- From Rep. Paul's testimony to the Joint Economic Committee
Hearing, February 28, 2008.
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- In recent months the undeclared war in Iraq seems not
to have been on the minds of most Americans. News of the violence and deprivation
which ordinary Iraqis are forced to deal with on a daily basis rarely makes
it to the front pages. Instead, we read in the newspapers numerous slanted
stories about the how the surge is succeeding and reducing violence. Never
does anyone dare to discuss the costs of the war or its implications.
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- There are the direct costs of the war, the costs of maintaining
bases, providing food, water, and supplies, which the administration vastly
underestimated before embarking on their quest in Iraq. These costs run
into the tens of billions of dollars per month, and I shudder to think
what the total direct costs will add up to when we finally pull out.
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- Then there are the opportunity costs, those which decision
makers in Washington almost never discuss. Imagine that the war in Iraq
had never happened, and the hundreds of billions of dollars we have spent
so far were still in the hands of taxpayers and businesses. How many jobs
could have been created, how much money could have been saved, invested,
and put to productive use?
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- Unfortunately, it appears too many policymakers in Washington
still cling to the broken window fallacy, long since discredited by the
19th century French economist Frederic Bastiat, that destruction is a good
thing because jobs are created to rebuild what is destroyed. This pernicious
fallacy is unfortunately widespread in our society today because those
in positions of power and influence only recognize what is seen, and ignore
what is unseen.
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- Running a deficit of hundreds of billions of dollars
per year in order to fund our misadventure is unsustainable. Eventually
those debts must be repaid, but this country is in such poor financial
shape that when our creditors come knocking, we will have little with which
to pay them. Our imperial system of military bases set up in protectorate
states around the world is completely dependent on the continuing willingness
of foreigners to finance our deficits. When the credit dries up we will
find ourselves in a dire situation. Americans will suffer under a combination
of confiscatory taxation, double-digit inflation, and the sale of massive
amounts of land and capital goods to our foreign creditors.
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- The continuation of the war in Iraq will end in disaster
for this country. Parallels between the Roman Empire and our own are numerous,
although our decline and fall will happen far quicker than that of Rome.
The current financial crisis has awakened some to the perils that await
us, but solutions that address the root of the problem and seek to fix
it are nowhere to be found. There must be a sea change in the attitudes
and thinking of Americans and their leaders. The welfare-warfare state
must be abolished, respect for private property and individual liberties
restored, and we must return to the limited-government ideals of our Founding
Fathers. Any other course will doom our nation to the dustbin of history.
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