U.S. Leaving $7 Billion of Military Equipment Behind in Afghanistan

By, Chris Rossini

Not only has the U.S. created a disaster with the unconstitutional invasion of Afghanistan, but now that they've been forced to retreat, they're leaving behind some stuff...$7 BILLION worth!

The Washington Post reports:

Military planners have determined that they will not ship back more than $7 billion worth of equipment — about 20 percent of what the U.S. military has in Afghanistan — because it is no longer needed or would be too costly to ship back home.

What's $7 billion when you can always just turn on the taxpayer spigot?

And doesn't Bernanke create $7 billion just in his sleep?

What's the big deal?

Maybe this blatant display of waste will irritate the average Joe American (for a few minutes). But what will he do? He went through the government education system. The worst thing that he'll say is that government needs to allocate its resources better; plan better, etc.

We libertarians see it differently, of course.

It's all waste.

Governments, after all, have no way of rationally measuring how to allocate resources. Every step is a kick to our teeth.

Murray Rothbard pointed out the differences of how the private sector allocates resources vs. the government:

The productivity of the private sector does not stem from the fact that people are rushing around doing "something," anything, with their resources; it consists in the fact that they are using these resources to satisfy the needs and desires of the consumers. Businessmen and other producers direct their energies, on the free market, to producing those products which will be most rewarded by the consumers, and the sale of these products may therefore roughly "measure" the importance which the consumers place upon them.

In the market, with prices and profit/loss statements, we can see and "measure".

Government doesn't bother with such things.

It just takes by force, and spends on the whims of whoever happens to be in control at the time. It's all political, and it's all arbitrary.

Rothbard describes government in further detail:

...the public sector can only feed off the private sector; it necessarily lives parasitically upon the private economy. But this means that the productive resources of society—far from satisfying the wants of consumers—are now directed, by compulsion, away from these wants and needs. The consumers are deliberately thwarted, and the resources of the economy diverted from them to those activities desired by the parasitic bureaucracy and politicians. In many cases, the private consumers obtain nothing at all, except perhaps propaganda beamed to them at their own expense. In other cases, the consumers receive something far down on their list of priorities.

...the "public sector" is actually antiproductive: that it subtracts from, rather than adds to, the private sector of the economy. For the public sector lives by continuous attack on the very criterion that is used to gauge productivity: the voluntary purchases of consumers.

So it doesn't matter what the government decides to do with the $7 billion of military stuff.

In every case, we lose.

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