you doing?
Hey, Scott.
I'm doing great.
Thanks for having me.
That's good.
It's been a long time since we've talked, but I'm happy to have the opportunity to speak with you about this great thing that you did with your co-author Thomas K. Duncan here.
And somehow this ended up on Time Magazine's website.
I don't know how you pulled that off, but it's called The Overlooked Costs of the Permanent War Economy.
A market process approach.
The Overlooked Costs of the Permanent War Economy.
So first of all, how did you get this published at Time Magazine?
Did they link to it on the front page of their website there?
They linked to it on their Battleland blog.
And actually, it was pure luck.
The author of the blog post just happened to read our paper.
And his name is Mark Thompson.
And another study had come out out of George Mason about a year ago out of the School of Public Policy.
And another economist not in our department in public policy named Stephen Fuller, he came out with this economic analysis of the Budget Control Act of 2011.
And his argument was that if the United States government cuts the military, we're going to lose, he said, over a million jobs.
We're going to lose $59 billion in worker wages.
Our gross domestic product is going to fall by 25%.
So his argument was we can't, under any circumstances, cut the military.
And so in some sense, it was a perfect timing, because although our paper is not a direct reaction to Fuller's study, the way that Time Magazine talked about it was as two kind of different positions.
One emphasizing his costs, which were, well, if we cut this stuff, it's true that we're spending less on defense by definition.
And then our side of the argument, which is, well, you're overlooking the costs of what those resources could have been used for when you spend it on building planes, tanks, and bombs, and so on.
Well, and it's really much better that it's not a response to what he wrote.
What you're really doing, as you explain in the introduction here, is you're filling in the gaps of previous research from your very same point of view.
And you explain, and could you please explain for us what makes this study unique, do you think?
Sure.
Well, the idea, it's really a very basic idea in the paper, which is what economists call opportunity costs, which is the very common sense idea that there's always a tradeoff.
If we use money to build a bomb, or a tank, or an airplane, or a school, for that matter, or anything, any kind of government project, that money has to come from somewhere.
You can either tax people in the private sector now, you can print money, or you can issue debt, which, of course, has to be paid back at some later date.
But you can't just produce things out of thin air.
That means that every dollar that gets spent on military-oriented things has to come at the expense of something else.
And that's really the main idea.
And so the idea is that you have this permanent war economy.
And when we talk about that, it's the idea that military production is institutionalized, or it becomes an ongoing fixture in the economy.
In other words, there's an entire industry, the military-industrial complex, whose goal is to produce military-related equipment and to engage in constant research and development and lobby government for contracts for that research and development.
And what Tom and I are trying to point out is, look, every dollar you spend on this, you're taking away from private investment, private spending.
And then the issue becomes, well, which is more likely to generate good things, things that people value?
Wealth.
Is it private investment, private spending by entrepreneurs, or is it a bureaucrat in Washington, D.C., and lobbyists who are seeking to get as much of that money as they can?
And we argue that it's the former.
It's the private entrepreneurs and private investment, private spending by citizens that's more likely to generate positive value-added outcomes.
So that every dollar we spend on the military, and as we spend more and more over time, really what we're doing is undermining the very process through which we're made better off as citizens in the United States.
All right.
Now, you talk about a new equilibrium.
I'm not exactly sure.
Is that the same thing as when you're talking about how each new military advance, whether technological or just kind of process-wise or whatever, always leads to even more advances along those lines, like old Doc Brown, askew to a tangent of an alternate universe where everything goes completely off track now?
That's exactly right.
So the way to think about this, if you think about a market, the way things work in markets, private markets, is that people come up with an idea.
They invest in that idea.
Sometimes they're right.
And when I say they're right, that means that people like it and they buy it.
They voluntarily decide to spend their hard-earned money on it.
Sometimes they don't.
There's a very hard and fast feedback mechanism in markets, which is profit and loss.
The things that you and I value as private consumers earn a profit, and people continue to produce them.
It attracts new entrants into that industry.
But also, it creates new opportunities for other people to come up with better ways of doing things.
