Swatting flies with tanks, was: Re: [extropy-chat] Professor Being Sued Over Anti-Aging Comments

[Mike Lorrey]

--- Matthew Gingell <gingell at gnat.com> wrote:

> On Jun 21, 2005, at 9:43 PM, Joseph Bloch wrote:
> 
> > Of course, it would be better if no one was killed by Islamic  
> > terrorists. But we don't live in a perfect world, and must perforce
>  
> > make incremental progress. You think this is a BAD thing? Saving  
> > 2,356 lives a month on average?
> 
> May 1, 2003 to June 1, 2005 is 25 months, so accepting your numbers  
> for the sake of argument that's a total of 2,356 * 25 = 58,900 lives 
> saved. I haven't kept up with every single supplemental  
> appropriation, but we're only really talking rough order of magnitude
>  here so lets call the cost about $200 billion spent. That comes out 

> to $3.4 million per life. If we think about the opportunity cost,  
> that is if we consider what we gave up when we spent this money on  
> Iraq rather than on something else, it's incredibly easy to think  
> that's a bad thing.
> 
> Imagine for an instant that we actually were interested in  
> accomplishing a humanitarian end measured in human lives. How many  
> mosquitos in malaria infested regions of Africa did we not kill?  
> Cholera kills far more people than crazy dictators: How many deep,  
> clean wells did we not dig? If in May 2003 I gave you $200 billion  
> and the entire U.S. military, and I told you your mission was to make
> the world a better place, would invading Iraq really be the best you 
> could do?

While I appreciate your logic, try mine on for size:

I would not use $200 billion and the entire US military to save people
from cholera or to dig wells or kill mosquitos (though we did use the
US military to do those things in Panama once when we were building a
canal). Why would I not do those things? Because they are too easy.
Using the US military to save people from malaria is like using an M-1
tank to swat a mosquito...... actually it is EXACTLY like doing that...
;) Pure overkill. Billions of dollars of taxpayer money and the US
military is supposed to be used for the HARD problems (like how JFK
once said, "we go to the moon not because it is easy, but because it is
hard...".

Curing people of malaria and saving them from Cholera is for private
philanthropists like Bill and Melinda Gates, the Red Cross, etc...
Private agencies can do the easy problems quite well and more cost
effectively than public agencies can. 

Using the US military is for the hard problems that require the power
to go and blow things up and kill lots of bad guys so the nice guy to
bad guy ratio in the world gets better (whether this could also be done
privately is a separate debate). We've been forced to accept some
curtailments on our liberties here in angloland recently because for
too long we tolerated a complete lack of them in some parts of the
world in the interest of keeping those areas stable for our benefit,
and we reaped the results. As Condi Rice was saying the other day, we
can't tolerate the tolerance of tyranny anymore. Both Crypto-pacifism
and moral relativism are anti-freedom concepts that need to go on the
dung-heap of history.

Some bad guys have to die if they refuse to get out of the way and let
people be free. Those bad guys are going to try to kill some good
people before they die, and are going to try to convince some gullible
people to support them and fight for them in the mean time, resulting
in more dead people. As the history books show, some 14,000 French
civilians died on D-day. It was a sad thing, but I doubt any sane
Frenchman today would say that D-day was a bad idea (whether they
appreciate the sacrifices of other nations is another matter).

Do I like how things are today? Not really, I went into a bank to make
change for a $100 bill the other day, and the teller asked me for my
name. I responded, "No," then "Let me amend that: Bloody hell no!"

Now, Bush has, in fact, not fulfilled his pledges for AIDS aid for
Africa, due to budget constraints, so the calculus of death folks are
dealing in should account for those things, granted, and of course, one
should also account for the number of lives saved in Iraq against the
lifetime taxes paid by the average American taxpayer (current and
future, given the deficit being run up). This might in the end come up
showing that we are wasting more taxpayer lives of labor (in taxes paid
for services not rendered to those taxpayers) than in lives being saved
in Iraq.

However, there should also be calculated that most of the $200 billion
spent in Iraq is an investment for the future. Saving 58,000 lives this
year and/or last year is small change compared to the millions of Iraqi
lives that will be saved over the coming decade or two, from not having
to live under the Hussein regime and its heirs. If we calculate 55,000
lives saved per two years, that is over a half million per twenty
years. Hussein's sons could easily have been expected to inherit and
wield his power for at least 20 if not 40 years into the future. Lets
say a million lives would be saved in the future by US investments in
Iraqi security today. Then we are just talking about $200,000.00 per
life saved, as a maximum, and only if we value the liberty of every
living Iraqi at zero. 

With a population of 26 million people, that is a payment of less than
$8,000.00 for the freedom of each Iraqi alive today. I realize that
some libertarians don't think the liberty of Iraqis is worth spending
two cents on.

Now, the population of Iraq, compared to that of the US today, is
approximately the same percentage as the population of african-american
slaves during the Civil War to the general population of the US. At
that time, we spent the equivalent of about $53 billion dollars ($3.3
billion in 1860 dollars adjusted for CPI ratio of 30:480, though this
ignores the postwar reconstruction costs, which amounted to an
additional $7 billion, or ~$100 billion today) and 300,000 American
lives then (in proportion to todays population, that would be like 3
million American casulaties today). Today we spend 33% more money
(likely transportation costs to transport people and goods from the US
to Iraq) and 1/2,000th the number of American deaths to achieve the
same end.

So, the real cost-benefit question is: Are 2.998 million American lives
worth spending an extra $50 billion? That is $16,677.79 per American
life that didn't need to be extinguished to free the Iraqi people in
the same way lives were spent in the US Civil War.

Mike Lorrey
Vice-Chair, 2nd District, Libertarian Party of NH
"Necessity is the plea for every infringement of human freedom.
It is the argument of tyrants; it is the creed of slaves."
                                      -William Pitt (1759-1806) 
Blog: http://intlib.blogspot.com


		
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