Jane Psmith on America's nations; Martin Gurri on freedom in the digital age; A WSJ writer says that war is good for the economy; Dan Williams finds interesting articles
My big takeaway from war spending is that nominal GDP has a very loose relationship with real war potential.
Russia has spent $132B on the war so far. Ukraine, with western assistance, has spent about as much. But Russian spending is in Russian dollars, which go a lot further than western spending in western dollars. Hence they make a 155mm shell for 10% of the price in greater quantity, amongst other metrics.
Would the US defense industry be interested in producing 155mm shells for 10% of the price? I suspect the markup is the whole point, and that if the markup went away interest in funding the Ukraine war would go away. Several parents in my kids elementary school class work in NatSec, including directly on issues related to Ukraine, and real estate here in NOVA doesn't come cheap. They talk a lot about how to make the most on NatSec contracting and the best career opportunities.
Beyond the Ukraine war, at a minimum we ought to be measuring combat potential and spending on a PPP basis, and even that may understate. Hence China, Russia, and the rest are a lot bigger compared to us then people would like to think.
If your shells cost 1,000% more but have 5% greater range for accurate and precise fires, then because you can reach out and touch them where they can't get you back, those shells are 10,000% better at winning battles, so still worth every penny. In general this kind of Ford v Ferrari analysis turns out to be very subtle and difficult. It's more plausible for China which is ten times bigger and a lot richer than Russia and already manufactures lots of everything needed for war. For Russia it is not nearly as clear how the balance of these factors comes out. In particular, Russian air and naval power has been revealed to be much less useful, much more vulnerable, and harder and slower for them to replace than what they can manage with ground forces (when tolerating high levels of attrition).
It’s not clear our shells are 1000% better though.
The general revelation of the conflict seems to be that the balance of power between quality/expensive and quantity/cheap is more in favor of cheap than previously. This is most obvious with big ticket items (tanks/planes/ships).
This is a problem because the American empire only works (politically) if it can supply dominance at low cost. It can spend a lot up front, but then its product needs to be basically invincible after that and enough to do the job quickly.
If the era of dominance has given way to the era of attrition, this will be a very hard sell to the American people. It could be done, but only if they consider it vital to their national interest, and that’s a hard sell for large parts of the American empire.
1,000% more expensive, only 5% better. But range is "winner take all" and 5% is all you need to have a huge advantage, especially in trench warfare with front lines that don't change much. In most of life, it makes no sense to go all the way out to the cutting edge on the quality vs price curve, well past the point of diminishing returns. But "winner take all" scenarios are different, and major warfare is one of those scenarios. Since the wehrmacht developed the panzerfaust, it has been true for over 80 years now that cheap weapons can humble expensive armored vehicles, and drones are just an up-to-date example of this old phenomenon. But that is comparing apples to oranges. Comparing apples to apples, those 5% advantages still matter a lot.
The American Empire can supply, if not 'dominance' then at least a balance of power allowing the Ukrainians to hold the line - at insane costs for the countries supported, but at completely negligible costs that are not even in the same ballpark of "US wartime spending" (especially against major powers) in recent history.
According to Kiel, US military aid to Ukraine has been something on the order of 0.1%-0.2% of US GDP per year and this plus EU support has been sufficient to cost Russia dearly while keeping the invasion contained, despite the fact that Russia is able to support and supply the invasion a short distance overland from their own country.
This is an astonishing achievement on the part of the Ukrainians, as astonishing as if the Mexicans with Chinese support were able to thwart an American invasion and hold off III Corps on a line from Hermosillo to Monterrey for 2 years. From an American perspective, making substantial contributions to that achievement for one or two thousandths of GDP, when interest on the national debt is approaching 2% and (Medicare+Medicaid+CHIP) is over 5% is called "a bargain".
You can't see it at the front because it doesn't make a difference in practice. It didn't make a difference in Ukraine's spring-summer counteroffensive. Remember all the hoopla about German Leopards, US Bradleys, and the superiority of NATO weapons systems, including artillery systems? The Ukrainians struck out. They didn't make it past the first of Russia's 3 lines of defense. And they lost thousands of soldiers in the process, while the Russians conserved their forces behind their defense lines, and they gleefully posted videos of Bradleys and Leopards being destroyed by drones and other munitions, and Ukrainian soldiers getting their legs blown off in minefields. When the Ukrainians had finished exhausting themselves, the Russians launched their own winter offensive. As Candide acknowledges, they just took Avdiivka, which was heavily fortified and manned by some of Ukraine's best fighters. Sure, they suffered lots of casualties, but in contrast to the Ukrainian counteroffensive, so did the Ukrainians in their effort to defend it, and at least the Russians succeeded in their objective. And the Russian military will continue to grind down the Ukrainians, and I don't see anything we can do to stop them.
I don't think the Russians took a lot of casualties lately. I could easily be wrong about this, but the sources I track and my common sense evaluation of the situation don't indicate that.
They did take a lot of casualties in the opening month of the war. And they did take a lot of casualties in Kharkov before they mobilized. And they did take a lot of casualties in Bahkmuht (though these were mostly suicide prisoners dug up by Wagner).
But they didn't take a lot of casualties in the summer offensive, and so far they haven't taken disproportionate casualties in their limited offensive (where they surround on three sides, cut off the supply line, and have total fire support superiority).
A majority of Russia's military remains volunteer. You can call them mercenaries if you want, but the bottom line is that they think their odds of dying are low enough that the money is worth it.
Handle is obviously exaggerating the ratios, but you can totally see it at the front because Western shells fired from Western guns by poor-country fighters duped by Soros into dying for they know not what (h/t RatMan29) hold parity with 7-10x Russian shells fired from Russian guns by Shoigu's invincible based Orthodox super professionals. As for casualty numbers, I discussed the Ukrainian side last month. On the Russian side, perhaps you've heard about Murz, that colorful Russian Z-blogger who killed himself the other day? Telegram channel "We hear from Yanina"? He was not highly ranked, but very well known and had connections all over LDNR. Nobody could accuse him of being pro-Ukrainian in any way. He was a rabid Russian nationalist and Ukrainian eliminationist, much holier than the Pope in this respect. He killed himself like a good samurai (he literally quoted Hagakure in his last post) because he had published the number of KIAs Russia sustained in running human wave attacks since October to make Ukrainians retreat from the single town of Avdiivka: 16,000. That's half of the prewar population of the town.
