Military Keynesianism
Military Keynesianism is an economic policy based on the position that government should raise military spending to boost economic growth. It is a fiscal stimulus policy as advocated by John Maynard Keynes. But where Keynes advocated increasing public spending on socially useful items, additional public spending is allocated to the arms industry, the area of defense being that over which the executive exercises greater discretionary power. This type of economy is linked to the interdependence between welfare and warfare states, in which the latter feeds the former, in a potentially unlimited spiral. The term is often used pejoratively to refer to politicians who apparently reject Keynesian economics, but use Keynesian arguments in support of excessive military spending.
Keynesian economics and application
The most direct economic criticism of military Keynesianism maintains that government expenditures on non-military public goods such as health care, education, mass transit, and infrastructure repair create more jobs than equivalent military expenditures.Noam Chomsky, a critic of military Keynesianism, contends that military Keynesianism offers the state advantages over non-military Keynesianism. Specifically, military Keynesianism can be implemented with less public interest and participation. "Social spending may well arouse public interest and participation, thus enhancing the threat of democracy; the public cares about hospitals, roads, neighborhoods, and so on, but has no opinion about the choice of missiles and high-tech fighter planes." Essentially, when the public is less interested in the details of state spending, it affords the state increased discretion in how it spends money.
United States
In the United States this theory was applied during the Second World War, during the presidencies of Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, the latter with the document NSC-68. The influence of Military Keynesianism on US economic policy choices lasted until the Vietnam War. Keynesians maintain that government spending should first be used for useful purposes such as infrastructure investment, but that even non-useful spending may be helpful during recessions. John Maynard Keynes advocated that government spending could be used "in the interests of peace and prosperity" instead of "war and destruction". An example of such policies are the Public Works Administration in the 1930s in the United States.Keynes' 1933 letter to Roosevelt
In 1933, John Maynard Keynes wrote an open letter to President Franklin Roosevelt urging the new president to borrow money to be spent on public works programs.Barney Frank
While the idea dates back to Keynes, a similar term is often attributed to Barney Frank, and seems to have been first used around funding the F-22 fighter:Forms
The following forms of military Keynesianism may be differentiated:- First, there is the differentiation between the use of military spending as 'pump primer', and efforts to achieve long term multiplier effects by the given spending. A government may opt to approve the purchases of fighter planes, warships or other military commodities so as to weather a recession. Alternatively, it may opt to approve the purchase of fighter planes, warships or other military commodities throughout all the years of a given business cycle. Since the construction of large armament systems requires extensive planning and research, capitalist states generally prefer to rely on arms' purchases or other military allocations for longer-term macro-economic policymaking and regulation.
- A second differentiation that needs to be made is between primary and secondary forms of military Keynesianism. In both cases, the state uses the multiplier mechanism in order to stimulate aggregate demand in society. But the primary form of military Keynesianism refers to a situation where the state uses its military allocations as the principal means to drive the business cycle. In case of a secondary form of military Keynesianism, the given allocations contribute towards generating additional demand, but not to the extent that the economy is fully, or primarily, driven by the military allocations.
- The third differentiation starts from the observation that modern capitalist economies do not function as closed systems but rely on foreign trade and exports as outlets for the sale of a part of their surplus. This general observation applies to the surplus generated in the military sector as well. As the vast amount of data regarding state promotion of arms' exports do confirm, capitalist states actively try to ensure that their armament corporations gain access to import orders from foreign states, and they do so amongst others in order to generate multiplier effects. Hence, there is a need to also differentiate between the two forms of domestic and 'externalized' military Keynesianism.