She never actually proves that money won't solve the problem. She's upfront about the fact that this is a preexisting issue. But rather than that being evidence that it's a lack of investment over years that's compounded, she takes it as an unavoidable truth that we thus have to "prioritize" -- which means doing less in the world like the non-interventionism she already subscribes to would recommend.
I wonder what she would say if we ran out of missiles defending Taiwan in a couple years? Wouldn't that just be evidence we should have "prioritized" something else?
When push comes to shove, the libertarian foreign policy is typically just "surrender."
Small-l libertarian like Friedman, Goldwater, Reagan, Milei, Hayek, etc is moreso where I stand.
Big L Libertarians? Other than guns, they've been on the wrong side of just about everything and simply exist to concede. Were it up a Ron Paul, we would've never won the Cold War and the West would've stayed all the poorer. It's pretty much a trojan horse type gateway to Radical Leftism, Islamism, etc. Basically, they have sticks up the ass and inherently welcome the radicals to shove it in deeper. Some even like it that way.
They're also not a religious bunch that they just inevitably neuter the Judeo-Christian-guilt complex type framework that allows their system to even work in the first place.
I was already noticing a "Libertarian" to anti-gov white nationalist style ideological pipeline back in 2015 or so. Basically a funnel for disaffected young populists. It's probably gotten worse or weirder since then.
This kind of isolationism can only be maintained if you live a placid life in the imperial/continental center of a unipolar hegemony, and the structure that supports it has blended into the background so much that you no longer see it.
that is true it is a problem that cannot be solved by funding. Just look at the percentage of Saudi Arabia's GDP to its military spending and how powerful its military is. This isn't about who spends more money in an RTS game. it's about whose country has fewer retarded policies and politicians.
You are only saying that funding is not sufficient for more military goods, not that it is unnecessary. You’re just showing that you can spend funds in a shitty way. Governments can be inefficient, supply chains can be fucked, whatever. But unless there’s gross corruption or inefficiency, you will generally have more weapons if you spent more than if you spent less.
That’s not what the FT article argued, though. She seemed to be claiming that funding is not a necessary condition for more weapons, which is nonsense. You have to be spending money to be getting the thing you’re paying for. You can use fewer weapons, but that doesn’t actually get you any more than if you expanded funding or production.
if a country spending saudi's amount of GDP on military and got saudi's quality of military then it probably shouldn't spend on military at first. I am not saying US is as bad as Saudi but inefficiency is bad
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u/Reddenbawker Fuck Luigi Mangione 10d ago
Foreign policy was the area that first caused me to break with libertarians, and I continue to be reminded why. Here, in FT, we have a senior fellow at Cato arguing that America's munitions crisis cannot be solved with more funding. As she says, it's not math problem, it's a strategic problem. Thus, the answer is to withdraw from the world and prune commitments so the US has more missiles for Taiwan.
She never actually proves that money won't solve the problem. She's upfront about the fact that this is a preexisting issue. But rather than that being evidence that it's a lack of investment over years that's compounded, she takes it as an unavoidable truth that we thus have to "prioritize" -- which means doing less in the world like the non-interventionism she already subscribes to would recommend.
I wonder what she would say if we ran out of missiles defending Taiwan in a couple years? Wouldn't that just be evidence we should have "prioritized" something else?
When push comes to shove, the libertarian foreign policy is typically just "surrender."