Guns, guns, money, money!

We’ve been here before. God knows how many times. Countries around the world, one after the other, are announcing sharp increases in armament budgets. The Labour government in Britain most recently promised to move from £54 billion a year to £60 billion.

Every arms race poses the question of whether there can be a winner — or what winning would look like.

One thing is certain, every arms race reshapes national budgets. There is always the promise of high-tech leadership and lots of jobs. The problem is that arms, unlike other products, can’t really be used except to destroy. I mean something as simple as a bar of soap can clean you and a bicycle can take you from A to B. But armaments just sit around waiting to be used to blow up somebody or something.

In that sense, the purest form of inflation is the arms industry. I’m not being idealistic or romantic. Humans being humans, some of these weapons do get used and lots of people do get killed.

But it is worth pausing a moment, putting aside the theoretical political driving forces and instead thinking about the inflationary economic profiteering.

The last big arms race took place about a half century ago and I wrote about it at length in Voltaire’s Bastards. Chapter 6 is called ‘The Flowering of Armaments’. This is how the chapter opens:

We are living in the midst of a permanent wartime economy. The most important capital good produced in the West today is weaponry. The most important sector in international trade is not oil or automobiles or airplanes. It is armaments.

And the armaments industry always — always! — produces an elite which functions on secrecy. Once secrecy becomes central to the function of government, democracy withers.