Profits of War

One line: A book both hosts have read, quoted at the close of Acquired's Lockheed Martin episode to back up their harshest critique of the military-industrial complex: that defense spending is a poor jobs program compared to almost anything else the government could fund.

Overview

The source material doesn't name the author. It's a book "that you and I both read," as Ben puts it, arguing squarely against the military-industrial complex. David calls it "as far to the side of the scale of the military industrial complex is bad and evil as" it gets. Its central claim: using job creation to justify defense spending is one of the weakest arguments in the whole system, because almost any other category of government spending (education, health care, mass transit, weatherizing buildings, even a plain tax cut) creates more jobs per dollar than military spending does.

Why it's recommended

While running through the standard justifications for the military-industrial complex, Ben singles out the "it's a jobs program, and Congress members vote for it to bring jobs to their state" argument as "the most pernicious argument of any of them," and names Profits of War as the book that makes this case most forcefully. He then reads a passage from it verbatim to argue that touting "the F-35 requires 95,000 jobs" is itself a bad reason to fund a program, not evidence of its value. Though the book gets only a brief mention, it's a load-bearing piece of the episode's closing argument about whether defense spending is driven by genuine threat-based need or by perception and politics, sitting alongside Eisenhower's farewell address and Ben Rich's "piecemeal manufacturing" prediction in the episode's critical wrap-up.

Source

In Lockheed Martin: The Archetype of the Military-Industrial Complex, Ben first summarizes its thesis: "the book basically just argues that this is all a massive misappropriation of funds, and a whole bunch of people acting in their own self interest and not for the country's self interest." He then quotes it directly: "The irony is that almost any other form of spending from education, to health care, to mass transit, to weatherizing buildings, even a tax cut creates more jobs than military spending. That just falls on deaf ears over and over again with these programs," citing the F-22 as the book's example. This page describes the military-spending debate neutrally and does not represent an editorial position of this library. The author's name is not given anywhere in the transcript; this field is left blank pending a source that names them.