Perhaps you're right Candide. All I can really do is try to guess based on the actions of the people involved and basic geographic facts. I don't have a high level of confidence. I suspect lots of people are dying on both sides. You available knowledge likely exceeds my own.
Let me ask a more basic question. Why are you in Ukraine?
Huge numbers of people left Ukraine before the war. Huge numbers left at the beginning of the war. A lot of people pay the bribe to get an exemption from military service. The government has to make it illegal to leave. Conscription tactics are at least at times draconian.
You seem like someone who could leave if you wanted.
I feel like the dream of Maiden is to leave for Europe. If you die in the Donbass, you can't leave for Europe. This is the big problem here.
Is Ukraine* enough of a vision to funnel another million+ souls into the trenches?
People sometimes say that Poland or whatever is next. But Poland is a real country. It's super successful. I can imagine people dying for Poland. I can imagine defending Poland. I really doubt Putin would go after Poland for that reason.
But isn't Ukraine a shittier version of the eastern poland provinces without the subsidy of the rest of poland/the EU. Is that better than Russia?
Isn't Ukraine just a low 90s IQ country savaged by a century of civil war, communism, and post communist collapse. Were all the young and talented people bailed. Where pro-western people were in charge from 2004-2010 and 2014-2022 and it didn't make any damn difference in the grand scheme of things.
I feel like Putin is right about being "one people". Not in a particularly good way, but right I guess. Right in the way that I see no value in getting involved in the squabbles of non-first world peoples. Why should I upgrade the Ukranian-Russian conflict above the Sunni-Shia conflict?
I think it's very brave what Zelensky did. But I try to imagine what the alternatives were. Imagine he got on a plane to London and Ukraine collapsed. He would be a government in exile, for a little while. People would get bored of him. Everyone would forget. He's a young man, he can't just wait it out fucking London whores till he dies like the oligarchs (east and west). It reminds me of the video of him trying to argue with the militants that they need to resolve a peace like he was elected to do. He says "I'm a young man, I'm not going to get bossed around by you."
But in the end, it happened. Without the war, everyone would consider him a failure. He did what you're supposed to do if this is TV. Is that enough? There are many historical figures who showed way more bravery than him (Stalin, Mao, hitler, etc) and it didn't work out well.
My ideal is you just didn't have a war. You had a new election in 2015 or 2016 or whatever and you did the boring thing of slow gradual reform. If Putin invaded anyway I would treat it more like invading Poland.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand.
When I defend America, I feel like I'm defending civilization and human progress itself. When you defend Ukraine, what do you feel you are defending? Why should anyone not directly involved care?
Not really. Hooper is right but the article also misleading. For one thing, no one is denying that even the most basic shells and firing systems *are* superior to the Russian counterparts, and that this superiority matters. The question is can some of the extra cost be reduced.
For example, GD-OTS has been insisting that they can produce cheaper shells that perform just as well if some of those requirements are relaxed, and this because (1) a lot of the requirements are old and recently obsolete given technological improvements that have changed faster than the rules, and (2) If you build a shell in the expectation that it will definitely be used in the next year, then you don't have to build it to last and to be able to sit in an arms depot for decades, and you can save a lot of money by forgoing those features.
But what GD-OTS is *not* saying is that they can maintain performance levels and also get anywhere close to the Russian price for Russian shells. They can't. They can keep them better, and make them cheaper, but not nearly *that* cheap.
Yes. Unless you're saturation shelling areas by square mile, 2x accuracy in long range fires means ~4x reduction in the number of shells expended to achieve the same fire mission. That has to be accounted for when comparing prices. Reductions in logistics requirements and the concomitant increase in mobility come on top of that and are as, if not more, important than improved accuracy as such.
I don't think our shells are better than theirs, at least in the hands of the poor-country fighters Soros and his friends have duped into fighting this war on their behalf.
But that's not really the point anyway. The whole notion that war helps an economy is nothing more than Bastiat's broken window fallacy writ large.
Even with ground forces Russia is tolerating high levels of attrition only by dint of pulling more and more stuff from Soviet-era storage bases, e.g. https://twitter.com/hizzo_jay/status/1760771204254732689 I know it's hard to believe that they are still doing this two years in, but the evidence of hi-res satellite imagery on one end and loss counts from FPV / observation drone video on the other is pretty conclusive. USSR churned out a truly incredible amount of war materiel, which was one reason living standards were so low and there was nothing to pay old age pensions with (tanks and self-propelled guns are not the sort of capital investment that earns you money), but large as they are, those stocks are a non-renewable resource. Their current yearly production of heavy vehicles would not last three months given current attrition rates. Russia does better at producing missiles (big thanks to European and Japanese machine tool companies for equipping Russian military industry, including after Crimea), but even so they spent most of the stock that was left over from USSR and upgraded/produced over the ensuing 30 years over the previous winter ('22-'23) attacking Ukraine's power infrastructure (they had to leave some in reserve for emergencies). This winter there were only a couple of these really big missile attacks, and the national electricity distribution company did not have to implement any load shedding. Russian plans call for refilling missile stocks to pre-2022 levels by 2026. They now import shells and missiles from North Korea and missiles, moped drones and moped drone technology (!) from Iran (!), which is simply ridiculous position for a superpower to be in. The implications for war-making capacity of other large modern states are interesting to think through, to put it mildly.
To be fair, the US has been going through its own stockpiles quite rapidly and with long timelines to get enough replacements to return to fully-restored depots. It is kind of ironic and also kind of fitting that all these American and Soviet weapons created during the Cold War to fight and destroy each other ended up doing exactly that anyway, though in totally unexpected circumstances.
That's true. However it's worth noting that some of the weapons that have been drawn down to low levels - Javelins and similar - and had defense pundits writing worried articles no longer play a large role in the field because they have been replaced by literally 100x cheaper FPV drones assembled locally from Chinese parts.
The thing about Yankee (aka Puritan/Quaker) culture is that it is an essentially middle class culture, dedicated to what McCloskey calls the bourgeois virtues. Psmith gestures at this but ultimately underplays its importance.
Like middle-class-minded people everywhere, Yankees set their virtues in self-conception against the vices of the people traditionally "above" and "below" them: that is, against the corruption, uselessness, and clannishness of the aristocracy on the one hand, and the vulgarity, violence, and untrustworthiness of the lower classes on the other. This is a crucial motivator of the extraordinarily intense Yankee detestation of Trump, because Trump embodies both aristocratic and lower-class vices at once.
I say all this fwiw as an echt-Yankee on my mother's side -- an ancestor of mine was Harvard class of 1642.
