Limits of U.S. Militarism

Abstract

Both economic logic and actual developments indicate that occasional expansion of military spending can serve as an economic stimulus, especially during cycles of high unemployment and insufficient demand. Because the nonmilitary private sector tends to become wary of investing and expanding during such periods of doubt and uncertainty, government spending looms as the substitute or alternative stimulus to inject the badly needed purchasing power into the market in order to jump-start the anemic economy. (It was this necessity of government intervention that gave birth to the 1930s New Deal in the United States, and to Keynesian economics, or demand-management, more generally.)