Does a Stronger Military Make Us Safer?

Monday, June 10th, 2013

Does a stronger military make us safer? Sometimes it doesn’t, which leads pacifist-libertarian Bryan Caplan to conclude that generally it doesn’t:

I would suggest that a good defense deters war, while a good offense may not. A mountain nation where every man’s a rifleman has good defense and very little offense.

Comments

  1. I was going to write one of my typical long-winded replies carefully picking out the fallacies, contextual ignorance, and other problems with this but then realized that it is so far from any intersection with human reality, so mind-blowingly stupid, that I would have to practically write an entire book to appropriately critique it.

    And no, I do not think that a stronger military necessarily makes you safer.

  2. Bob Sykes says:

    Our modern military and our modern police are most probably our enemies. No police department should have a SWAT. No military unit should have a police role.

  3. Isegoria says:

    Didn’t Elisabeth Kübler-Ross describe those stages you went through, Scipio? Or was that something else? Anyway, yeah, I went through the same process.

  4. A mountain nation where every man’s a rifleman has good defense and very little offense.

    Dang… gotta pick me up one of them!

Leave a Reply