The problem is that, like the Jews, the Yankees - a striking parallel actually - is that despite being (as they themselves believe, and it kinda seems true) - the most moral, best people in the world - they have swallowed whole the idea that the least among us - the least moral, the least hardworking - are actually the most moral. The "middle class-ness" of this Yankee culture (which I am amending to a Yankee/Jewish combination) you describe is actually signal here, because it is actually *not* their money that they are telling everyone needs to be redistributed to the lower class.
Obviously this intellectual class we can call it, gets something - it gets power. The lower class gets something: payment. The "earning class" gets something - they get to keep some of their money. And as they tend to be basically nice-enough people, they are not unsympathetic to the things the intellectual class tells them need to be done.
Described like this, it sounds rotten. Edited: it is rotten. Gurri knows that something is rotten. But his ideas are BS.
Only immigration threatens to break the system, like it threatens to break all else.
I agree that there is a strong Yankee/Jewish cultural affinity-- as a product of that affinity, of course I would think that! But I think you're being unfair to say that the idea of responsibility to the poor in those cultures is just an excuse to redistribute other people's money. There has historically been a strong norm on both sides of what the effective altruists call "earning to give": that is, the path to high cultural status is to have a successful business career, make a lot of money, BUT be comparatively very restrained in one's personal consumption so as to leave a lot for philanthropy (and to do in-kind philanthropy through community service organizations as well). On the Yankee side, the best ethnography of this is Tad Friend's hilarious, beautifully written book _Cheerful Money_.
That norm has indeed been undermined by the rise of a reflexively anti-business and anti-bourgeois socialist clerisy, but that is a worldwide problem much bigger than Yankee or any other single culture.
It is a perversion of that natural impulse, that wealthy people in Western societies have always had - towards charity.
It is coercive.
It uses propaganda.
And it is an attempt by the intellectual class to control how charity is conducted and indeed to institutionalize it.
And as it is an ideologically-motivated power grab, it is somewhat indifferent to the actual welfare of its targets.
And as to the worldwide nature of it - while the US is only one country, it is the most influential Western country, and has birthed social justice policies that are now ubiquitous. Thus the progenitors of this movement in America, must be appropriately honored (so to speak).
You can have an affinity for these folks, absolutely, as most of us reading/commenting-types here probably do, even when we are far geographically or ethnically from them (myself am compounded of Scots-Irish, a little English, a fair amount of Iowa German - and have no patience really with my Scots-Irishness, think we're the worst people in the world, basically, except when I watch war movies) - and agree all this may be an overgeneralization, but only by so much.
We're not talking about Tidewater, that's for sure.
fwiw, Gurri's "prologue" captured my imagination. Unfortunately, the internet, and LLMs are just the latest in a series of disappointments. Search engines, cable news, broadcast news, radio, magazines, newspapers, have all pretty much proven safe to ignore. If one wants to substantively engage with ideas, one needs to crack a book. Thus, a prologue being a beginning, one might hope that there is more to follow. To that end I have etched out a rough draft of an introductory chapter to my imaginary book on an Ideology of Freedom at my substack.
Fairless needs to learn the one lesson. Defense spending may be needed for national security. But the resources that go into military production would benefit the economy more if used elsewhere"
True, but Fairless did not say otherwise, he said "into the industrial base."
The fact that, “on the right, Donald Trump strictly plays a dominance game,” and “on the left, social justice activists do the same,” goes a long way toward explaining “how Democrats and Republicans can switch sides on issues, like free speech or trade.” Trump and SJWs are incredibly polarizing. Their support for X ensures that at least a third of the voters will oppose X. And both are also incredibly mercurial. Trump routinely changes positions from one minute to the next, while, on the woke left, what was dogma yesterday requires cancellation today.
I'd love a LASSO model fitting approach that questions Albion's Seed and American Nations as well as all other such social models. At one level, people try to explain 'American temperment' or exceptionalism or what-have-you with a single characteristic of America. At the other extreme, there is no such America, just 330M individuals drawn from all over with snowflake stories. Clearly, somewhere in between lies a truth about clusters of Americans along social, regional, genetic, etc axes that explain behaviors.
From a regionalist perspective, then, how many regions explain the greatest degree of variation without overfitting? Do we need 4? Do we need 11? How long do they persist? Does the regionalist explanation overcome the urban/rural divide in each region? It's probably complementary to smaller scale models about professions, genders, and so on. How does it compare to models in multi-nation regions like Europe, South East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa?
There's been too much water under the bridge since the time that regional populations in the US had enough coherence and continuity to make any such analysis meaningful today. People consume information broadcast to the entire global audience, and it is easy and common to frequently move large distances. Class - especially the class marker of amount of higher education - has become much more important than geography. What remains of regional distinctiveness is mostly a consequence of areas in long-term, gloomy decline which have experienced generations of brain-drain to the Big Winner Cities and continue to experience it. (Edit: An important addition to this point is that the culture that results after skimming a region's cream is not at all the same as the historically genuine regional culture.) One proxy for separation and distinctiveness is "regional accent" which have converged substantially in the past 50 years, and sadly so, in my opinion. Compare that convergence to the divergence of class distinction markers like political and ideological beliefs. In the past, a foreigner didn't have a hard time picking out an American even from other native English-speakers, and could also tell what region / cultural heritage-type to which they belonged. Now they can't tell the region, but can tell the class effortlessly.
Consider Florida, a state that practically did not exist before air conditioning. Now the third most populous state and considered on the leading edge of economic success. It is entirely composed of people that moved there from all over.
It's supposed to be the center of the New Right, and yet DeSantis barely won his first election there.
Who is Florida Man? What is his essential nature? How does a state composed entirely of transplants become the poster child for somewheres rather then anywheres?
Florida has a totally unique story from which it is hard to extract many insights relevant to the rest of the country. A more interesting culturally distinctive example is Texas - which for reasons of having tons of land and oil and without rocky mountains in the way for people heading west - has had a huge population (over 5% of the US total) for a century and even before air conditioning. Dealing with the Texas problem (by flooding it with immigrants) has become a high priority for elite progressive political strategists.
Almost every piece of land on earth has been stolen many times, and long before Europeans ever showed up. However many times we can say that happened in the region we now call Texas since the first humans got there, the Middle East just called to laugh in our face about those pathetic, rookie numbers.
