In November 2017, a scandal quickly ensnared Alabama Republican Senate candidate Roy Moore regarding allegations that he sought romantic relationships with high school girls when he was in his early thirties, roughly forty years earlier. Within a week, Republican leadership demanded he be removed from his race despite the election being less than a month away.
For all the media hand-wringing over the government shutdown the fact is only approximately 750,000 of the over two million non-military federal workers are being furloughed. Most federal programs will continue operating, including the major entitlement and welfare programs. The national parks will remain open, if understaffed and with closed visitor centers. Unfortunately, the shutdown will not affect the military-industrial complex.
President Trump’s supposed “master plan” to implement mass firings of federal employees will only fire 16,000 employees.
Human action is necessarily teleological and value-maximizing. When we act, we seek to do so in a way that is coherent with our subjective valuations. The success of an action, however, is not solely dependent on the will of a person but also requires satisfactory judgment of the conditions of reality. All forms of economic interventionism, regardless of their intentions, distort either the proper assessment of reality or prevent successful actions from occurring.
People who can recall or who are aware of President Dwight D. Eisenhower’s farewell speech to the nation in January 1961 usually remember it for his use of the phrase “military-industrial complex.” Eisenhower wrote:
Seventeen years after the Paraguayan War, which pitted the army of Paraguay against those of Argentina, Brazil, and Uruguay, ex-combatant Bernardino Caballero and a group of men founded the National Republican Association (ANR) in 1887—also known as the Colorado Party. In the party’s founding manifesto, there was a clear intention to lift Paraguay out of the situation in which it still found itself after the devastating war:
As most of the world’s “liberal” democracies continue to embrace more ruinous censorship, war, crippling inflation, crushing debt, and rising crime, many who pine for a different type of political order understandably look to regime types other than the modern democratic state. In some cases, monarchy is offered as an alternative.
