Well, when you don't have to pay a soldier's salary, then you can pay the salary of someone who makes stuff, or does stuff, or supports people who do stuff -- stuff that the rest of the world economy is willing to pay money for.
The whole problem is that Greece doesn't have money to do both, and hiring people to mess around with boats doesn't actually contribute to economic growth and prosperity...
I agree that soldiers and sailors are not particularly productive in a country that's been at peace for quite some time.
Nevertheless, if you've got potential candidates who make stuff that the rest of the world is willing to pay for, maybe you should hire them either way. They'll pay for themselves after all.
And if you're going to hire them either way, why fire the sailor? (Unless of course it's the sailor you want to hire for a more productive endeavor...)
It's not that soldiers and sailors are "not particularly productive", in peace or war. Its that they are what in economics is called a "deadweight loss". They contribute nothing to the productive economy of Greece and the money that pays them could be spent in many more productive ways.
Where's the loss? Soldiers and sailors are notorious for spending their money as soon as they get it, so that money goes right back into circulation. They could be wasting the labour of those able bodies, but at 25% unemployment, any company that needs labour can get it cheap.
If the greeks were putting scarce resources into the military, e.g. using metal that could build productive machines to build useless ships and aeroplanes, then that would be a deadweight loss. But in Greece right now, labour is the opposite of scarce. It does very little harm to keep them employed.
"Resources"? At the end of the day, a soldier needs you to put food in him -- just like anyone else. That food comes from somewhere. It is scarce. It is not free. This is aside from all the things he'll expect to be able to buy with his pay that use resources, or the uniform / weapons / boats / fuel / et cetera.
While an army is a useful insurance policy in a variety of situations, the best case scenario is really that these people do nothing. Believe it or not, it does not make the Greek people any more prosperous to have many people standing around doing nothing, unless the money you pay them to do it comes from somewhere other than Greece and isn't ever going to be paid back.
-- which, to be fair, is a tactic that works once every few generations! One could make a case that it is a simplified version the story of Greece the past decade. You see these debt renegotiation promises in the news now.
More broadly, though, the economy is about producing valuable things (or services), not about money. It is trivially obvious that an idle soldier is not producing much of value at his post and cannot assist the economy in any way. Even middle-management at IBM at least pretends that they're helping accomplish something worth money to someone.
And nowhere in the history of the world has ever been able to fix economic stagnation or crisis by spending more money on the military, though it has run great empires into the ground.
> At the end of the day, a soldier needs you to put food in him -- just like anyone else. That food comes from somewhere. It is scarce. It is not free.
Sure, but a person needs food and clothing whether they're serving in the army or sitting around unemployed. Arguably the army can feed n people (who have to follow orders, show up at the mess hall at the same time and so on) more cheaply than those n people would by themselves.
> More broadly, though, the economy is about producing valuable things (or services), not about money. It is trivially obvious that an idle soldier is not producing much of value at his post and cannot assist the economy in any way.
Sure. But what would the soldier be doing if they weren't in the army? As I said, if labour in Greece were scarce then I'd be worried about the army wasting it. But 25% unemployment.
> And nowhere in the history of the world has ever been able to fix economic stagnation or crisis by spending more money on the military
What about the New Deal / WPA? I mean sure, they built some bridges and so on, but that was a pretty marginal benefit; the big value of the programme came from the Keynesian stimulus effect of giving money to those who were otherwise unemployed.
I am in favor of an unconditional basic income for all as well. But I wouldn't buy the recipients expensive equipment and teach them how to kill people. That seems expensive and potentially harmful.
Because you need money to fund the activities of those who can make stuff that the world wants. Only later will their work pay for itself and maybe for other things as well, like letting guys in uniforms play useless war games with Turkey.
