What is “service?” When someone signs a contract and joins a state’s uniformed armed force, who is serving whom? The answer isn’t as simple as one might think. “Service” is a layered thing in even its simplest forms.

For example, think of  the “servers” at your favorite restaurant. They serve at least two masters: The restaurant’s owners on one hand, you on the other. The market justification for this is that by serving the customers well (satisfying their desire for food served quickly, efficiently and courteously), the servers also serve the ownership well (satisfying their desire for maximum profits). And there’s no question that service is what they’re engaged in. They really are servants, not masters, at the beck and call of  (and subject to pleasure or displeasure of) customer and restaurateur alike.

Military “service” is different. The soldier, sailor, airman or Marine certainly serves the military force. Likewise, that military force certainly serves the state which created and operates it. But those are both instances of service to ownership. There are no “customers” in any real sense. The alleged “customers” — the tax-paying citizens of the state in question — are themselves servants rather than served.

In the case of the United States, the only war in its 240-year history which even came close to qualifying as an instance of “service” to the taxpayers was the American Revolution. Every subsequent conflict, from the Whiskey Rebellion to the (just now supposedly wrapping up) occupation of Afghanistan, has been fought entirely in the interests of the state and the ruling class. To the extent that I’ve studied history, this appears to be true of all other states and their wars as well.

If anyone should be thanking anyone else for “service,” it should be me thanking all of you who paid my salary, bought my food, provided my medical care, subsidized my travel and covered the costs of numerous other benefits of military “service,” even though nothing I did during that “service” could plausibly be construed as having been done in your defense or for your freedom.

It’s unseemly that the direction of appreciation should be reversed, with you continuing to believe I did something for you. And since you really have little choice in the matter (other state “servants” stand ready punish you if you don’t pay for said “services”), it seems to me that what you’re due from me is not thanks, but sincere apology. I’m sorry I took the money that the state took from you. By way of restitution, I hope to help you abolish the state which took it.

According to unnamed US officials, Silk Road is an unnecessary duplication of existing World Bank efforts. The subtext, of course, is that the World Bank and other Bretton Woods institutions, along with Western foreign aid programs, were created to integrate the world economy under the control of Western capital (primarily that of the US and its trilateral junior partners in Western Europe and Japan). China, as a rising regional power and the second largest economy in the world, challenges the hegemony of global economic governance institutions created to serve American interests — much as the rising power of imperial Germany a hundred years ago challenged Britain’s unrivaled naval and colonial domination.

The hypocrisy comes in when you consider the sheer scale of US government global infrastructure financing since World War II, and its pretense that the goal of this financing is service to the neutral interests of some “international community.”

Some people (especially liberals) frame state-funded infrastructure as a neutral good that benefits everyone. It is no such thing. Depending on its scale, structure, and degree of overlap between its funders and its beneficiaries, it benefits some economic actors at the expense of others like any other state-funded input. One stereotypical question we anarchists like to attribute to liberals — usually delivered in a whiny, quavering voice — is “but who will build the roooaaads?”

In fact, despite the lionization of “infrastructure” as “progressive,” every major, centralized, nationally funded infrastructure project in American history has had politically organized business interests as its main constituency, serving primarily to subsidize their business models. In early US history it was mainly the Federalists and Whigs, parties of the national commercial interests, who promoted federally-funded “internal improvements.” The massively subsidized national railroad system, with its high-capacity central trunk lines and reliable schedule, gave rise to a nationwide wholesale and retail ecosystem, which in turn enabled giant industrial corporations to produce on a continental scale. Like the railroad system, the federally subsidized civil aviation and Interstate Highway systems made large nationwide corporations artificially competitive against local producers by enabling them to externalize increased distribution costs onto the taxpayer.

Some right-leaning libertarians whose hearts bleed for corporate interests adopt a pose of ignorance, echoing liberal arguments that “the roads benefit anyone who wants to use them,” or disingenuously twisting left-libertarian arguments that subsidized roads benefit some business interests at everyone else’s expense as a condemnation of large corporations for “driving on public roads.”

Some use similar chicanery on a global scale, asking how libertarians could object on principled grounds to obviously “neutral” activities like the US Navy keeping world sea lanes open for commerce. This is just a larger-scale libertarian equivalent of “but who will build the roooaaads?” For an answer we need only consult Adam Smith, who argued that public infrastructure should be financed by its beneficiaries: That public bridges be financed by tolls based on the weight of vehicles passing over them, and that navies be financed based on the value of merchant cargo shipped under their protection.