Likewise, those things that suffer a loss go out of business.
It just means that you and I as consumers don't value it.
That dynamic process, what makes markets so effective, is completely opposite when it comes to government in general, and especially when it comes to the military-industrial complex.
So there's no private profit-loss mechanism.
It's true those firms earn profits, but the way they earn profits is by lobbying government to earn contracts to produce things.
When they do that, what happens then is that one opportunity creates a whole new array of opportunities, both for the firm that secures the contract, but for other firms as well.
What you get is this kind of vicious circle of lobbying and of otherwise private actors, which would have to produce things that people valued, now trying to satisfy bureaucrats.
You get this ongoing process, which is self-extending.
There's no way to end it, really, because once it starts going, it's continuous.
If you look at some examples, and we talk about some in the paper, for instance, the F-35 plane, which of course that program is infamous for its cost overruns, but it's the same kind of logic where we started, when I say we, I should say the U.S. government started investing in it.
They say, we're going to buy 2,400 of these planes at $380 billion.
They invest all this money because it's supposed to be this great stealth technology, and what happens?
Well, you get cost overruns by 50 percent.
You get projects falling behind schedule.
Instead of saying, like a business would, a business would say, well, does it make sense to keep throwing good money after bad?
Now the argument you hear is, well, it's too big to fail.
We've spent so much money already, we can't possibly not get this product, so we have to spend even more money.
Really, the estimated cost of producing and then maintaining these planes is over a trillion dollars.
And to put that in perspective, to put the magnitude of that one program, the F-35 plane in perspective, assuming that one trillion plus number is correct, which we have every reason to believe, Australia's entire GDP, so their entire output per year is about $925 billion.
So the United States is investing more money in one military project, the F-35, than an entire year of output, all output in Australia.
That's an enormous amount of wasted resources that could have been used for lots of other things in the private sector.
So that's the fundamental point, where you continually pull these resources out of the private sector and make people worse off over time.
Well, but then as you say, and I guess it's the drone example that you use in the article, because the F-35 is maybe just another kind of fighter, but the drone is a sort of new fangled thing.
And the way you put it, every time that they make an advance in the drones, well, then there's more drone bases, and that means we need more consultants and more specialists and more contractors who can service the drones.
And then of course, you got all the ladies at the diner across the street from the place who are now dependent on the drone base, and the store where they all buy their shoes, and on and on and on down the line, the entire, it's not just that this money could have gone to something else, it's that when you take this money that could have gone to something else, and you put it, and you spend it this way, you're basically creating this massive distortion away from the way things would be.
We were talking with Sheldon Richman on the show the other day, and he was sort of half conceding the point that if, you know, I don't know, I dream a genie came and just made all the militarism go away.
You talk about a bubble, you talk about malinvestment, what we, what the American society, what our government has put into the warfare state since 1941, it would be, and of course he's got faith in the markets as well, the market would work it out pretty quick, but there would be a massive dislocation from producing nothing but weapons to, you know, these people actually having to get real jobs.
That's 100% correct, and that's the kind of logic that people like Fuller and his study, but also politicians now constantly refer to, right?
So when Fuller says, well, if we cut a trillion dollars from the defense budget, GDP would fall by 25%.
Really, he's making the point you just made, which is it is true that in the immediate moment you cut spending, less money would be spent on the military by definition, which means you'd displace labor.
So people that were involved in this complex, which you touched upon, would be out of work, and output would fall in the short run.
Now, the thing that we need to keep in mind is that GDP as a measure of wealth is a poor one, right?
So it's one that economists use all the time, and it just measures output.
I mean, the Soviet Union, by all illustrations of GDP, had a very high level of output, and it tricked a lot of economists.
They said they were outproduced in the United States, but in the Soviet Union, if you looked at the average citizen, their standard of living was quite low, and that's because they were producing lots of military equipment, which didn't improve standards of living for the average individual.
It's true that you were producing stuff.
