WE'RE NOT ALL KEYNESIANS, REALLY

When it comes to defense spending, we are all socialists. At least that's the implication of a study by the Center for Strategic and Budgetary Assessments. Barry Watts, one of the 2 authors, was formerly a Pentagon and Northrop Grumman official and said this about the economics of defense:

“A serious misunderstanding of the realities of weapons acquisition in the United States [is] to think that the U.S. defense industry operates like a normal free market,” the CSBA wrote. “A classic free market involves many small buyers and many small suppliers, and competition among buyers and suppliers drives prices toward stable, economically efficient equilibrium levels. None of these features resemble the way in which the U.S. defense industrial base functions.”