The single largest component of US “defense” spending is the US Navy, due to the enormous capital outlays embodied in its ships. And the main purpose of all those carrier groups in the Indian Ocean and western Pacific is to keep maritime choke points open and suppress piracy. Absent a state with the ability to tax society at large for the benefit of particular economic interests, merchant shipping (including oil tankers) would necessarily bear the full cost of this policing activity, adding significantly (to say the least) to shipping costs.

It’s hard to deny — unless one is economically illiterate — that this is a massively distorting subsidy, or that the provision of maritime protection on free market principles would result in a powerful shift of incentives toward supply chain relocalization and energy conservation.

In Phoenix and most likely elsewhere, the VA health care system has been leaving veterans to die while awarding bonuses to those perpetrating the neglect. The VA has always been an awkward problem for the US government. Promising to care for veterans for the rest of their lives is a key recruiting point, but actually spending the money to provide that care does not pad Lockheed and Raytheon’s bottom lines as much as building ships that don’t sail and planes that don’t fly. But now, in our new age of access and transparency, keeping the dirty secrets of the VA has become nearly impossible.

But should we exert ourselves to “fix” the VA? Is it worth our time? No. The VA is a Potemkin village, a recruiting tool used to assure naïve young men and women that their damaged bodies and ravaged minds will be cared for after their time in uniform. The degree to which it can perform this function while simultaneously minimizing the amount of actual care provided is the true measure of the VA’s success, and why VA reform is doomed from the outset.

But those lessons we learned in boot camp aren’t completely worthless. While many veterans fall on hard times, others of our number do well for ourselves, and if we apply the “No One Left Behind” ethos to our civilian lives, we can perhaps someday dispense with the VA entirely while simultaneously forming a mutual aid network that could be a kernel for a future free society.

Numerous Veterans Service Organizations (VSOs) already exist, but far too many are focused on lobbying the government for more aid for veterans. Rather than follow their lead, we should look to the great work being done at the Under the Hood Café, Coffee Strong and similar GI Coffeehouses around the country and world. These institutions serve as focal points for the wider community, bringing veterans and their families together, allowing them to lean on each other and benefit from each other’s strength. Expanding on this network and looking after one another in civilian life the way we did in uniform is the real path to fixing the problems we face.

I am often bewildered at what an individual means by stating that she supports the troops, especially where that individual opposes wars and imperialism. It has become apparent to me that many support the troops out of a sense of duty or obligation, one that in American life is screened from debate more fanatically than almost anything.

For one who backs war itself, perhaps it makes perfect sense to support the troops, the necessary constituent parts of the larger practice advocated. If you say you support a movie production, then it follows that you would support the various actors, screenwriters, producers and cinematographers involved in the overall process.

What is rather stranger and more perplexing is the spectacle of one who opposes or is critical of America’s wars, but nevertheless insists that we must support the troops. But what could that mean? Are we to believe that the war is a thing separate and apart from the individuals who actually execute it, that it exists in a vacuum as some mysterious evil spirit in and of itself? It’s an awful lot like proclaiming, “I oppose the House of Representatives, but I support the individual members of Congress.”

It seems untenable to support the integral pieces of the very thing you stand against. Though it may still be plausible, if we assume that to be an anti-war troop supporter just means that they feel compassion for the troops and sorrow at their fate.

But if “support the troops” means only just that — that we ought to pity these burnt offerings to the state and corporate gods of war and respect them as fellow human lives — then, of course, who could disagree? In that case, even I would support them. But no one on any side of the war question, if you will, really believes that the trumpeters of “support the troops” mean that. Rather what the dupes and malefactors most loudly adjuring that we support the troops are really saying is that we should get in a straight, marching line behind the American War Machine for no more worthy a reason than that it is American and so too are we.

Such rationales have very little to do with genuine honor, loyalty or other noble values, but are merely a sinister, nationalistic cult that we are meant to swallow without criticism or thought. Indeed the “support the troops” propaganda script is designed to do just that, to promote active hostility and outrage at anyone that might have the temerity to question the United States’ hegemonic military domination of the world — and the whole political economy that it travels with.

Do I hate the troops? Certainly I do not. No, instead my execration is turned toward the sniveling politicians who send them to their deaths, and to the inhuman defense contractor executives who profit from them — both groups just as much terrorists as the al-Qaeda leadership. And both the U.S. military establishment and al-Qaeda prey on and take advantage of the misconceived anger and patriotism of society’s benighted, mostly young men, who see themselves as freedom fighters and their cause as virtuous.