So as long as the United States, and people take this for granted in the United States because we're so wealthy, they take for granted the wealth-producing effects of private markets, in some sense, we can afford to waste this money.
We can afford these distortions.
In other words, not collapsing the entire economy, but really what we're trying to point out is that things could be even better, and at some point, if we don't get this under control, whatever that means, if it's possible, then it will have effects on our well-being in terms of we won't be able to afford it at some point.
We can't continue this indefinitely, and there's no way to know what that point is where you've reached a tipping point where you've kind of tipped things where you've moved from the productive to the unproductive.
In other words, you've sucked so many resources out of the private sector that you've kind of undermined the very dynamism which made you wealthy in the first place.
So our broad point here is every time the military program comes up, every time, people are going to understate the cost because they're going to just focus on the out-of-dollar expenses, which are understated, of course, always anyway, and then typically government programs go into cost overruns.
But even putting that aside, let's assume that it's actually on target.
There's all these distortions that you're talking about where you're going to create these vested interests who are not then going to allow for any kind of adjustments down the line.
In fact, what they're going to do is seek subsequent resources to maintain what they have and expand it.
So you get these bases like you pointed out.
You get these production lines, these factories that produce things that don't want to shut down.
And on top of it, what happens is you start diverting a lot of good resources, not just physical resources like buildings and plants and so on, but intelligent people, engineers, lawyers and so on, from private endeavors which could improve the lives of private citizens into this complex where they are constantly trying to come up with new and better ways or what they perceive as new and better ways and what they can sell to politicians of defense.
The drone industry, as you pointed out, is a perfect example where now you have lobbying to sell them internationally to other governments, to use them domestically, and then you have to have, of course, training classes and certificates and all this, and you have all these consultants coming out of the woodwork.
We saw the same thing, of course, post-9-11 where there was an entire terrorism industry emerged where you have consultants and all these private individuals who otherwise would have to work in the private sector, but instead what they end up doing is lobbying government for contracts and for employment so that they can be involved in that industry.
Yeah, and for people who either don't have a conscience or they don't know about it, don't care about it, or they believe in it, and this is the most lucrative business in the whole world to be in, and I think you talk about this in the article too about how much easier it is, well, you don't put it this way, but it's sort of the comparison between what does it take to bribe a private person as compared to someone in Congress, and it's pennies on the dollar to bribe a congressman because it's not his money.
It's the public's money.
They either tax it or they print it or hit enter button and create it and whatever, so I remember seeing, for example, headlines where it was supposed to be a shocking headline.
Can you believe Lockheed spent $14 million with an M lobbying in just the first six months of, I think this was 2011 or maybe 2012, and of course, they get tens of billions of dollars a year in contracts from the U.S. government, and that's all they got to put into it, and then Nick Turse talks about in his article, again, World War II started a long time ago, and they never dismantled the thing since then.
They just keep adding to it a whole new homeland security state, as you say, but Nick Turse in his book, The Complex, he talks about how every computer company, every university, and all the toothpaste and tube socks and clothing and every accoutrement of a soldier, all the companies that make the batteries that go in their little radios, it's so much, it's completely, he quit calling it the military industrial complex because it's the military industrial dash a hundred different things.
It's the entire economy, from the bottom up, the entire culture, throw the churches in there too, everything, TV, or Hollywood, you know, Hollywood makes a phone call and they got F-22s for their new transformer flick, etc.
Right, so this just goes to show again the point you had raised earlier and the point Tom and I tried to make in the paper, which is every intervention in the name of protecting us has these distortionary effects which ripple throughout the economy, and the problem is, there's two problems convincing people of this.
The first is that it's a counterfactual, so you're making the argument, well, these resources would have been spent a different way or something else would have happened, and of course the natural tendency for people, including economists, as Fuller's study shows, because what he's doing is focusing just on the scene, what you observe, so what do people observe?
Oh, it creates jobs, and it does, right?
