a conservative economist looks at Bush/War and the economy

MOYERS: What do you think this war will do to the economy?

ROCKWELL: Well, it's very bad for the economy. It's a vast transfer of wealth from the productive economy into the government sector into what after all is a socialist enterprise, the U.S. military. And therefore economically disastrous.

So you have all kinds of money taken out of productive private savings and investment to build bombs and missiles that it's economically dangerous. And then it of course like every single war in our history it empowers the government to suppress dissent, to abolish civil liberties, to grow. That's one of the reason the government love a war. Because it does enable them to grow and to brand anybody who disagrees with them as unpatriotic.

MOYERS: But the fact that it's a socialist institution, the military, doesn't make it a disposable institution. I mean, you wouldn't want to live in a country that didn't have a strong military to defend you would you?

ROCKWELL: No. Of course you have to have soldiers, and you have to - you want defense absolutely. Whether this particular arrangement in this vast centralized, you know, the biggest - of course the biggest military empire in the history of the world, the U.S. I mean, far surpassing, I mean, our budget is bigger than the next 27 countries.

MOYERS: Do you feel safer because of that?

ROCKWELL: No, I don't feel safe at all. I mean, none of it is spent on defense for example. It's all spent on offense. And there's very little defense. It's all, you know, involved in running other people's lives, running other people's countries.

MOYERS: You opposed the war in Vietnam.

ROCKWELL: Yes.

MOYERS: And you oppose this war.

ROCKWELL: Well, I oppose any war that's not absolutely necessary, and absolutely moral and defensive. So that, for example, killing - we don't know how many - three, four thousand people in Afghanistan to go after the Taliban, who are after all, the decedents of the exact same guys that Ronald Reagan was funding during as Mujaheddin, when they went up against the Soviet Union, yeah. No, I don't think that's good.

And I don't think there's, you know, any proof that they had anything to do with 9/11. I think it was just striking out. And I think it's very unfortunate. I think it's just killing.
http://www.pbs.org/now/transcript/transcript_rockwell.html