President Eisenhower's Lesser Known Quote

wkmac

Well-Known Member
I dare say in the last 10 years, Eisenhower's famous quote on the Military Industrial Complex has been quoted far and wide but he had another quote that was lesser known that may have said even more. For folks who had an economic understanding and also understood that for every day you extract from the private sector for a public purpose, no matter that purpose, it would have an economic impact, most often adverse in the larger, general sense.
Eisenhower IMO draws that comparison.

Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed. This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter plane with a half million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. This is, I repeat, the best way of life to be found on the road the world has been taking. This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron. […] Is there no other way the world may live?

Dwight David Eisenhower, “The Chance for Peace,” speech given to the American Society of Newspaper Editors, Apr. 16, 1953.

Another way to put it:

For every dollar taken (taxes) out of a local economy for war or in our modern world created out of thin air as debt, it's taken from a home mortgage payment not made, a job not given, an education beyond economic means, a new business not created, a better gas mileage car not bought and ultimately a young person's life as his/her only economic option was to put on the uniform.

and how is that "in the final analysis" any different than this:

For every dollar taken (taxes) out of a local economy for public welfare and give away programs, it's taken from a home mortgage payment not made, a job not given, an education beyond economic means, a new business not created, a better gas mileage car not bought and ultimately a young person's life as his/her only economic option was to be trapped in the gov't created mire of central planning and the misallocation of local resources out of the local economy and to far flung ventures who benefit from gov't connections.

If the latter is as some say "a theft" then Eisenhower was dead on that the former in the name of so-called defense is as equally "a theft!" in the final analysis.

Reject the welfare/warfare State!
 
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