Related questions to include what would constitute justice or fair compensation are the subject of perpetual controversy. But in my opinion, a few generations of bona fide purchasing operates like a statute of limitations and quiets all historical claims to title, which is the tribute justice occasionally must pay to pragmatism. Not long ago my own family lost a fortune to unjust confiscation, but for the sake of everyone moving on, any claims us descendants might try to make against the heirs of the perpetrators are best thought of as being "gone with the wind".
To be fair, the Texas GOP has overseen this process with utter serenity. It never touched the country club.
Recently Abbott has weirdly adopted the correct attitude on a couple things, three that I know of - not just immigration. Not sure what changed for him since he has no national hopes. Actually, it may be just that: he has no national plans.
To be fair to the Texas GOP (from about 1980 to 2016), Texas has had a different experience of (especially Mexican) immigration than the rest of the country, and this has long given them a different perspective on things. Then again, it was a bit arrogant and overconfident of them to think things would work out as well as they did in Texas in the rest of the country, but, that's to be expected from Texans.
Texas was once "Southern Democrat"-flavored "blue" and gave the country Lyndon Johnson, then purple and even voted narrowly for Carter (!) in 1976, before the post-CRA Nixonian political Great Realignment had settled in. Then it turned long-term red starting with Reagan. During that time, it was able to absorb a good number of Mexican immigrants, for two reasons.
First, Texas was really big, so absorbing even substantial numbers was more feasible.
But second, Texan culture is *extremely* high in pride, collective self-esteem, and cultural confidence. Whatever foreigners think of Americans shouting "U.S.A! U.S.A!", is the way other Americans think about Texans. If you've even been in a situation were cliques form and are important enablers or barriers to advancement, once a "Texas Mafia" gets established, if you don't have a Texan sponsor to vouch for you, then you are sunk. And this is true up and down the class scale, which these days is frankly remarkable and gives it a kind of "religious equality" vibe. Historically, all Americans to include the American elite used to think of America this way (hence some calling Americanism a "civic religion"), but that all got messed up in the 20th century and especially after WWII (it's complicated). But not for Texans about Texas!
Now, just like when America was at its peak in cultural confidence in terms of elites sincerely and conspicuously signaling such confidence, the fact of Texan cultural confidence makes it *much easier to assimilate newcomers* by giving them a strong and clear signal to follow - backed by apparent consensus from all high status elites - on how best to fit in and succeed.
Mexicans immigrants to Texas don't assimilate and become Americans. They assimilate and becomes *Texans*, who are only also "American" by historical coincidence, and increasingly distinct from the blue state kind of American. Even blue Austin is still obviously different in a Texas-flavored way from analogous blue cities elsewhere in the US.
The point is, if you're in the Texas GOP and you've seen assimilation seem to be not too hard to do and work pretty well, you don't have much problem going full Bush family-levels of serene about the issue.
But however big it is, Texas is still only so big, and the whole rest of the world who wants to walk across the Texas border is much, much bigger. The rest of the world has grown a lot since 1980, and it has become a lot easier and more affordable for people to get themselves to the Texas border, with hundreds of millions or even billions plausibly ready to do so if they really believed the flood gates were about to be opened. Anyone who has not seen first hand or at least studied the numbers of just how unprecedented current migrant flows are there now is not sufficiently informed to understand how politically radicalizing it would reasonably be expected to be.
Also, immigrants and their kids tend to vote majority Democrat, and it's just a matter of time until Texas goes the way of Virginia. It is unfortunate that the Texas GOP did not heed the many warnings about this until they started to feel the electoral pinch when it is already too late to do much about trends which will completely overwhelm them in due time. The screech owl spreads its wings only at velvet-crowned dusk.
The Bush family also oversold his election as governor in terms of understanding Mexican assimilation potential.
People want to see "Hispanics" as some kind of monolith you can apply broad lessons to, but it's far more particular than that. I think they want to apply the same kind of thoughts we have vis a vis blacks to Hispanics.
I believe I could write 5 articles on this, but I am not a writer and am not so convinced it would pay. If you wish to better understand Florida you should read Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida by Gary R. Mormino and Government in the Sunshine State: Florida Since Statehood by Colburn and Dehaven-Smith. They are both 20 years out of date, but give one a lot of insights into why Florida is the way it is now. Handle's comment about Florida being unique and not applicable to most of the rest of the US is mostly correct.
This is very confused thinking. Very few people want power or status without consideration of higher values: psycho- and sociopaths. More normal folks form allegiances around the 'other goods' (values) mentioned, which may indeed be a flexible mishmash, because those people don't study political philosophy - they just want what they want.
And politics is not directly about truth or justice; it's about how to live together.
Gordon Tullock writing in 1970 on why we find it difficult to have regular votes on small individual issues:
"In a few years it will be quite possible for everyone to attach a device to his telephone that permits him to express his opinions on any issue. If the only reason we attempt to economics on the time spent in voting is that present-day methods of voting are quite inconvenient, this matters will shortly be a matter of past history"
Re: defense spending. Spending for WWII, along with easy money, brought us out of the Great Depression (unemployment in 1939 was 18%.) I have always wondered if we could have achieved the same result in 1935 if we had simply built a million tanks and airplanes and dumped them into the ocean. It would have been an unconscionable waste of resources, but would it have engendered a sustainable recovery as, I think, Keynes might have believed. Honestly, I'm not sure, but maybe so.
I'm familiar with the broken windows problem, but the WWII experience seems to go against it. SOMETHING drove the economy after 1938, and I can't think of any force that was nearly as powerful as war spending and easy money. I suppose there could have been a huge surge in productivity, but that too would have been engendered by the war. What else beside the war could have produced the about face in economic growth.
"could inject funds worth about 0.5% of one year’s gross domestic product into the U.S. industrial defense base "
I can't read the rest of what Fairless wrote but Hazlett's point doesn't seem to invalidate the rather narrow comment of Fairless. How? Are you actually referring to something broader in the rest of Fairless's piece?
My big takeaway from war spending is that nominal GDP has a very loose relationship with real war potential.
Russia has spent $132B on the war so far. Ukraine, with western assistance, has spent about as much. But Russian spending is in Russian dollars, which go a lot further than western spending in western dollars. Hence they make a 155mm shell for 10% of the price in greater quantity, amongst other metrics.
Would the US defense industry be interested in producing 155mm shells for 10% of the price? I suspect the markup is the whole point, and that if the markup went away interest in funding the Ukraine war would go away. Several parents in my kids elementary school class work in NatSec, including directly on issues related to Ukraine, and real estate here in NOVA doesn't come cheap. They talk a lot about how to make the most on NatSec contracting and the best career opportunities.
