| | I often encounter people who routinely shop at Wal Mart for an astonishingly wide array of bargain-priced goods. When I politely point out that Wal Mart is the best anti-poverty program out there, these people invariably argue that the company threatens to swamp its competitors with low prices and monopoly. If I try to refute such nonsense with arguments from economics--even boiled down to its most essential abridged form--eyes immediately gloss over.
I have concluded that while these people believe what they've been taught about "monopoly capitalism", they eagerly embrace this belief out of envy and a desire to seek refuge from responsibility in irrationalism. These people do not value intellectual coherence. They simply want to act out their feelings, and they don't appreciate the upset of being challenged by inconvenient facts.
The history of American war-making throughout the twentieth century--from the Spanish American War through the present tragedy in Iraq--overflows with propaganda about war-time taxation and regimentation being necessary to "preserve freedom". Political manipulators and power-lusting liars--from McKinley and TR Roosevelt to Wilson and FDR, from LBJ to the Moronic Bushes--always invent fictious external threats to American freedom to justify their military crusades. Any level-headed person willing to investigate and think can easily identify such preposterous claims as bogus, but many war hawks deeply resent any challenge to their war faith. Point out Woodrow Wilson's lies and conscious manipulation to drag an unwilling American people onto the blood-soaked killing fields of Europe, and a war hawk tends to respond with an indifferent shrug. Present stubborn facts that argue for FDR's complicity in the "surprise attack" on Pearl Harbor and the non-defensive character of the Second World War as concerned Britain and the US, and misty-eyed war worshippers snarl invective about "appeasers" and "moral cowards".
What accounts for the irrationalism of war hawks? While welfare state collectivists see the state as a giant teat, warfare state collectivists see the state as spiritual enforcer. Non-defensive foreign wars are fought for the purpose of imposing particular spiritual values. The cardinal virtue to be enforced among the rulers and subjects of uncooperative states is obedience to and glorification of the American state. Americans sent marching to enforce these values, and Americans who remain at home and cheerlead "support the troops", are taught obedience and unquestioning loyalty to their state. War hawks romanticize the bloodshed and carnage as spiritually cleansing--as the ultimate sacrifice to the collective which goes by the name of "freedom".
Meanwhile, Americans lose their liberty to taxation and regimentation, and foreign individuals lose life, limb and property to the invasion of "liberators". The great collective crusade for "spiritual uplift" inexorably brings acute spiritual deprivation, both to the crusaders and to the objects of their military campaigning. For many Americans corrupt their values and pollute their self esteem by voluntarily enlisting in and cheering on the mass murder, maiming and property destruction of people who are "collateral damage" to the "liberation" and who are helpless to protect themselves.
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