These youths, the sacrificial lambs of empire, are victims; to say that you support them as troops — that is, in their capacity as tools of the Empire — is to shamefully devalue their lives, to concede that they are nothing more than the military industry’s cost of doing business. And war is business. The entire political and economic paradigm in the United States for decades on end has been based on a formula of a military industrial complex at home and sycophantic colonies abroad.

“Support the troops” is among those “smelly little orthodoxies,” to quote George Orwell, that nurture and preserve injustice in society. We must get under tired clichés and banalities if we are to arrive at the reality of important issues. As a tradition, anarchism has endeavored to do just that — to confront the superstitions that have so long crusted over genuine critical thinking. This Memorial Day, try out the anarchist’s counter-tradition of challenging the political mainstream’s domination of the discourse. You may be surprised what you find.

Violence has become our foreign policy – it is the status quo. Our nation-state acts as an agent of terror to occupied territories and lesser states under its influence. The system will stop at no cost. As Bush-era “shock and awe” grew unpopular, the system was able to change the face of its aggression with the Obama era drone wars.

Perhaps what is most disturbing is the support the public lauds on politicians who support aggressive foreign policy. This represents the decaying moral fabric of the nation – the economy, scandals and social issues dominate public thought. Hawks such as Lindsey Graham (waging an all out assault on the habeas corpus), vulgar libertarians such as Rand Paul (whose filibuster, cheered as patriotic by the very people who supported the invasion of Iraq, did not call for the end of drone attacks overseas, only to protect us Americans) and let’s not forget the most effective evil, the noble peace prize-winning Commander-in-Chief (whose NDAA effectively silences dissent, much more ominous than the Patriot Act – who he himself signed again) are all popular politicians. What has become of the anti-war movement?

Our foreign policy is morally unjust. As our troops are separated from their loved ones, flown overseas, killed and maimed, so too are innocent people in our occupied territories. Towns and villages are bombed, occasions such as weddings, birthdays and funerals are bombed, first responders are bombed, men, women and children are murdered, families are torn apart, hundreds of thousands are displaced, people are indefinitely detained and tortured in detainment. Our tax dollars fund this inconceivable aggression, but what is the scandal – the targeting of political groups? What about state sanctioned murder?

We are laying waste to helpless people, who have often been repressed by dictators and authoritarian regimes we placed in power. Where is our national conscience? We were hurt when people cheered September 11^th, but then acted just as barbaric at the news of Bin Laden’s death. How do we not get it?

Change must come from within. The system will obviously still act, regardless of falling public support for the war. But, we are an obedient society. The more we obey the harsher the state becomes, and the more it is able stop dissent. With laws such as the NDAA, the state has defined what is just, but it is the state that is unjust.

The state says in order to uphold the American way we must be strong, and our economy must grow at any cost – this rhetoric is championed by conservatives and liberals alike. We can stand for this no more. We need freed markets, we need to decentralize our institutions, we need to develop alternatives to power, we need to change our moral consciousness. Humanity needs peace.

Our crisis is institutional, but also moral and intellectual. If the government will not stop the war, we must stop the government. Will we?

When Hamas, a quasi-state claiming to represent the Palestinians, launches rockets that predictably kill or maim everyday Israelis, destroy property, and cause fear among civilians, it is committing terrorism. Regardless of the legitimate grievances Palestinians have, it is wrong to use deadly violence in a way that inevitably hurts the innocent. This is the moral principle toward which we should hope all humanity strives.

When the Israeli state, claiming to represent the Israelis, launches bombs at densely populated Palestinian neighborhoods, killing and injuring many civilians, this too must be condemned. The right of self-defense against aggressors does not entitle one to inflict collective punishment or even to be criminally reckless with the lives of innocent third parties. Nothing entitles one to be so reckless. We have all sorts of fundamental rights in life—not to be enslaved, not to be killed, and to pursue peacefully a living and our happiness. And the right of self-defense. But self-defense does not include the right to hurt innocent people any more than the right to feed one’s family entitles one to steal.

For many years, the U.S. government has supported foreign governments in their militarism. Americans should have a particular interest in what these governments do. It is of course a disgrace that the U.S. has backed such awful dictators as Saddam Hussein and Hosni Mubarak.