You spend money and it creates jobs, it does, you do produce things and you create, as you pointed out, you know, these factories and then that generates income for shops in the area where the factory is and it builds up these towns and geographic kind of centers around the military production, but what we're trying to emphasize is a really basic point, which is there's the unseen, too, which is, in other words, how would those resources have been spent absent this distortion in the economy, and so there's these massive understatements in the cost which can't be measured, and so when you hear people talk about the spending of the defense complex, which is already understated, if you just look at, for instance, the Department of Defense budget, that's a massive understatement of what's actually spent on defense every year, you know, even that's understated then because you have these ripple effects, which are long-lasting, too, they last for decades and decades, right?
So you have military bases which have, you know, even if you make the argument they had some role to play several decades ago, they're still in existence, they're very difficult to shut down because, you know, there's jobs related to it, and of course politicians want to please their constituents and the special interests which are part of their constituents, and that includes these jobs where they exist.
Well, yeah, and of course, I don't know, you think about the casualties of the wars at Spree, you think, wow, you know, maybe one of those little Iraqi girls that died at the checkpoint on the way to the hospital, you know, would have cured cancer someday or that kind of thing, but just on the American side of it, you think about how many absolutely brilliant engineers and scientists have had their entire careers diverted into the military industries, where just absolutely priceless, unimaginable, unseen gifts to, you know, market processes, for example, like when Buckminster Fuller said, you know, and I don't think he was being utopian, he was just like crunching the numbers in a very Fuller-ish kind of way, different Fuller, saying, you could feed everybody on Earth, no problem, everybody on Earth could live like a billionaire, all we've got to do is just work out the methods of distribution.
Well, you know what, like, hey, what about 70 years' worth of brilliant engineers who have not been working on the methods of distribution of food and other forms of wealth to the people of the world, you know, where a billion people still live in basically, you know, Bronze Age circumstances, and all of this wealth is just diverted into, and you know, Orwell said, hey, the only reason we do this is we make a floating fortress or we make a rocket ship so we can take your excess wealth and we can sink it into the sea or blast it off into space where you can't get to it.
That's the whole point, is you might sit around, you know, reading about Hayek all day and understanding why you don't need them.
Yeah, I mean, you know, you raised a couple of very good points.
I mean, earlier you brought this idea about the universities.
One of the things I've noticed being in academics is, you know, pretty much all major universities now have degrees in the post-911 world in something like counterterrorism or security studies, and so now you can get a degree in, so specialize in your career in being part of kind of the broader terrorism complex, so it just feeds into it, and then on top of it, you know, you have private actors, then, as you pointed out, and scientists, so these individual studies spend a lot of years getting human capital, and it's very profitable in many instances to work for either a government agency directly or a private firm that gets government contracts, and, you know, that's bidding away resources from the private sector, and in doing so, it's not just, you know, because the other thing people point out all the time, this, in my view, is just cherry-picking.
They'll pick out things that the government does in general, but especially the military.
They'll point to some technology that was discovered in the military, that the military discovered, and then point that out as somehow being, justifying all the spending, and they'll say, well, without that spending, we wouldn't have this radar or that radar.
Well, perhaps, but if you spend enough money on anything, you're going to get some good stuff.
The point always is what's the trade-off, and as you point out, there's lots of good stuff that happens when we allow private individuals to engage in experimentation, to engage in innovation, to figure things out, and that stuff never happens, and we never see it, of course, which makes it so tough to make this argument, as I pointed out, but we never see it, and it never comes to fruition, because they're allocating all their effort and all their creativity into contributing to the broader military production effort and the broader complex, and that's a cost which is, as you point out, it's enormous, and we should really be discussing these things when we take these costs into account, not just the dollar and cents, which by themselves, of course, are huge, but when you take this into account, and then, as you point out, when you start taking into account the human creativity that we lose when we kill people in other countries, of all ages, that makes the cost even larger.
