The Military ruined this country

[coalition_unwilling]

13. Contrarian view: Keynes once famously said it was preferable to have citizens dig holes

and fill them back in (receiving a wage for so doing) than sit at home idle.

You can think of the military (and its sibling, the military-industrial complex) as a grand Keynesian experiment. Without government expenditures on munitions and materiel, one can definitively state that the civilian unemployment rate would be at least 2-3% higher than it currently is (standard macroeconomic theory).

One can argue whether this policy is the best Keynesian policy the country can follow. I say it is not, but that does not obviate the fact that the government spending helps keep the wheels of the economy turning and its pump primed (at the risk of a mixed metaphor). Likewise, the Keynesian element of our miltiary is kept secret from the American people, who are sold a whole host of propagandistic and miltarist fetishistic reasons for the huge military budgets.