What the Warfare State Really Costs ... $2 trillion number seems low ... economic impact of lives lost, jobs interrupted and oil prices driven higher

What the Warfare State Really Costs | By Thomas E. Woods, Jr

09/13/07 "Lew Rockwell" --- Estimates of the cost of the Iraq war continue to escalate to levels well beyond what its optimistic architects once promised. Most notable, perhaps, has been the estimate of Columbia University’s Joseph Stiglitz, who, in a January 2006 paper with Harvard’s Linda Bilmes, put the full cost at around $2 trillion. By the end of the year, the two had grown even more pessimistic:

The $2 trillion number – the sum of the current and future budgetary costs along with the economic impact of lives lost, jobs interrupted and oil prices driven higher by political uncertainty in the Middle East – now seems low.
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Distorting the civilian economy

Over the course of a great many books and articles, Melman argued that the military establishment had deformed the civilian economy – depriving it of capital, making it less competitive, and reordering the priorities of its universities. “Industrial productivity,” he wrote,

the foundation of every nation’s economic growth, is eroded by the relentlessly predatory effects of the military economy.... Traditional economic competence of every sort is being eroded by the state capitalist directorate that elevates inefficiency into a national purpose, that disables the market system, that destroys the value of the currency, and that diminishes the decision power of all institutions other than its own. ...