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.