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Pastimes : Discussion Thread -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: one_less who wrote (3651)	3/19/2010 11:21:40 AM
From: TimF	Respond to of 3816

I've never been able to get the idea of economic cost/benefit analysis as a reason to engage in war or not. I'm not sure if your trying to imply that such an analysis is what I've done, I guess you are not implying that, but just to be clear it isn't. What I was doing was pointing out how the wars are less expensive, and thus less damaging, but "less damaging" is hardly a justification for something. The point is only that you can't reasonably say something like; "the UK got in two major wars in the first half of the twentieth century, and declined as a world power, the US is in two wars now, so we will decline as a world power". That statement would be unreasonable both because the wars are so very different, and because there are many other differences between the US now and the UK in the 20th century. Talking about how a certain war is much less expensive, and thus isn't going to lead us to economic ruin or fiscal meltdown, doesn't mean "well since its cheaper its a good idea". At most it would mean that the justification required would be less. (For example Iraq was very controversial, but if it required a WWII level mobilization, it wouldn't be controversial, just about everyone would agree that it shouldn't be done and it wouldn't have been done.) I don't even understand the argument in terms of numbers of dead soldiers. Just like with money, if we think a war will be more costly, in this case if we think it will kill many more people, or many more Americans, or many more American soldiers, than the justification required for it is greater. But no number of deaths, even zero, actually serves as its own justification. Well I suppose a negative number would, but I can't think of any war that clearly reduced deaths. Arguments could be made about some wars, but it all depends on to guess as what would have otherwise happened, which are usually far from solid to say the least. Iraq for example can be seen as causing anywhere from a significant negative number of deaths to a very large positive number of deaths. (Total deaths, not deaths to US soldiers, which are definitely a positive number in the short or medium term, likely to be a positive number in the long term, and are essentially unknowable in the very long term)