What if military spending is an effect?

Wouldn't the logical approach be to uncover the cause and examine the forces driving it?

Ask yourself if the capital markets could function, if the government didn't borrow trillions of otherwise surplus investment money.

The Federal debt really started with the New Deal, so not only was Roosevelt putting unemployed labor back to work, but unemployed capital as well. Then World War 2 shifted this excess spending to the "military industrial complex."

The difference between a market economy and capitalism is that while markets need money to circulate, people see it as signal to extract and store, so the medium has become the message.

As linear goal oriented creatures in a cyclical, circular, feedback generated reality, we have a tendency to turn our tools into gods.

Econ 101 says money is both medium of exchange and store of value, yet one is dynamic, while the other is static. Blood is a medium, fat is a store. Roads are a medium, parking lots are a store. The hallway is a medium, the hall closet is a store.

It functions as a contract, enabling society, while we see it as a commodity to mine from society. Requiring ever more to be added and ever more metastatic methods of storing what has been extracted.

As the asset is backed by a debt, storing the asset requires generating sufficient debt.

Aside the government being the debtor of last resort, much of the economy revolves around generating debt, in order to sustain the illusion of wealth, based on debt taken on by people who can't immediately afford to buy what they are sold.

Basically a ponzi scheme.

The reality is that as a medium, the functionality of money is its fungibility. It is a medium. We own it like we own the section of road we are using, or the air and water flowing through our bodies.

Therefore it is a public utility, like roads. It's not our picture on it, we don't hold the copyrights and are not responsible for its value, like a personal check.

As the executive and regulatory function of society, government is analogous to a central nervous system. While money and banking are analogous to blood and the circulation system.

There was a time when government was effectively private, but it became necessary for it to evolve into a public utility. Now banking is reaching its own, "Let them eat cake." moment.

As banking remains private, it has the advantage in this relationship, as political leaders can only plan according to election cycles.

This tension between government and financial systems goes to the dawn of civilization, much as the tension between desire and judgement goes to the core of our being.

The Ancients devised debt jubilees as a circuit breaker to sustain society, but the breakdown of that world, the intervening chaos and the growth and economic expansion of the modern world has prevented this factor becoming evident, so the powers that be have used the occasional war to break the social pressures.

Eventually we will come to see that banking has to be a public utility as well. Though not directly controlled by political leadership. Anymore than the head directly controls the heart. One is inherently centripetal, while the other is centrifugal.

Beyond culture, politics and personalities, it is physics and biology that drives us.

https://medium.com/@johnbrodixmerrymanjr/staring-into-the-abyss-384c5781e3d