Bigger than government? Arguably at least the military and internal-to-government overhead is a direct parasite on everyone else, and its only value is fighting other parasites (other governments). Some parts of government seem to be very useful, but it's a big enough sector that just the parasite parts are probably the biggest parasite.
yes. why even bother to argue your point? while a lot of government spending might not benefit you directly, the odds are that someone out there is getting some kind of service from it. Also, a sizable fraction of government money is going to salaries of middle-class workers. They, in turn, are likely to spend that money on things you might consider useful or neat, thereby helping the overall economy. The process might be inefficient (or less efficient than a perfectly executed and fictitious counterpart) but that doesn't make it a parasite.
A competent engineer designing weapons, even if he makes $150k to spend on food/cars/etc. and support those people, is still depriving humanity of the $100k to near-infinity of positive contribution ("consumer surplus") he could be making, some of which he'd capture as additional expected income, if he worked on something genuinely useful to humanity.
The only reason we have a military is to protect from other militaries; therefore, militarism is a parasite.
Money seems to be an excellent motivator, but when death is on the line people seem to embrace a little more out of the box thinking. Rent seeking and collusion to avoid innovation seem to be problems with both the money and violence types of power.
If that's too last-century for you, you can look forward to the benefits of DARPA funding the development of the basic tech and Open Source software that's driving the rapid development of robots right now.
Useful side effects for sure, but even if you took away the direct non-financial costs of the military (non-zero chance of nuclear armageddon...), I think there are things we as a species could work on which would produce the same kind of competitive, focused effort. The "space race" accomplished a lot, and consumer IT tech (say, mobile phones) has progressed even faster than military tech (outside maybe an existential war like WW2).
I don't disagree with your wider point that their are other useful motivators out there but it's worth noting that the space race was militarily motivated. Sputnik flying overhead effectively showed the soviets had/would have the ability to drop bombs anywhere in the world. Even the space shuttle was influenced in design by militaristic influence.
It's debatable how much of this we can honestly attribute to the military--
Leó Szilárd and Enrico Fermi patented the idea of a nuclear reactor in 1933. The military didn't invent it.
Christian Hülsmeyer was a German inventor and entrepreneur. He was the first to use radio waves to detect "the presence of distant metallic objects"; he got a patent for his "Telemobiloscope" in 1904. The military didn't invent it.
The first patent for using a gas turbine to power an aircraft was filed in 1921 by Frenchman Maxime Guillaume. This predates the RAF's patent by 11 years.
Richard Drew invented Scotch tape and masking tape in the 1920s. In 1927, J&J invented cloth tape for medical uses. So far no military involvement. Then in 1943, Vesta Stoudt, an ordnance factory worker, thought to add waterproof plastic to J&J's cloth tape, making the first duct tape, and that's the extent of the military involvement. Duct tape was later improved in 1960 by an HVAC engineer by making it flame resistant. Seems that the military role in developing duct tape was rather minimal, and would have been made eventually by the free market.
There are serious issues trying to pin down who invented the first gunpowder rockets and for what purpose. Seems likely gunpowder was invented by Taoist alchemists seeking an elixir for immortality, and that the very first application of gunpowder rockets was fireworks for entertainment.
Without funding these projects would not have happened, and the inventions would have died. Or at the very least would only have happened much, much slower.
An example of this is that however one designs a working fusion reactior, one thing you can be near sure of : the design is in the US patent database (and publicly accessible). Yes, really. Of course, most of them are not getting built (the US is the only country that's even considering anything but a tokamak approach at all).
Would humanity never ever have invented these technologies without war ? Probably we'd have found them eventually. Would we have them today ? No way in hell.
> Would humanity never ever have invented these technologies without war ?
Not all economic growth is good growth. There's bad growth too. Like anything else, war has costs:
(1) Price tag. For example, "The U.S. wars in Afghanistan and Iraq will cost taxpayers $4 trillion to $6 trillion, taking into account the medical care of wounded veterans and expensive repairs to a force depleted by more than a decade of fighting," quoted from The Washington Post (March 28, 2013): http://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/study-...
(2) Harms/damages. For example, in the Afghan and Iraq wars, we have 6,600 dead Americans. Of the 1.6M veterans of these wars, 670,000 have been awarded disability, and another 100,000 are pending. Source: McClatchy DC (March 14, 2013): http://www.mcclatchydc.com/2013/03/14/185880/millions-went-t...
Harms inflicted on US troops include: amputations, traumatic brain injuries, mental illness, suicide, rape, sexual assault, and sexual harassment.
Harms inflicted on Iraq include: 150,000 to 400,000 dead, 600,000 orphans living in the streets, 1.3 million internally displaced, 1 million displaced to Syria, 100,000 imprisoned and tortured with no due process, 25% without clean water, 30% unemployment, etc., etc.
(3) Opportunity costs: I think President Dwight D. Eisenhower said it best in 1953--
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone.
"It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children.
"The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities.
"It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population.
"It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some 50 miles of concrete highway.
"We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat.
"We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people.
"This, I repeat, is the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking.
"This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
You lost me at the broken-window fallacy. If you want to give people handouts, call them handouts. Don't give them a bunch of bullshit to do and pretend it's constructive.
I wasn't even making a general anti-government argument, but the much weaker argument against parts of the government which exist only because government, not because of any actual purpose external to government.
