>Well, for one, a degraded society - I think Baran and Sweezy called it
>"wasting the surplus." But for Shaikh and Tonak, defense expenditures are
>not productive of capital (though they might be necessary for both domestic
>and international control). Look at it this way - cranking up GDP by
>increasing gov't expenditures to fight a war, build prisons, etc., may pulse
>the economy for a few years (even several?), but running a garrison economy
>has proven incompatible with capitalism over the longer haul.
Qualitatively it sucks, yes, but I'm still waiting for that longer haul to kick in. The U.S. economy may be pathological - to borrow Michael Perelman's title - but it ain't suffering from terminal incompatibilies either, is it? This of course is part my long campaign to figure out what the real-world implications are of Shaikh/Tonak-style theorizing. People assure me they're very very important, but I've yet to be convinced.
Doug