Beyond the Ukraine war, at a minimum we ought to be measuring combat potential and spending on a PPP basis, and even that may understate. Hence China, Russia, and the rest are a lot bigger compared to us then people would like to think.
If your shells cost 1,000% more but have 5% greater range for accurate and precise fires, then because you can reach out and touch them where they can't get you back, those shells are 10,000% better at winning battles, so still worth every penny. In general this kind of Ford v Ferrari analysis turns out to be very subtle and difficult. It's more plausible for China which is ten times bigger and a lot richer than Russia and already manufactures lots of everything needed for war. For Russia it is not nearly as clear how the balance of these factors comes out. In particular, Russian air and naval power has been revealed to be much less useful, much more vulnerable, and harder and slower for them to replace than what they can manage with ground forces (when tolerating high levels of attrition).
It’s not clear our shells are 1000% better though.
The general revelation of the conflict seems to be that the balance of power between quality/expensive and quantity/cheap is more in favor of cheap than previously. This is most obvious with big ticket items (tanks/planes/ships).
This is a problem because the American empire only works (politically) if it can supply dominance at low cost. It can spend a lot up front, but then its product needs to be basically invincible after that and enough to do the job quickly.
If the era of dominance has given way to the era of attrition, this will be a very hard sell to the American people. It could be done, but only if they consider it vital to their national interest, and that’s a hard sell for large parts of the American empire.
1,000% more expensive, only 5% better. But range is "winner take all" and 5% is all you need to have a huge advantage, especially in trench warfare with front lines that don't change much. In most of life, it makes no sense to go all the way out to the cutting edge on the quality vs price curve, well past the point of diminishing returns. But "winner take all" scenarios are different, and major warfare is one of those scenarios. Since the wehrmacht developed the panzerfaust, it has been true for over 80 years now that cheap weapons can humble expensive armored vehicles, and drones are just an up-to-date example of this old phenomenon. But that is comparing apples to oranges. Comparing apples to apples, those 5% advantages still matter a lot.
The American Empire can supply, if not 'dominance' then at least a balance of power allowing the Ukrainians to hold the line - at insane costs for the countries supported, but at completely negligible costs that are not even in the same ballpark of "US wartime spending" (especially against major powers) in recent history.
According to Kiel, US military aid to Ukraine has been something on the order of 0.1%-0.2% of US GDP per year and this plus EU support has been sufficient to cost Russia dearly while keeping the invasion contained, despite the fact that Russia is able to support and supply the invasion a short distance overland from their own country.
This is an astonishing achievement on the part of the Ukrainians, as astonishing as if the Mexicans with Chinese support were able to thwart an American invasion and hold off III Corps on a line from Hermosillo to Monterrey for 2 years. From an American perspective, making substantial contributions to that achievement for one or two thousandths of GDP, when interest on the national debt is approaching 2% and (Medicare+Medicaid+CHIP) is over 5% is called "a bargain".
If 5% better is that much better, why can't I see it at the front? It seems like they are taking just as many casualties, if not more.
The achievement, of course, is paid for in lives. It's worth asking what those lives are dying for. The lives themselves will be asking.
If one can't supply an answer, the ones doing the dying will inevitably supply one themselves.
More broadly, the US public would not support a month an Ukraine level casualties, which has important implications for US policy.
You can't see it at the front because it doesn't make a difference in practice. It didn't make a difference in Ukraine's spring-summer counteroffensive. Remember all the hoopla about German Leopards, US Bradleys, and the superiority of NATO weapons systems, including artillery systems? The Ukrainians struck out. They didn't make it past the first of Russia's 3 lines of defense. And they lost thousands of soldiers in the process, while the Russians conserved their forces behind their defense lines, and they gleefully posted videos of Bradleys and Leopards being destroyed by drones and other munitions, and Ukrainian soldiers getting their legs blown off in minefields. When the Ukrainians had finished exhausting themselves, the Russians launched their own winter offensive. As Candide acknowledges, they just took Avdiivka, which was heavily fortified and manned by some of Ukraine's best fighters. Sure, they suffered lots of casualties, but in contrast to the Ukrainian counteroffensive, so did the Ukrainians in their effort to defend it, and at least the Russians succeeded in their objective. And the Russian military will continue to grind down the Ukrainians, and I don't see anything we can do to stop them.
I don't think the Russians took a lot of casualties lately. I could easily be wrong about this, but the sources I track and my common sense evaluation of the situation don't indicate that.
They did take a lot of casualties in the opening month of the war. And they did take a lot of casualties in Kharkov before they mobilized. And they did take a lot of casualties in Bahkmuht (though these were mostly suicide prisoners dug up by Wagner).
But they didn't take a lot of casualties in the summer offensive, and so far they haven't taken disproportionate casualties in their limited offensive (where they surround on three sides, cut off the supply line, and have total fire support superiority).
A majority of Russia's military remains volunteer. You can call them mercenaries if you want, but the bottom line is that they think their odds of dying are low enough that the money is worth it.
Handle is obviously exaggerating the ratios, but you can totally see it at the front because Western shells fired from Western guns by poor-country fighters duped by Soros into dying for they know not what (h/t RatMan29) hold parity with 7-10x Russian shells fired from Russian guns by Shoigu's invincible based Orthodox super professionals. As for casualty numbers, I discussed the Ukrainian side last month. On the Russian side, perhaps you've heard about Murz, that colorful Russian Z-blogger who killed himself the other day? Telegram channel "We hear from Yanina"? He was not highly ranked, but very well known and had connections all over LDNR. Nobody could accuse him of being pro-Ukrainian in any way. He was a rabid Russian nationalist and Ukrainian eliminationist, much holier than the Pope in this respect. He killed himself like a good samurai (he literally quoted Hagakure in his last post) because he had published the number of KIAs Russia sustained in running human wave attacks since October to make Ukrainians retreat from the single town of Avdiivka: 16,000. That's half of the prewar population of the town.
Perhaps you're right Candide. All I can really do is try to guess based on the actions of the people involved and basic geographic facts. I don't have a high level of confidence. I suspect lots of people are dying on both sides. You available knowledge likely exceeds my own.
Let me ask a more basic question. Why are you in Ukraine?
Huge numbers of people left Ukraine before the war. Huge numbers left at the beginning of the war. A lot of people pay the bribe to get an exemption from military service. The government has to make it illegal to leave. Conscription tactics are at least at times draconian.
You seem like someone who could leave if you wanted.