Very consistently, U.S. policy has been to support Israel financially, diplomatically, morally, and militarily. Israel uses U.S.-provided hardware to bomb Palestinian communities. America’s perceived one-sided support for Israel was one of the major grievances named by Osama bin Laden in explaining why al Qaeda attacks the United States. Israeli policy should thus be of special interest to Americans in our national foreign policy discourse.

As with the rest of American diplomacy, there is very little dissent in the mainstream on this issue. During their foreign policy presidential debate, Obama and Romney competed strenuously over who would be more unwaveringly pro-Israel. That was the extent of the debate: not what the right position is, but which one of them held that same position more firmly.

Critics of Israel are sometimes accused of singling out Israel. I’m sure some of them do. And some appear to have bad reasons for doing so. But there are good reasons to carefully scrutinize the close allies of your own government, whose policies you might have a marginal chance in changing. This becomes even more important when all conventional discourse is silent on or supportive of the status quo of mass violence that has failed to bring peace and incites terrorism. Moreover, if out of general principle, regardless of the excuse, you don’t approve of governments occupying communities where they’re not wanted, putting up checkpoints on internal main roads, choking off commerce and suppressing cultural exchange—if you don’t approve of blockades, restrictions on exports, or governmental attempts to stop private individuals from transferring small arms—you should be unhappy that your government backs these policies by proxy.

We often hear that we should defend Israel because it is a liberal democracy, at least compared to the Muslim theocracies nearby. But that shouldn’t temper our critique of the government’s policies in the occupied territories. Liberal states have often been guilty of some of the greatest crimes in foreign policy. On the eve of the American Revolution, one of the central colonial criticisms of the British Empire was that it acted hypocritically, championing human rights at home while treating foreigners with a much lower moral standard.

This is true of U.S. foreign policy in general. Americans like to believe their government defends something akin to the relative liberty we associate with America at home. Yet U.S. foreign policy has often conspicuously stood in sharp contrast with the values espoused at home. It has been characterized by firebombings, torture, massacres of villagers, and alliances with some of the most brutal states in modern history. Often, the victims’ humanity is dismissed in mainstream political discourse as if their lives don’t matter as much as our lives do.

The collectivism of war is one of the most wicked forms of tribalism in our time. Most Americans recognize that Muslim terrorists are guilty of regarding innocent people as a disposable means to an end. But they are not alone. U.S. and Israeli leaders do this too. The United States deliberately killed hundreds of thousands of Iraqi civilians through sanctions in the 1990s. Today, Israeli politicians and important public figures use crazed language calling on the government to “flatten Gaza” or “send it back to the Middle Ages.”

I’m not saying there is a simple solution for the Middle East. But it should be obvious that just as Hamas’s rocket attacks are an immoral and ineffective way to defend the Palestinians, Israel’s provocations and reactions, which tend to kills dozens of times as many people, are also immoral and counterproductive. Whether the goal is seen as self-defense or to maintain an illegitimate occupation, the Israeli government has committed human rights abuses that in practice do not serve to defend anybody. The U.S. government should not force taxpayers to finance any of this, and so long as it does, Americans ought to be particularly critical.

The map compares the drone campaigns waged by the Bush and Obama administrations. Its description contends that “Obama has ratcheted up his predecessor’s tactic of deploying unmanned aircraft into Pakistan and Yemen to kill supposed terrorists …”

In replies to that tweet, I suggested that the alleged “five to one” increase in drone attacks comes not from a difference in policy between the two administrations but from an increase in drone production and deployment capacity. In other words, if W could have conducted as many attacks, he would have.

The number of drones in service over time corroborates my analysis. As of 2009, “… the total number of military drones has soared to 5,500, from 167 in 2001.” As of this year, the US drone fleet has grown to 7000 and Pentagon officials want $5 billion from Congress to buy more.

That comes to a 130% increase, but not all of those are attack drones. I am not sure exactly which models would qualify as such, but I think we can safely assume that the Predator and Reaper models constitute the bulk of them. In 2009, the Air Force owned 195 Predators. In 2010, that number increased by 137% to 268. In 2007, the Air Force owned nine Reaper drones. In 2010, 57 Reapers. That’s roughly a six to one increase.

So, not only do we see an increase in drone capacity, but we also see an enhancement in capability, as 2011 marked the last Predator delivery and its succession by the Reaper, which can deliver more ordinance and has longer range. And I think we can safely assume that the military has come into more attack drones by now. This six to one increase in Reapers obviously exceeds the five to one increase in drone attacks under Obama, and it does so for practical reasons.

