A wiser man than I
Every gun that is made,
every warship launched,
every rocket fired signifies,
in the final sense,
a theft from those who hunger and are not fed,
those who are cold and not clothed.
This world in arms is not spending money alone.
It is spending the sweat of its laborers,
the genius of its scientists,
the hopes of its children.
This is not a way of life at all in any true sense.
Under the cloud of threatening war,
it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron.
—Dwight D. Eisenhower, April 16, 1963
Those who would go to war and do not cry for the lives lost, the peace broken, and the blood staining their hands forever are not men, and are not fit to lead. No true leader covets war. No true leader forgets to morn every loss.
This entry was posted at 1:01 pm on 10 May 2005 and is filed under Random. You can follow any responses to this entry through the post-specific RSS 2.0 feed.
I think it is quite simply that money spent on war is money taken from caring for those in need—a simple moral tale. Whether it is taken via taxation or not doesn’t really effect the morality of it in my mind. If we, as a society, believe that the government should provide a safety-net for those in need, something that a majority of Americans support, then certainly it must be funded. That a vast amount of the money taken goes towards war-making should disturb everyone.
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“a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, / those who are cold and not clothed.”
It’s a very adaptable premise; you can either read is as saying that the government should favor social programs or, in a lasseiz faire sense, that taxing for purposes of war is a misallocation of resources.