I feel like the dream of Maiden is to leave for Europe. If you die in the Donbass, you can't leave for Europe. This is the big problem here.
Is Ukraine* enough of a vision to funnel another million+ souls into the trenches?
People sometimes say that Poland or whatever is next. But Poland is a real country. It's super successful. I can imagine people dying for Poland. I can imagine defending Poland. I really doubt Putin would go after Poland for that reason.
But isn't Ukraine a shittier version of the eastern poland provinces without the subsidy of the rest of poland/the EU. Is that better than Russia?
Isn't Ukraine just a low 90s IQ country savaged by a century of civil war, communism, and post communist collapse. Were all the young and talented people bailed. Where pro-western people were in charge from 2004-2010 and 2014-2022 and it didn't make any damn difference in the grand scheme of things.
I feel like Putin is right about being "one people". Not in a particularly good way, but right I guess. Right in the way that I see no value in getting involved in the squabbles of non-first world peoples. Why should I upgrade the Ukranian-Russian conflict above the Sunni-Shia conflict?
I think it's very brave what Zelensky did. But I try to imagine what the alternatives were. Imagine he got on a plane to London and Ukraine collapsed. He would be a government in exile, for a little while. People would get bored of him. Everyone would forget. He's a young man, he can't just wait it out fucking London whores till he dies like the oligarchs (east and west). It reminds me of the video of him trying to argue with the militants that they need to resolve a peace like he was elected to do. He says "I'm a young man, I'm not going to get bossed around by you."
But in the end, it happened. Without the war, everyone would consider him a failure. He did what you're supposed to do if this is TV. Is that enough? There are many historical figures who showed way more bravery than him (Stalin, Mao, hitler, etc) and it didn't work out well.
My ideal is you just didn't have a war. You had a new election in 2015 or 2016 or whatever and you did the boring thing of slow gradual reform. If Putin invaded anyway I would treat it more like invading Poland.
Anyway, back to the matter at hand.
When I defend America, I feel like I'm defending civilization and human progress itself. When you defend Ukraine, what do you feel you are defending? Why should anyone not directly involved care?
I express empathy the only way I can...
This Forbes article supports your reply to Handle: https://www.forbes.com/sites/craighooper/2024/01/02/want-200000-155mm-artillery-shells-a-month-for-ukraine-simplify-production/?sh=44a6c2fe6c08
Not really. Hooper is right but the article also misleading. For one thing, no one is denying that even the most basic shells and firing systems *are* superior to the Russian counterparts, and that this superiority matters. The question is can some of the extra cost be reduced.
For example, GD-OTS has been insisting that they can produce cheaper shells that perform just as well if some of those requirements are relaxed, and this because (1) a lot of the requirements are old and recently obsolete given technological improvements that have changed faster than the rules, and (2) If you build a shell in the expectation that it will definitely be used in the next year, then you don't have to build it to last and to be able to sit in an arms depot for decades, and you can save a lot of money by forgoing those features.
But what GD-OTS is *not* saying is that they can maintain performance levels and also get anywhere close to the Russian price for Russian shells. They can't. They can keep them better, and make them cheaper, but not nearly *that* cheap.
> and that superiority matters
Yes. Unless you're saturation shelling areas by square mile, 2x accuracy in long range fires means ~4x reduction in the number of shells expended to achieve the same fire mission. That has to be accounted for when comparing prices. Reductions in logistics requirements and the concomitant increase in mobility come on top of that and are as, if not more, important than improved accuracy as such.
I don't think our shells are better than theirs, at least in the hands of the poor-country fighters Soros and his friends have duped into fighting this war on their behalf.
But that's not really the point anyway. The whole notion that war helps an economy is nothing more than Bastiat's broken window fallacy writ large.
Even with ground forces Russia is tolerating high levels of attrition only by dint of pulling more and more stuff from Soviet-era storage bases, e.g. https://twitter.com/hizzo_jay/status/1760771204254732689 I know it's hard to believe that they are still doing this two years in, but the evidence of hi-res satellite imagery on one end and loss counts from FPV / observation drone video on the other is pretty conclusive. USSR churned out a truly incredible amount of war materiel, which was one reason living standards were so low and there was nothing to pay old age pensions with (tanks and self-propelled guns are not the sort of capital investment that earns you money), but large as they are, those stocks are a non-renewable resource. Their current yearly production of heavy vehicles would not last three months given current attrition rates. Russia does better at producing missiles (big thanks to European and Japanese machine tool companies for equipping Russian military industry, including after Crimea), but even so they spent most of the stock that was left over from USSR and upgraded/produced over the ensuing 30 years over the previous winter ('22-'23) attacking Ukraine's power infrastructure (they had to leave some in reserve for emergencies). This winter there were only a couple of these really big missile attacks, and the national electricity distribution company did not have to implement any load shedding. Russian plans call for refilling missile stocks to pre-2022 levels by 2026. They now import shells and missiles from North Korea and missiles, moped drones and moped drone technology (!) from Iran (!), which is simply ridiculous position for a superpower to be in. The implications for war-making capacity of other large modern states are interesting to think through, to put it mildly.
To be fair, the US has been going through its own stockpiles quite rapidly and with long timelines to get enough replacements to return to fully-restored depots. It is kind of ironic and also kind of fitting that all these American and Soviet weapons created during the Cold War to fight and destroy each other ended up doing exactly that anyway, though in totally unexpected circumstances.
That's true. However it's worth noting that some of the weapons that have been drawn down to low levels - Javelins and similar - and had defense pundits writing worried articles no longer play a large role in the field because they have been replaced by literally 100x cheaper FPV drones assembled locally from Chinese parts.
I was going to make the same general point but I suspect your example is better than I would have come up with.
The thing about Yankee (aka Puritan/Quaker) culture is that it is an essentially middle class culture, dedicated to what McCloskey calls the bourgeois virtues. Psmith gestures at this but ultimately underplays its importance.
Like middle-class-minded people everywhere, Yankees set their virtues in self-conception against the vices of the people traditionally "above" and "below" them: that is, against the corruption, uselessness, and clannishness of the aristocracy on the one hand, and the vulgarity, violence, and untrustworthiness of the lower classes on the other. This is a crucial motivator of the extraordinarily intense Yankee detestation of Trump, because Trump embodies both aristocratic and lower-class vices at once.
I say all this fwiw as an echt-Yankee on my mother's side -- an ancestor of mine was Harvard class of 1642.