Firstly, workers with the training to operate these drones were in short supply, at least as of 2009.

Secondly, it would appear that drone attacks don’t take place without some sort of diligence in terms of target selection. Or, perhaps we can just chalk it up to a shortage of targets. The Disposition Matrix should eventually fix that.

These drones do not and cannot come into the possession of the military at the whim of any president. Large military contracts take time to fulfill and contractors rarely deliver on schedule. And that comes on top of decisions and investments made well before Obama’s inauguration.

So, we ought not to draw a conclusion pertaining to Obama’s war policies and how they compare to W’s in terms of viciousness. Rather, these administrations share a more fundamental policy of class preservation, of maintaining the status quo. The defense contractor and military elites depend on their budgets and must constantly buy and deploy new toys to perpetuate that funding, and thereby their purpose as a class.

What we have often heard before from military-first proponents, that we must devise new weapons and procure more of them in order to preempt and counter our enemies’ countermeasures, does not work for drone warfare as we currently wage it. These proponents cannot make that excuse this time around. The likes of al-Qaeda have no means to counter drones beyond employing better operational security and adhering to it more strictly. What we have is simply blatant rent-seeking behavior.

If you found my previous arithmetic somewhat tenuous, that’s okay. I never intended to establish a strong correlation between the size of the attack drone fleet and the number of attacks. Obama simply has more attack drones at his disposal as well as a more developed means of producing them than his predecessor, so what else would he do? I suppose that if he really wanted, he could either let the drones sit idle or devote them entirely to the humanitarian/rescue missions that the industry never fails to mention in its public relations material.

But relegating to either fate an attack drone, something engineered as a weapon, would make it pointless. And that is one of the greatest threats to authority, that the people should realize that its stately investments are pointless, that the emperor wears no clothes. In one of my favorite films, Cube, the characters debate over the purpose of the terrible machination in which they find themselves trapped. One of them provides a succinct and chilling answer: “Because it’s here. You have to use it or admit it’s pointless.” Sadly, I have yet to hear a more apt analysis for Obama’s escalation of drone warfare.

Com a rejeição do “Não Pergunte, Não Conte,” as forças armadas dos Estados Unidos puseram fim a pelo menos uma parcela importante de sua discriminação oficial com base em orientação sexual. Desde o acordo no Congresso no último outono — uma das poucas promessas do Presidente Obama que ele realmente levou adiante — a comunidade gay e lésbica vinha contando os meses, dias e horas. O MSNBC retumbava com brados de “Nunc dimittis!”  Assim, acrescentarei minhas próprias congratulações aos membros gay do serviço … acho.

À primeira vista, essa história parece uma grande vitória para qualquer pessoa que deteste ver instituições grandes e poderosas tripudiarem sobre a dignidade humana das pessoas e tratarem-nas como lixo. A um segundo olhar, entretanto, o que vocês acham que são as forças armadas do estado, afinal de contas?

Graças a esta recente abençoada ocasião, temos agora o prazer de saber que a tortura em Guantánamo — prisão cujo fechamento é promessa que Obama não levou adiante — é conduzida por uma instituição militar integrada não apenas sob o aspecto de raça mas também sob o aspecto de orientação sexual.

E as “entregas extrajudiciais,” as “técnicas rigorosas de interrogatório” na Base da Força Aérea de Baghram, e sabe lá Deus o que na rede de prisões secretas em todo o mundo — coisa que Obama nunca sequer prometeu fazer cessar — serão levadas a efeito tanto por gays quanto por heterossexuais. Que ótimo!

A missão principal de Exército, Marinha, Força Aérea e Marines é manter o mundo a salvo para as corporações transnacionais. E Deus tenha misericórdia de qualquer povo moreno em qualquer parte do mundo que se colocar no caminho de tal missão. Então agora gays e lésbicas têm direito igual de juntar-se à diversão de esfregar a bota de Tio Sam no rosto do mundo. Oba!

Este é um dos problemas do liberalismo da corrente majoritária: Substituiu a classe pela identidade. Em vez de questionar a estrutura do poder institucional nos Estados Unidos, e a exploração que ela possibilita, o liberalismo convencional meramente preconiza uma seleção representativa de mulheres, pretos, hispânicos e gays gerindo as instituições.

