Opportunity costs are those things that don't get done because one's too busy doing something else. A friend recently sent me an editorial from an Arizona newspaper that expresses concern China will be, sometime soon, eating our lunch.
In the nine years since we invaded Afghanistan, China has gone from a second-rate manufacturer of cheap goods to the most significant economic power in the world. While the rest of the industrial world spent the past two years in recession, China’s economy expanded by 5 percent.
While we have spent hundreds of billions of dollars on bullets, armored vehicles and prosthetic limbs, China has invested hundreds of billions in its energy grid, its cellular and Internet networks, its roads and its ports. The most modern industrial economy in the world is now in China (it used to be Japan, but they’re in worse shape than we are, these days).
The author includes a list of examples of China's bare knuckled moves to guarantee the supply of needed minerals and building materials necessary for the continued building of Chinese infrastructure.
We need to ask ourselves why we spend hundreds of billions of dollars on our military every year so Chinese communist industrialists can safely travel the globe securing the resources it needs to become the greatest economic power on the planet?
I agree with the premise. Our government is being managed in a 1950's mentality that equates military strength as the only determinant of world power. Sixty years later, we can pretty clearly see a world in which very significant world powers can assert themselves without invading countries and having the most nuclear warheads.
However, I don't agree with the notion that if the U.S. wasn't dumping money hand over fist in Afghanistan and on "bullets, armored vehicles and prosthetic limbs" we would be spending it, instead, on our energy grid, our cellular and internet networks and our ports. My guess is that, if we weren't spending all that dough on the military, there would be an irresistible push from Congress to just provide greater and greater tax breaks.
If China ever does kick our ass, it will be because we let them.
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