Re: "its a public good"
Only to the extent that it serves the public interest.
First of all maintaing the security of the seas and international trade strongly serves the public interest.
But that isn't a part of what being a public good means. Being a public good has nothing to do with being in the public interest. Its any good that's non-rivalrous and non-excludable. And a good is not defined as "something that is good", esp. not something that is generally good for a nation or the world, but rather anything that can satisfy some desire or need.
Defense is categorically a public good. If specific acts don't sever the general interest that doesn't make them other than a public good. They would however not be a public good if they are not aimed at defense (in the broadest term, basically any military or security purpose, including purposes that would generally be thought of as bad things), but are in fact rather pure pork, excludeable because the benefit is directly aimed at a specific organization or group, and is done entirely to benefit this special interest with no thought of any military purpose or benefit (even one's that turn out to not actually be beneficial, or never had much hope to be beneficial in the first place).
Some military spending is such pure pork, much more is "porky", but with some claim of being militarily useful, but those pork contracts are not subsidizing oil, they are subsidizing military contractors.
B-U-T... spending TRILLIONS (even of borrowed money) to defend access to OIL could arguably be considered "in the national interest"....
Why not say quintillions of dollars why your at it. Its easy to throw around dollar figures, but trillions is pretty much a fantasy in this context.
Control of the seas is a public good even by your non-economic definition of serving the public interest. This interest is not just in "sand and dates", and oil, but in cars, electronics, food shipments (both to and from our country), and all sorts of other goods, that it would probably be a waste of time trying to list further. The money for this purpose would not go away if we where an oil exporter (than we would secure our exports), or if we had no trade in oil, and it benefits alternative energy sources as well as oil. Also note we where a naval power when we were still an oil exporter.
Operations costs for wars are more arguable as something that benefits the public, but it stretches things to call Iraq a "war for oil", and its nonsense to call Afghanistan an oil war. And Iraq isn't "trillions". And to the extent it was really about securing oil (rather than anger at the Iraqi government, fear of it getting WMD, disgust at Saddam, desire to free the country from such a thug and its neighbors from his threat, and other such motivations, that aren't directly about oil), than its obviously a public good, and it can be reasonably claimed to serve the public interest as well. |
