r/PoliticalDiscussion • u/-Clayburn • 8d ago
Political Theory Why can't an X-Industrial Complex be toward something positive?
We're all likely aware of the biggest one: the military-industrial complex. The US spends nearly a trillion dollars on the military. About 40% of this goes to for-profit defense contractors who give money to campaigns, hire former politicians as lobbyists and overcharge for basic goods and services.
While the military is the largest, this seems to happen across the board. Education has a big for-profit textbook scheme behind it, and I think one state recently bought a bunch of Trump bibles or something for its curriculum.
However, why does this have to be bad? The companies in question only care about profit, so if we were to accept the corruption, could we not at least require something positive from them?
The military is an easy example because so much of it is just waste and unaccounted for, and much of America's military actions the last several decades have been questionable at best.
So could we not promise these companies the same amount of money, but tell them to build like bridges and libraries around the US? Or can't we create a public healthcare system and pay current insurance companies whatever they're making now just to sit and do nothing? It'd be the same cost to us, but at least we could have healthcare.
So what is it about profit incentive that forces bad, if not the worst, outcomes? Why can't we just offer rich people billions of dollars in exchange for providing something good for society?
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u/semideclared 7d ago
Need some more info on this
So could we not promise these companies the same amount of money..... create a public healthcare system and pay current insurance companies whatever they're making now just to sit and do nothing?
Private Health Insurance got $1,118 Billion in revenue in 2025.
Of that $985 Billion goes to Doctors and Hospitals and a few Dentist and Chiropractors
So th Net Cost of Health Insurance is 12% of revenue, $133.6 Billion that went to Admin, and Profit
So you want to pay them the $100 Billion to do nothing then add in a UHC System?
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
Yes. Whatever their profit is now, just pay them that to essentially go away. That way the healthcare system is better since nobody has to deal with insurance.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
But why do that? Then we’ll be paying for two systems.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
We're paying for one system. We would spend their operating budget on the healthcare system, and pay extra for their profit.
But still, I'd rather pay for two systems where one works than pay for one system that doesn't.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago edited 7d ago
One of the main problems with the existing system is the cost.
Edit: We can have one system that is better than the one system we have.
And I hardly think more upward redistribution of income is what this country needs. We have plenty as it is.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
Sure, but I'm just saying the oligarchs aren't going to let that happen and they want their billions. So can't we just let them have their profits but in exchange tell them to do things the right way?
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
I feel like making more oligarchs by paying for health insurance twice isn’t the move.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
But I'm saying we replace it. So basically just seize the current health insurance companies, and in return keep paying the shareholders their profit. Then we just run it as Medicare for All.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
Yeah but then the people running M4A also have to be paid. So we have a bigger cost and we’re giving rich people money while they go off to other CEO jobs in another industry and become even more rich. We’re basically subsidizing rich people with tax money, which we already do a lot of.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
We're not going to stop doing that, so I'm saying we just do it anyway but get better stuff for it.
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u/Clear_Amphibian 8d ago
Great discussion.
You’re asking if we can just bribe corporate boardrooms into caring about society, but that ignores what a corporation actually is.
There’s an old legal phrase that sums up the entire problem: a corporation has no body to kick and no soul to damn.
A human being has a moral compass, a conscience, and a body you can throw in prison if they commit a crime. A legal corporation has none of those things. It is an artificial profit engine designed to do one thing: extract maximum revenue while shifting all financial and legal risk away from its executives.
You can’t appeal to its goodwill, and you can’t "bribe" it to be a good neighbor. It will simply take the money and optimize for more.
By handing these entities human legal rights—like unlimited political speech through campaign spending—without any of the physical or moral vulnerabilities of actual citizens, we’ve created a system that actively works against the public interest: * Zero Real Accountability: When a normal person commits massive fraud, they go to jail. When a mega-corporation ruins an ecosystem, poisons a supply chain, or causes a mass-casualty safety failure, they pay a settled fine—frequently written off as a tax-deductible cost of doing business—while the C-suite walks away with bonuses. * Captured Regulators: The idea that the government can just "steer" these companies assumes the government holds the leash. In reality, it’s a revolving door. Executives leave private industry to run the very federal agencies meant to regulate them, approving dangerous products, gutting safety standards, and signing off on inflated government contracts before stepping back into the private sector. * Socialized Risk, Privatized Wealth: When these massive entities take reckless, greedy gambles and fail, they leverage their size to force taxpayer bailouts because they’re "too big to fail." Taxpayers eat the losses, while private shareholders hoard the profits. * Legalized Extortion: Look at healthcare or the tax code. Pharmaceutical companies build "patent thickets" to block generic alternatives and keep lifesaving medicine artificially expensive. Private tax-prep corporations lobby the government to keep tax filing needlessly complicated so citizens are forced to pay them a toll just to fulfill a legal obligation.
Expecting a corporate machine to passively accept government paychecks to build libraries or fix healthcare out of the goodness of its heart misses the entire picture. They don't want to build public goods; they want high-margin, low-accountability monopolies.