Right, yeah, it's just, it's fun to me, it is, as you say, it is unseen and counterfactual and all that, but it just, you know, I've been impressed by human ingenuity before, you know, I can imagine, I don't know exactly how to imagine it, but it just seems like it must be, in the last 70 years, if you want to go from, well, you know, since the end of World War II, it just seems like an incalculable amount of lost wealth and creativity there, you know, only God could measure it, it's a number so big, more than all the stars in the galaxy, ideas wasted on how can we make this machine gun kill a Vietnamese a little bit more effectively, you know, it's unreal, you know, it is unseen, you have to try to just picture it or something, but it's, to me, it's a pretty powerful image, you know?
Yeah, I mean, the other thing that comes into play here, and this is a broader point about technology, is to the extent you make things more efficient killing, it lowers the cost of engaging in war, too, so it's unclear that we want more efficient killing machines, you know, you make, you dehumanize people when you can fly a radio-controlled plane over them and see little dots on a screen and you don't have to, you know, shoot someone or kill them face-to-face and it becomes almost video game-like, like what drones are allowing now, so even taking account of the cost that we've discussed, another thing to think about is you make killing more efficient, you lower the cost, you get more killing, and so, you know, the other thing to think about is you vest more resources and you get more weaponry, you know, governments don't produce things unless they use them, so the idea that we're producing all this military equipment and innovation and somehow we're not going to use it is ridiculous, so in addition to all the stuff we're talking about, the other thing to think about is you're lowering the cost of engaging in warfare and that goes for the United States government, but also, of course, when we sell this equipment to other governments, which is the logical outcome, because, of course, both for supposed strategic reasons, but you also get lobbying then by private firms who want to get contracts with other governments internationally, because there's even more money available there, we're seeing this with the drones right now and the lobbying for international sales, then you just contribute to global warfare, which, again, just reinforces a lot of the things we've been talking about, so it's a self-extending logic, which is very disheartening when you think about it because of the massive cost that you mentioned.
Well, and, you know, I don't know if this really fits in an academic economic paper like this, too, but to me it's all a matter of economics, in a way, the study of human action, right?
And that's the malinvestment in, say, arguments defending Republican politicians for torturing people, right?
Some guy who might have been praying to Jesus and thinking about the Sermon on the Mount instead of screaming his head off that you're a traitor because you're not pro-torture, he spent the last ten years like that, his entire, and millions of Americans' entire morality is just more warped than ever before about, you know, what it means or what it doesn't mean.
I could just as easily use a Democrat who's now silent that Obama's doing it, as who they are becomes warped and twisted and messed up by having to rationalize living in a society that has a government that does these things and not doing anything about it, or the fact that it's their political heroes that are the ones that are doing it.
And so the American people are less American now, they're a bunch of pro-torture mongers, they're a bunch of close-their-eyes-tight-as-Hillary-Clinton-kills-kids-all-day kind of people now, which maybe they would be different if it had been different, you know?
There's a real effect there, I think.
Yeah, yeah, I agree.
I mean, people become desensitized to it in general, and now, I mean, the militarization...
And taking off their shoes at the airport and all of that effect, too, you know what I mean?
We're just...
Sure.
We're totally different now.
Yeah.
You know, our society has become more militarized.
You know, politicians are very quick to point out, when it comes to things like gun control, they'll say, you know, people have become desensitized because of violence in video games, violence in movies.
Well, American citizens have become desensitized to the government doing this stuff because they've done it so long, and they keep doing it, and they've justified it, and people keep coming up with justifications, so now it's, well, if you and I say something like, well, it might be a good idea to cut some military spending, all of a sudden we're un-American, or, you know, we don't care about soldiers, or we don't care about, you know, people in other countries, you know, innocent people who we're saving, supposedly, and it's...
From that standpoint, it's an uphill battle, because people have become so desensitized to politicians doing this, to the costs involved in doing it, that they don't even realize anymore.
I mean, again, pointing out, like Tom and I are doing, that there's a significant overlook cost.
A lot of people look at us somehow like what we're saying is crazy, and what I'm confident about is that we're making a very basic point, which is there's significant costs involved, and wherever you stand on the issue of the military, it's your duty to at least recognize those costs, and if you want to still make an argument for greater military spending, greater military intervention, the burden of proof is on you to justify that those costs are justified, and they're significant, as you pointed out.
