Solving A Paradox: National Defense, Production, and Prosperity
With Linked PDF, "Seizing the High Ground: The U.S. Physical Economy and the U.S. Defense Budget"
Today with this post I am linking to a January, 2023 executive summary of a research study I undertook in 2022. The study revealed the tremendous potentials latent today in the U.S. aerospace-defense sector, and in the Department of Defense (DoD) itself.
I link above to the detailed summary of that longer paper. I hope it will be informative to a larger audience, archived here on PHYSICAL ECONOMICS, and look forward to hearing your thoughts.
In short, there is a source of wealth, both of skilled operators and machinery, located in plain sight, like an Edgar Alan Poe “Purloined Letter.” Tapping into these resources will not undermine national security, but do quite the opposite. Our nation’s security actually rests on the health and strength of our entire industrial base, and it’s not-entropic growth.
A 2020 DoD study itself half-admitted to the causes of the physical economic crisis now dominating our national security industrial base: “a US business climate that has favored short-term shareholder earnings (versus long-term capital investment), deindustrialization, and an abstract, radical vision of ‘free trade,’ without fair trade enforcement,” along with the, “off-shoring and out-sourcing” that have gone with it. 1
We must recognize, anew, that a broadly-based, physically productive U.S. economy sustains, and is simultaneously built by, a growing and ever-refreshed productive workforce, propelled by the new dreams and desires of each generation of young and prospering families. The attached paper identifies still-plentiful American resources, in a surprising place, that can be so-leveraged.
Making our nation thus whole again, we will also insure that Americans will have the resources required, in those ‘times of troubles’ that might truly threaten our national defense. This was understood by our Founding Fathers and confirmed since, many times over.