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Path: utzoo!linus!decvax!harpo!seismo!ut-sally!riddle
From: riddle@ut-sally.UUCP (Prentiss Riddle)
Newsgroups: net.politics
Subject: Re: What if...? (money in the ground)
Message-ID: <492@ut-sally.UUCP>
Date: Thu, 1-Dec-83 13:28:31 EST
Article-I.D.: ut-sally.492
Posted: Thu Dec  1 13:28:31 1983
Date-Received: Fri, 2-Dec-83 23:56:20 EST
References: <1165@pur-ee.UUCP> <389@pyuxa.UUCP>
Organization: U. Texas CS Dept., Austin, Texas
Lines: 37

pyuxa!wetcw says:

 >> I would invite the person who is worried about all
 >> "those resources" being tied up in silos to go back
 >> to Economics 101.  If all that money is tied up in
 >> silos, then I had better get out my pickaxe and go digging.
 >> Dummies, the money spent on ANY project, be it military,
 >> Social, or Private goes out to the working stiffs.
 >> ...
 >> Please don't cry about the money being spent and sitting in the
 >> ground.  Whatever is in those silos represents literally hundreds
 >> of thousands of jobs.

Sigh.  The same old silly arguments again.

No one is claiming that there is literally money tied up in missile silos,
but the resources on which the money was spent -- land, energy, man-years --
are gone.  Money isn't our problem.  (If it were, we could always print more.)
But resources, and particularly the resources which people are willing to see
allocated as taxes by the government and then consumed to meet national goals,
are finite.  The point is that the "hundreds of thousands of jobs" and the
accompanying material resources which now go into useless instruments of war
would serve a useful purpose if they were spent instead on things like health,
education, housing and food.  (And if you're still set on dwelling on the
trickle-down effects of the money spent rather than on the resources which that
money represents, those who've had more than Economics 101 point out that more
jobs result dollar-for-dollar from non-military expenditures than from military
ones.)

As someone recently said in another discussion, if ideas like these were
true, then we could just pass a single dollar around enough times and feed
the whole world.  Unfortunately you can't eat money.
----
Prentiss Riddle
{ihnp4,seismo,ctvax}!ut-sally!riddle
riddle@ut-sally.UUCP