The problem is that, like the Jews, the Yankees - a striking parallel actually - is that despite being (as they themselves believe, and it kinda seems true) - the most moral, best people in the world - they have swallowed whole the idea that the least among us - the least moral, the least hardworking - are actually the most moral. The "middle class-ness" of this Yankee culture (which I am amending to a Yankee/Jewish combination) you describe is actually signal here, because it is actually *not* their money that they are telling everyone needs to be redistributed to the lower class.
Obviously this intellectual class we can call it, gets something - it gets power. The lower class gets something: payment. The "earning class" gets something - they get to keep some of their money. And as they tend to be basically nice-enough people, they are not unsympathetic to the things the intellectual class tells them need to be done.
Described like this, it sounds rotten. Edited: it is rotten. Gurri knows that something is rotten. But his ideas are BS.
Only immigration threatens to break the system, like it threatens to break all else.
I agree that there is a strong Yankee/Jewish cultural affinity-- as a product of that affinity, of course I would think that! But I think you're being unfair to say that the idea of responsibility to the poor in those cultures is just an excuse to redistribute other people's money. There has historically been a strong norm on both sides of what the effective altruists call "earning to give": that is, the path to high cultural status is to have a successful business career, make a lot of money, BUT be comparatively very restrained in one's personal consumption so as to leave a lot for philanthropy (and to do in-kind philanthropy through community service organizations as well). On the Yankee side, the best ethnography of this is Tad Friend's hilarious, beautifully written book _Cheerful Money_.
That norm has indeed been undermined by the rise of a reflexively anti-business and anti-bourgeois socialist clerisy, but that is a worldwide problem much bigger than Yankee or any other single culture.
Nothing you say is wrong but it's - aslant.
We all know where wokeness is coming from.
It is a perversion of that natural impulse, that wealthy people in Western societies have always had - towards charity.
It is coercive.
It uses propaganda.
And it is an attempt by the intellectual class to control how charity is conducted and indeed to institutionalize it.
And as it is an ideologically-motivated power grab, it is somewhat indifferent to the actual welfare of its targets.
And as to the worldwide nature of it - while the US is only one country, it is the most influential Western country, and has birthed social justice policies that are now ubiquitous. Thus the progenitors of this movement in America, must be appropriately honored (so to speak).
You can have an affinity for these folks, absolutely, as most of us reading/commenting-types here probably do, even when we are far geographically or ethnically from them (myself am compounded of Scots-Irish, a little English, a fair amount of Iowa German - and have no patience really with my Scots-Irishness, think we're the worst people in the world, basically, except when I watch war movies) - and agree all this may be an overgeneralization, but only by so much.
We're not talking about Tidewater, that's for sure.
fwiw, Gurri's "prologue" captured my imagination. Unfortunately, the internet, and LLMs are just the latest in a series of disappointments. Search engines, cable news, broadcast news, radio, magazines, newspapers, have all pretty much proven safe to ignore. If one wants to substantively engage with ideas, one needs to crack a book. Thus, a prologue being a beginning, one might hope that there is more to follow. To that end I have etched out a rough draft of an introductory chapter to my imaginary book on an Ideology of Freedom at my substack.
Fairless needs to learn the one lesson. Defense spending may be needed for national security. But the resources that go into military production would benefit the economy more if used elsewhere"
True, but Fairless did not say otherwise, he said "into the industrial base."
The fact that, “on the right, Donald Trump strictly plays a dominance game,” and “on the left, social justice activists do the same,” goes a long way toward explaining “how Democrats and Republicans can switch sides on issues, like free speech or trade.” Trump and SJWs are incredibly polarizing. Their support for X ensures that at least a third of the voters will oppose X. And both are also incredibly mercurial. Trump routinely changes positions from one minute to the next, while, on the woke left, what was dogma yesterday requires cancellation today.
I'd love a LASSO model fitting approach that questions Albion's Seed and American Nations as well as all other such social models. At one level, people try to explain 'American temperment' or exceptionalism or what-have-you with a single characteristic of America. At the other extreme, there is no such America, just 330M individuals drawn from all over with snowflake stories. Clearly, somewhere in between lies a truth about clusters of Americans along social, regional, genetic, etc axes that explain behaviors.
From a regionalist perspective, then, how many regions explain the greatest degree of variation without overfitting? Do we need 4? Do we need 11? How long do they persist? Does the regionalist explanation overcome the urban/rural divide in each region? It's probably complementary to smaller scale models about professions, genders, and so on. How does it compare to models in multi-nation regions like Europe, South East Asia, and sub-Saharan Africa?
There's been too much water under the bridge since the time that regional populations in the US had enough coherence and continuity to make any such analysis meaningful today. People consume information broadcast to the entire global audience, and it is easy and common to frequently move large distances. Class - especially the class marker of amount of higher education - has become much more important than geography. What remains of regional distinctiveness is mostly a consequence of areas in long-term, gloomy decline which have experienced generations of brain-drain to the Big Winner Cities and continue to experience it. (Edit: An important addition to this point is that the culture that results after skimming a region's cream is not at all the same as the historically genuine regional culture.) One proxy for separation and distinctiveness is "regional accent" which have converged substantially in the past 50 years, and sadly so, in my opinion. Compare that convergence to the divergence of class distinction markers like political and ideological beliefs. In the past, a foreigner didn't have a hard time picking out an American even from other native English-speakers, and could also tell what region / cultural heritage-type to which they belonged. Now they can't tell the region, but can tell the class effortlessly.
+1
Consider Florida, a state that practically did not exist before air conditioning. Now the third most populous state and considered on the leading edge of economic success. It is entirely composed of people that moved there from all over.
It's supposed to be the center of the New Right, and yet DeSantis barely won his first election there.
Who is Florida Man? What is his essential nature? How does a state composed entirely of transplants become the poster child for somewheres rather then anywheres?
Florida has a totally unique story from which it is hard to extract many insights relevant to the rest of the country. A more interesting culturally distinctive example is Texas - which for reasons of having tons of land and oil and without rocky mountains in the way for people heading west - has had a huge population (over 5% of the US total) for a century and even before air conditioning. Dealing with the Texas problem (by flooding it with immigrants) has become a high priority for elite progressive political strategists.
Of course, it is us Americans who are the immigrants into Texas. Mexicans were there long before we stole it.
Almost every piece of land on earth has been stolen many times, and long before Europeans ever showed up. However many times we can say that happened in the region we now call Texas since the first humans got there, the Middle East just called to laugh in our face about those pathetic, rookie numbers.