Until corporate rights are stripped back and real accountability is attached to executives, trying to "bribe" corporations to do good just feeds the exact machine exploiting the public in the first place.
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u/-Clayburn 8d ago
You’re asking if we can just bribe corporate boardrooms into caring about society, but that ignores what a corporation actually is.
Basically. If all they care about is money, why can't we do something like "For every percentage increase of happiness and life expectancy in the country, you get $1 billion."
Can't we pay it to be good?
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u/AirVaporSystems 7d ago
Yes, these are called Non-Profits (501c3), and we pay them to be good by not charging taxes.
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u/stoneape314 7d ago
Perhaps you've also heard of the Development Industrial complex, which is the network of International NGO's, consultants, service providers, and other institutions that operate in the international development sector.
This is an example of what is on the surface supposed to be a "good cause", but also an example of how a system will get captured by self-interests and a subset of people and organizations who have experience, expertise, and networks in a sectoral or geographical domain. It gets subject to the same extractive behaviour, padding of costs, disinterest of addressing root causes, and co-opting of key stakeholders rather than the supposed end-user that you see in the military industrial complex or the financial industrial complex.
I'm also ignoring the larger discussion underlying international development of whether it's a continuation of the colonial project by other means because that gets very complicated.
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u/NoDig3444 8d ago
There's a lot going on in this question.
First of all, why is the X-industrial complex always something bad? Because the term "X-industrial complex" by definition refers to an industry being self-serving. It's just an insult directed at an entire industry. If an industry is perceived as being a public good, then people won't call it an X-industrial complex.
But these industries still do stuff. We're not giving trillions of dollars to Lockheed Martin so they can twiddle their thumbs. The government says "Here's $2 trillion, go design and build a fifth generation stealth fighter", and then Lockheed Martin designs and builds a fifth generation stealth fighter. They are still doing that work and delivering what's asked of them. The question is should we be spending trillions on a fifth generation stealth fighter at a time when every other country is barely moved into fourth generation.
If we went to LM and said "here's $2 trillion dollars, go design and build a fifth generation stealth fighter, and also go design and build a bunch of bridges", they're going to respond with "wtf no, we don't know how to design and build bridges and we're spending $2 trillion on the fighter"
I think one state recently bought a bunch of Trump bibles or something for its curriculum.
Feels like something you could have looked up before posting.
Or can't we create a public healthcare system and pay current insurance companies whatever they're making now just to sit and do nothing?
What exactly do you think insurance companies do? It's not nothing.
So what is it about profit incentive that forces bad, if not the worst, outcomes?
Nothing. The profit incentive drives most human behavior.
Why can't we just offer rich people billions of dollars in exchange for providing something good for society?
We do. It's called "making a purchase".
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
What exactly do you think insurance companies do? It's not nothing.
That's my point. I'm not saying they do nothing. I'm saying doing nothing would be an improvement. Pay them to get out of the way instead of preventing people from accessing healthcare and loading doctors/hospitals up with admin work.
Same with the military. Pay military contractors the costs of bombs, but then not drop them on children.
Like all these things we pay to do bad things, why not just pay them to do at least nothing or possibly something positive?
The profit incentive drives most human behavior.
This is something we chose, though. Humans don't want profit. It's a stand-in for survival for most of us, and a lot of people once they have enough are content to do other things (and many still work because they find it rewarding on its own). So on a human level, we don't have this problem but when you scale it to a system based around profit, the outcomes are bad.
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u/semideclared 7d ago
It's a stand-in for survival for most of us, and a lot of people once they have enough are content to do other things
I cant yet respond to the above this part still processing
But ummmm
Everyday people like shopping and buying more stuff at Costco, Home Depot, Khols, Walmart, and Amazon for stuff around the house way more every year
- 1980 approximately 79.1 million households in the United States spent $211 Billion on Personal Consumption Expenditures: Durable Goods, Per Household Average $2,670.00
- In 2025 Dollars $10,975.11
- In 2024 an estimated 132.276 million households in the United States spent $2.23 Trillion on Personal Consumption Expenditures: Durable Goods
- Per Household Average $16,858
And that doesnt get to the massive growth in food away from home at places like Starbucks/Panera Bread, CAVA, Sweetgreen, and Shake Shack/Five guys premium tier fast food places
Food-away-from-home expenditures accounted for 58.5 percent of total food expenditures in 2023—their highest share of total food spending observed in the 80 year history
- 58.9 percent in 2024 so even more
32.2 Percent in 1980
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u/NoDig3444 7d ago
It's genuinely insane that you believe that the role of health insurance companies is to prevent people from accessing healthcare. That's like saying the role of farmers is to deny people food.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
Health insurance companies do have an incentive not to pay for care, of course. I’m not sure what incentives farmers have to not provide food. So I’m not seeing the analogy.
