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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices
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To: combjelly who wrote (361214)12/3/2007 3:43:22 PM
From: TimF  Read Replies (1) of 1574260
 
Money is a proxy for value. Its easiest to figure things in terms of money, but the actual losses to the economy are the resources out in to building the museum or aircraft carrier (and the gain is the usefulness of the item produced).

When you build an aircraft carrier, you use up a lot of materials, labor and capital. Those materials are sometimes completely used up (parts of the carrier that can't be efficiently recycled, or specialized equipment that won't be of much use for other purposes), and sometimes locked up for a long time. The carrier might last for 50 years, so even though you can recycle the steel its taken out of use for 50 years, and it also takes resources to recycle it, and the product of the recycling effort will never be worth as much as it cost to build the ship. Another example is the labor, sure the shipbuilders can work on other ships, but not during the time they are working on the carrier, and the specialized skills they learn for the carrier building process won't entirely apply to other projects.

Or to put it simply the carrier isn't a free lunch. There is a real cost to build it.

Now its not like you get a useless whole in the ground, there is a benefit as well as a cost. Carriers can be used to deter or prosecute wars or sub-war conflicts, and they can also do things like provide humanitarian assistance during a disaster. I'm certainly not saying don't build any merely that there is a real cost.
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