Right.
And now, one more thing I wanted to focus on here was the socialist calculation problem, and it reminded me of, I'm sure you saw this thing maybe a year ago or so by Nicholas Kristoff in the New York Times about how he's so impressed with U.S. Army socialism that he thinks that really is the model for American society.
He's sort of like living in...
He imagines it as like Star Trek, The Next Generation, or whatever.
Yeah, everybody's in the military, but they're all friends, and nobody ever orders anybody to kill anybody or anything bad like that, and everybody has a replicator for all the food they want, and it's just fine.
And he really, even though he's crazy in describing how he thinks America, the country, ought to be, he really picked up on something quite accurate about the army, that that's what it is.
It's communism.
It's a bunch of armed socialists.
Yeah, I mean, you're exactly right, and historically, the idea of socialism, so the national ownership over the means of production, which is how socialism is defined, came out of the logic of the war economy.
So throughout history, when countries have gone to war, the government takes over either a portion of the economy or a significant portion, and what people started seeing was that, boy, when government chooses a single end, making bombs, they can make bombs on a lot of them.
They can pull resources and make bombs, and then so what people started saying, this goes back well before the article last year, this goes back decades, they said, well, why don't we just extend that same logic to shoes and to food, and then since government's really good at making bombs, we'll just get those same people who care a lot about other people and they're really smart, and they can rationalize production over all goods.
And that's really what the logic of socialism was.
Well, if it works in the wartime economy, it can work in other industries as well.
The calculation debate goes back, of course, to the late 1800s, early 1900s, and Ludwig von Mises and Hayek were on the side of capitalism, and there was a group of people on the side of arguing for socialism, and the core idea was, okay, they're scarce resources.
We all recognize that.
That's one of the core tenets of economics.
What's the best way to allocate them?
And what Mises and Hayek said is, outside of the market, outside of private property prices and profit loss, there is no way for you to rationally, for planners to rationally allocate resources.
In other words, the way Mises puts it, you won't know if you should use platinum to make railroad tracks or to make jewelry, right?
The reason we know not to make railroad tracks out of platinum is because it's very expensive.
The only way we know it's expensive is because there's a price attached to it, which comes out of market interactions, trading, which tells us that it's relatively scarce and therefore expensive.
Central planners lack that information and therefore couldn't allocate resources at their highest value to use.
They can produce lots of stuff, right, just that people don't value it, and that's what happened in the Soviet Union.
It took economists even a long time to recognize this, but the Soviet Union produced a lot of what?
Military equipment and hardware, a lot of infrastructure, and it was all, or a large majority of it, was wasted.
It was pure waste.
People starved to death.
And if you look at centrally planned economy, that's the story over and over again.
So the military spending in the United States is the same exact thing.
As I pointed out earlier, the difference is, fortunately for us, we have enough wealth from actual private entrepreneurship that we're not starving.
We can, in other words, afford to have a relatively high standard of living and afford all this waste in addition, but at some point, that's not the case anymore.
In other words, as the military, the vicious circle of military spending and all that's associated with it that we've been discussing continues to expand, it will continue to undermine those productive activities, and at some point, our standard of living will be undermined to a significant degree.
All right.
Thank you so much for your time.
Great study here and a great interview too.
Appreciate it, Chris.
Thank you so much, Scott.
I appreciate it.
Chris Coyne, Christopher J. Coyne from George Mason University.
This study can find it at Time Magazine's website.
It's called The Overlooked Costs of the Permanent War Economy, a Market Process Approach.
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Check out the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
They put America first, opposing our government's world empire, and especially their Middle Eastern madness.
That's the Council for the National Interest at councilforthenationalinterest.org.
Hey, everybody.
Scott Horton here.
You ought to consider advertising on the show.
Here's how it'll work.
You give me money, and then I'll tell everybody how great your stuff is, they'll buy it, and we'll all be rich as Republicans.
Sound pretty good?
Shoot me an email, scott, at scotthorton.org, and we'll work it out.