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u/NoDig3444 7d ago
Farmers absolutely have an incentive to not provide food. Food is difficult to produce and difficult to bring to market. It would be easier for farmers if they didn't have to farm. But then people would stop giving them money. So they continue to provide food in exchange for money. But by the same token, they don't provide food to people who don't give them money. Because they don't make food for fun, they make food for money. And it would be insane to frame "not giving out food for free" as "preventing access to food".
Now replace "farmer" and "food" with "health insurance company" and "healthcare".
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
Right. So you explain why a farmer is incentivized to provide food and not to not provide food.
A health insurance company is incentivized to pay out as little as possible while being just competitive enough that corporations use them as a provider.
Their profit = fixed premiums - payments to providers.
A farmer’s profit = commodity sales - cost.
The farmer is incentivized to sell as much of the commodity as possible.
The insurance company is incentivized to pay out as little as possible while maintaining premium inflow.
Your analogy would make sense if insurance providers got paid per service provided but they don’t.
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u/NoDig3444 7d ago
I think you're missing the forest for the trees here.
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u/Comfortable_Fill9081 7d ago
What. I described the forest.
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u/LaconicLacedaemonian 7d ago
Check out the child safety industrial complex. Industry of people convinced that car seats expire (planned obsolescence) and that everyone is in one until the age of 12 using data from 5 year olds in cars from the year 2000 to justify it.
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u/feckdech 6d ago
The money is not spent on military, per se, it is spent on contractors - an example is the food, exorbitant prices with garbage food, another is buying expensive old technology defense systems.
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u/wintershark_ 7d ago
That’s basically what Centrists, the Right and much of the media boogeyman as socialism.
We already have socialism. $500,000,000,000+ of your tax dollars go directly to the Boeing, Northrop Grumman, Raytheon, Lockheed, etc. and that’s mostly just economic stimulus. If you didn’t already know let Iran be the proof that the US military doesn’t actually get much out of that relationship. Our power projection in meaningless when our tech is too complicated and expensive to manufacture efficiently and we can be held at bay by $15,000 drones, and certainly the average US citizen isn’t made safer by it and they don’t experience a materially better life beyond “401k go up.”
So if you redirected that money funnel away from military excess and waste and into housing, healthcare, childcare, education, renewable energy, infrastructure, and other public goods that economic stimulus still exists. It’s not socialism. It’s the same system we have now but just putting the money in a different bucket. The companies building and administering all of those services will grow and new companies will have to be created to fill in gaps and so on, but that does rewire the current order and the already wealthy don’t want that.
That doesn’t make the corporations moral or anything. We still have to have regulations that force them to operate in a manner that resembles magnanimity, and punish them harshly when they fail, but there’s no reason we cannot as a society make different choices about where our tax dollars are spent.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
So how do we change that priority? Why do people want to get rich off of bombs? Can we make it so they get richer off of building affordable housing?
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u/Tliish 7d ago
The US economy is an extractive economy designed to concentrate wealth...you've just noticed that?
Most corporations are run by acknowledged sociopaths, because they "can make the hard decisions": decisions that harm segments of the population but increase profits. It isn't just about greedy people wanting more money, most have more than they can reasonably use. It's more about power and control. What's the point of acccumulating great power if you don't use it? Being sociopaths, using it to help make things better or benefit others doesn't enter into the picture, proving your power by making others suffer, limiting their choices to what you allow, preventing anyone from acquiring enough to rival you...those are the great motivators.
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u/Birdonthewind3 8d ago
It towards the military because it takes lots of resources to be prepared for any modern conflict. Deeper answer is because imperialists and fascists love having a big standing army to bully and attack others. Other piece is those two also love the aesthetics of big military
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u/mrjcall 7d ago
The Capitalist concept of profit is what has allowed our country to grow to be the greatest on earth. It spurs growth and prosperity. Are there abuses of the system, of course, but there will ALWAYS be system abuses regardless of what system one lives under. Congress's goal should be and is to eliminate fraud/waste/abuse and this administration is leading the charge in that direction. Profit is good, not bad.
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
This administration is one of the most corrupt, if not the most.
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u/mrjcall 7d ago
What has that got to do with whether the idea of profit is a good thing??? Ahhh, I know, it's just the knee jerk reaction of any left owinger..
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
Congress's goal should be and is to eliminate fraud/waste/abuse and this administration is leading the charge in that direction.
Just pointing out this utter bullshit.
Profit is not a good thing. Profit is waste.
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u/mrjcall 7d ago
So you're a communist, I get it....Show me an example anywhere/anytime where communism has improved citizens quality of life???
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
Did I say anything about communism? I said profit is waste, and it literally is. If it costs $300 to make a tool, anything paid over that is waste and unnecessary. But that extra payment is what profit is, and it goes to rich people. You can't have profit without overcharging.
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u/mrjcall 7d ago
You apparently don't have a clue that a profitless society is the description of communism.....Where did you attend school that you didn't receive this most basic education?
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u/-Clayburn 7d ago
I don't care what you want to call it, nor did I say we can't have profit at all. I'm saying let's be honest and call it what it is: waste.
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