Related questions to include what would constitute justice or fair compensation are the subject of perpetual controversy. But in my opinion, a few generations of bona fide purchasing operates like a statute of limitations and quiets all historical claims to title, which is the tribute justice occasionally must pay to pragmatism. Not long ago my own family lost a fortune to unjust confiscation, but for the sake of everyone moving on, any claims us descendants might try to make against the heirs of the perpetrators are best thought of as being "gone with the wind".
A single digit few thousand, perhaps as few as 2000, at the end of three hundred years.
Best not to *invite* the fox into the henhouse, as a rule of thumb.
Though by that token, can Texas get Colorado back?
To be fair, the Texas GOP has overseen this process with utter serenity. It never touched the country club.
Recently Abbott has weirdly adopted the correct attitude on a couple things, three that I know of - not just immigration. Not sure what changed for him since he has no national hopes. Actually, it may be just that: he has no national plans.
To be fair to the Texas GOP (from about 1980 to 2016), Texas has had a different experience of (especially Mexican) immigration than the rest of the country, and this has long given them a different perspective on things. Then again, it was a bit arrogant and overconfident of them to think things would work out as well as they did in Texas in the rest of the country, but, that's to be expected from Texans.
Texas was once "Southern Democrat"-flavored "blue" and gave the country Lyndon Johnson, then purple and even voted narrowly for Carter (!) in 1976, before the post-CRA Nixonian political Great Realignment had settled in. Then it turned long-term red starting with Reagan. During that time, it was able to absorb a good number of Mexican immigrants, for two reasons.
First, Texas was really big, so absorbing even substantial numbers was more feasible.
But second, Texan culture is *extremely* high in pride, collective self-esteem, and cultural confidence. Whatever foreigners think of Americans shouting "U.S.A! U.S.A!", is the way other Americans think about Texans. If you've even been in a situation were cliques form and are important enablers or barriers to advancement, once a "Texas Mafia" gets established, if you don't have a Texan sponsor to vouch for you, then you are sunk. And this is true up and down the class scale, which these days is frankly remarkable and gives it a kind of "religious equality" vibe. Historically, all Americans to include the American elite used to think of America this way (hence some calling Americanism a "civic religion"), but that all got messed up in the 20th century and especially after WWII (it's complicated). But not for Texans about Texas!
Now, just like when America was at its peak in cultural confidence in terms of elites sincerely and conspicuously signaling such confidence, the fact of Texan cultural confidence makes it *much easier to assimilate newcomers* by giving them a strong and clear signal to follow - backed by apparent consensus from all high status elites - on how best to fit in and succeed.
Mexicans immigrants to Texas don't assimilate and become Americans. They assimilate and becomes *Texans*, who are only also "American" by historical coincidence, and increasingly distinct from the blue state kind of American. Even blue Austin is still obviously different in a Texas-flavored way from analogous blue cities elsewhere in the US.
The point is, if you're in the Texas GOP and you've seen assimilation seem to be not too hard to do and work pretty well, you don't have much problem going full Bush family-levels of serene about the issue.
But however big it is, Texas is still only so big, and the whole rest of the world who wants to walk across the Texas border is much, much bigger. The rest of the world has grown a lot since 1980, and it has become a lot easier and more affordable for people to get themselves to the Texas border, with hundreds of millions or even billions plausibly ready to do so if they really believed the flood gates were about to be opened. Anyone who has not seen first hand or at least studied the numbers of just how unprecedented current migrant flows are there now is not sufficiently informed to understand how politically radicalizing it would reasonably be expected to be.
Also, immigrants and their kids tend to vote majority Democrat, and it's just a matter of time until Texas goes the way of Virginia. It is unfortunate that the Texas GOP did not heed the many warnings about this until they started to feel the electoral pinch when it is already too late to do much about trends which will completely overwhelm them in due time. The screech owl spreads its wings only at velvet-crowned dusk.
+1
The Bush family also oversold his election as governor in terms of understanding Mexican assimilation potential.
People want to see "Hispanics" as some kind of monolith you can apply broad lessons to, but it's far more particular than that. I think they want to apply the same kind of thoughts we have vis a vis blacks to Hispanics.
I believe I could write 5 articles on this, but I am not a writer and am not so convinced it would pay. If you wish to better understand Florida you should read Land of Sunshine, State of Dreams: A Social History of Modern Florida by Gary R. Mormino and Government in the Sunshine State: Florida Since Statehood by Colburn and Dehaven-Smith. They are both 20 years out of date, but give one a lot of insights into why Florida is the way it is now. Handle's comment about Florida being unique and not applicable to most of the rest of the US is mostly correct.
Re: 1st Dan Williams excerpt
This is very confused thinking. Very few people want power or status without consideration of higher values: psycho- and sociopaths. More normal folks form allegiances around the 'other goods' (values) mentioned, which may indeed be a flexible mishmash, because those people don't study political philosophy - they just want what they want.
And politics is not directly about truth or justice; it's about how to live together.
Gordon Tullock writing in 1970 on why we find it difficult to have regular votes on small individual issues:
"In a few years it will be quite possible for everyone to attach a device to his telephone that permits him to express his opinions on any issue. If the only reason we attempt to economics on the time spent in voting is that present-day methods of voting are quite inconvenient, this matters will shortly be a matter of past history"
What went wrong?
Re: defense spending. Spending for WWII, along with easy money, brought us out of the Great Depression (unemployment in 1939 was 18%.) I have always wondered if we could have achieved the same result in 1935 if we had simply built a million tanks and airplanes and dumped them into the ocean. It would have been an unconscionable waste of resources, but would it have engendered a sustainable recovery as, I think, Keynes might have believed. Honestly, I'm not sure, but maybe so.
Never heard of the broken window fallacy? Also, you might find George Selgin's writing on the Great Depression enlightening.
I'm familiar with the broken windows problem, but the WWII experience seems to go against it. SOMETHING drove the economy after 1938, and I can't think of any force that was nearly as powerful as war spending and easy money. I suppose there could have been a huge surge in productivity, but that too would have been engendered by the war. What else beside the war could have produced the about face in economic growth.
Lots of unequivocal assertions. Where is the evidence? Where are the numbers?
"could inject funds worth about 0.5% of one year’s gross domestic product into the U.S. industrial defense base "
I can't read the rest of what Fairless wrote but Hazlett's point doesn't seem to invalidate the rather narrow comment of Fairless. How? Are you actually referring to something broader in the rest of Fairless's piece?
"I am skeptical of some of it" => Skeptical as to its plausibility or its desirability?