A série de Soledad O´Brien “Pretos nos Estados Unidos” na CNN, há alguns anos, mostrou um clipe do discurso do Dr. King “Eu tenho um sonho” — seguido por O’Brien dizendo solenemente que, como evidência da materialização daquele sonho, “Alguns são presidentes de empresas; alguns são secretários de estado.” Eu tenho um sonho pessoal: Ver o último presidente de empresa estrangulado com as vísceras do último secretário de estado.

Sugiro que, em vez de nos preocuparmos com se salas de diretorias corporativas, legislativos e gabinetes “têm cara de Estados Unidos,” preocupemo-nos com o domínio que essas instituições exercem sobre nossas vidas e nossos meios de subsistência. Como branco do sexo masculino, posso dizer que sei o que é ser intimidado, tratado injustamente e explorado até à alma por pessoas de aparência semelhante à minha — e, acreditem ou não, não é tão divertido quanto vocês possam supor.

Artigo original afixado por Kevin Carson em 28 de setembro de 2011.

Traduzido do inglês por Murilo Otávio Rodrigues Paes Leme.

At first glance, this story seems like a big win for anyone who hates seeing large, powerful institutions walk all over people’s human dignity and treat them like dirt.  But at second glance, what do you think the state’s armed forces are all about, anyway?

Thanks to this recent blessed occasion, we now have the pleasure of knowing the torture at Gitmo — the closing of which is a promise Obama didn’t follow through on — is conducted by a military that’s integrated not only by race but by sexual orientation.

And the “extraordinary renditions,” the “harsh interrogation techniques” at Baghram AFB, and God knows what at the network of black sites around the world — stuff Obama never even promised to stop — will be carried out by gays and straights alike.  O happy day!

The primary mission of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Marines is to keep the world safe for transnational corporations.  And God have mercy on any brown people anywhere in the world who get in the way of that mission.  So now gays and lesbians have an equal right to join in the fun of grinding Uncle Sam’s boot in the world’s face.  Woo-hoo!

That’s one of the problems with mainstream liberalism:  It’s replaced class with identity.  Rather than questioning the structure of institutional power in America, and the exploitation it enables, conventional liberalism merely agitates for a representative selection of women, blacks, Hispanics and gays running the institutions.

Soledad O’Brien’s “Black in America” series on CNN a few years ago showed a clip of Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech — followed by  O’Brien intoning that, as evidence of the dream’s fulfillment, “Some are CEOs; some are Secretary of State.”  I have a dream of my own:  To see the last CEO strangled with the entrails of the last Secretary of State.

I submit that, instead of worrying about whether corporate boardrooms, legislatures and cabinets “look like America,” we worry about the domination those institutions exercise over our lives and livelihoods.  As a white male, I can say I’ve known what it’s like to get pushed around, screwed over and squeezed dry by people who look like me — and believe it or not, it’s not as much fun as you might think.

Translations for this article:

• Portuguese, Um Viva para a Rejeição do DADT.

If the military takes a greater interest in renewable energy than it previously did, this could lead to general improvements in renewable energy technology. Whatever marginal gains come from this will at some time be held up by military industrial apologists as something we should thank military spending for. By the same logic, we should thank insurgents for kindly burning fuel trucks and killing people.

The military takes tremendous amounts of wealth out of the productive economy. It costs a lot of money to operate remote bases securing those who make deals with U.S. authorities. That money could have instead been spent on renewable energy and environmental research.

A more prosperous society will in general spend more on environmental concerns. And the green advertising campaigns, annoyance of concentrated car exhaust, association of carbon emissions with climate change, health risks for those who live near power plants, and noise complaints regarding wind power suggest that there is significant interest in environmental improvement. But government takes resources that people could use to improve life and forces them to instead fund toxic military sites, uranium ammunition purchases, and widespread death and destruction. Not to mention government protections that keep wealthy polluters from paying for damage they cause.

Regardless of how you measure it, the U.S. military has been fighting in deserts for a while now. But apparently they are just getting around to thinking about solar power.

An organization laden with entrenched interests cannot change quickly unless the power brokers see something in it for themselves. If the organization forces people to fund it and bans competition, it will become massive and bureaucratic, sucking up resources from enterprises that actually create wealth. By claiming the right to exercise authoritarian power over other peoples’ lives it becomes a magnet for those who wish to benefit from ruling others and can afford to play the games.

A coercive organization that answers primarily to pressure from the top will attempt to manage change on behalf of the connected interests trying to secure profits through force, instead of allowing new ideas to be adopted as people need and desire. To re-tool society for health and freedom, it is essential to reduce our dependence on government.