Republican Militarism Gives Them Selective Keynesnesia (And What Lies Beneath)

Krugman discerns a "New Rule" for the Randroid Right: "government spending can’t create jobs, but cuts in government spending can destroy jobs -- as long as the jobs are in the defense sector."

Of course, every right-wing capitalist is always a crony capitalist first of all -- actually free or fair trade is for suckers! -- and so this New Rule really just amounts to the opportunistic truism that every Republican can be counted on to talk like a Keynesian, contrary to the endless macroeconomically illiterate market-fundamentalist pieties they spew otherwise, if only for a moment, as Krugman nicely puts the point, whenever "campaign contributors are about to lose a lucrative contract."

He elaborates: "Propose some kind of public investment, say in green energy, and the right screams 'Solyndra! Waste! Fraud!' But propose spending the same amount on weapons that we don’t need, and it’s all good. If only we could convince Republicans that solar power or mass transit were complete wastes, but that they would upset some foreign power -- the French, that’s it! -- a big stimulus program might sail through." So, once again, right-wing ideologues proceed in the manner of evil children with their faces smeared with stolen jam, a ready lie on their tongues, and Daddy's loaded gun in their hands.

But rather than simply stopping there, I do think it is instructive to realize that to the extent that so-called "principled" market libertarians/Movement Republicans [1] declare themselves advocates of the "spontaneous order" of presumably natural, presumably virtuous, presumably optimally efficient markets, and so carve out only the "barest" minimal government, one confined to police and military functions to protect given relations of property and commerce, as justifiable and yet [2] defense and policing in the actually-existing world involves the development and maintenance of a vast and fantastically sophisticated technoscientific apparatus and a substantial body of organized personnel, this means that [3] every "free marketeer," so-called, from the most "principled" to the most cynical, actually celebrates in the name of "free markets" a centrally planned economy and elaborate subsidized research and development policy all stealthed as "defense," and supported by a non-negligible portion of the supposedly "free" population subjugated to an explicitly authoritarian hierarchical command-and-control social structure.

Of course, there has never in fact been a "natural market" qua "spontaneous order" in the first place, since what passes for free exchange and legitimate ownership has always been articulated in the context of historically contingent laws and treaties and protocols and regulations and conventions, a dynamic ritual and material infrastructure generating a sense of trust and legitimacy and reasonable expectations, and so the whole "market naturalist" conceit is the most arrant nonsense imaginable, a conjuring trick in which customs are deliberately mistaken for optimalities or even inevitabilities as a way to preserve given social relations and distributions of force and resource as beyond political contestation even as they rely for their maintenance on political collaboration.

No wonder then that the "spontaneist" champion of what passes for natural market order here and now (never mind his no doubt accidental, incidental identification with the incumbent-elite beneficiaries of that order) will always depend on an essential recourse -- always figured as "exceptional" and not "essential" -- to military-police violence, across every layer of his discourse, from the disavowal of history that enables the spontaneist conceit at root all the way to hypocritical defenses of wasteful military spending to coddle pet constituencies in day to day editorializing.