Pentagon funding linked to Trump stance on Russia amid sanctions waiver
A Trillion and a Half in Other People’s Money
When defence becomes a “one-time generational investment,” the impartial spectator’s first question is not how loud the drums sound, but who, silently, is sending the coins.
A defence minister now presses legislators to grant a record defence budget of $1.5 trillion, presented as a “one-time generational investment” necessary for national security. At the same moment, the chief magistrate temporarily relaxes sanctions upon Russia, also in the name of national security; some legislators threaten to make future defence funds depend upon a more severe posture toward that power. The scene is familiar: a great sum of other people’s money, a high-sounding appeal to safety, and a quarrel not over whether the money shall be spent, but over the exact music to which it shall be marched out the door. It is a costly opera, and the audience is compelled to buy tickets.
In the work I called an inquiry into the nature and causes of the wealth of nations, I observed that the first duty of the sovereign is defence. A state that cannot protect itself will not long protect property, industry, or anything else. Yet to acknowledge the duty is not to applaud every account rendered in its name. All expence must, in the end, be defrayed from the annual produce of the land and labour; a trillion and a half does not leap from the page of a budget, but from the tables of the labouring poor in dearer goods, higher taxes, or diminished public services elsewhere. The benefits, meanwhile, are by no means so widely scattered as the burdens that sustain them.
When so great a sum is proposed, I always ask first how it alters the price system. A vast, sudden demand for arms and instruments of war raises the rewards of those trades, draws capital and talent into them, and leaves less for other employments. If the expenditure truly averts dangers that would have ruined commerce and agriculture, the bargain may be excellent. But if much of it arises from what I once called a conspiracy against the public—contracts contrived to be large, opaque, and secure—then prices are not the faithful signals of scarcity and use, but the managed returns of a protected few. The citizen pays more, not for greater safety, but for better-fed clients.
One must never forget that those who draw their profit from such expenditures have a standing interest in magnifying dangers and minimising alternatives. The merchant who equips an army is, in this respect, like the merchant I once saw directing commercial policy: he loves his country much, no doubt, but he loves his trade more steadily. It is not necessary to impute villainy. Self-love, acting under a loose discipline of public scrutiny, suffices. When the minister for defence declares this budget “paramount” to the ruler’s priorities, and promises to push it “regardless” of electoral outcomes, we see self-interest operating where it always does—among office-holders, contractors, and factions—only now armed with patriotic language and a very large pen.
On the other side, legislators threaten to withhold or condition these funds unless the executive adopts a sterner line in sanctions against a rival power. Here too, I would counsel coolness. That the ruler waives some restrictions lately enacted by the assembly, and does so again under the pretext of national security, may be wise or foolish; I have not the facts to judge the particular case. Yet it is plain that the quarrel is not about frugality, but about direction. Each party employs the purse of the public, not as a trust to be administered by the rules of justice and economy, but as a rod with which to chastise or compel its adversary. The labourer pays either way; he is merely invited to choose his drummer.
In my treatise on moral sentiments, I proposed an impartial spectator, a sort of well-informed and disinterested onlooker whose approbation we secretly court. Let us submit this scene to him. He sees rulers and representatives higgling over who shall claim the mantle of severity toward a foreign power, while all agree that an immense expenditure must proceed. He sees sanctions first enacted to signal indignation, then relaxed to serve another calculation, all still dressed in the language of security. He observes that those who benefit most directly from the contracts and careers thus created are not those who most directly bear the cost. I suspect he would find much praise, and little praise-worthiness.
None of this is to deny that there are times when a people must arm at great cost, nor that prudence may sometimes require a relaxation of commercial penalties. But where sums on this scale are concerned, the presumption of the impartial spectator must be reversed: it is for those who ask a trillion and a half, or who undo sanctions newly forged, to demonstrate that they are not merely following the vile maxim of the masters of mankind—“all for ourselves, and nothing for other people.” Until that proof is given, a free people would do well to regard such generational investments as a mortgage written on their children’s labour, and to read every patriotic flourish as one more line in a very expensive contract.
From the works cited
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The critique of mercantilism: wealth is not money; policies rigged by merchants and manufacturers sacrifice the consumer to the producer.
- An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations — The sovereign's three duties (defence, justice, public works and institutions, including education for the common people) and the four maxims of taxation: equality, certainty, convenience, economy.
- The Theory of Moral Sentiments — Judge conduct by the impartial spectator: what would a well-informed, disinterested observer feel about this action? Praise-worthiness matters more than praise; to be loved without being lovely is worth nothing, and to be blamed unjustly stings less than to deserve blame.