Quote:
Originally Posted by DGG
The Reagan administration did put a lot of emphasis and money on the military, but the purpose was hardly a Keynesian economic purpose. Reagan believed that the Soviet Union was an empire of evil and that the USA in particular and the Free World in general needed a strong military defence against the military threat of communist regimes.
In hindsight it is clear that Reagan was right. The greater armament spending forced the Soviet Union to spend more on its military. This was an important factor to make the Soviet Union bancrupt, thus forcing it to leave the influence in the Warsaw Pact states and eventually to be dissolved entirely. The result was democracy in most of Central and Eastern Europe.
Gorbachew got the Nobel Peace prize for his role to make these events peaceful. Reagan would have deserved it better.
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Keynes wrote a pamphlet entitled How To Pay For The War. Perhaps you should read it.
What we see in hindsight is that the US gov't was caught flatfooted by the collapse of the Soviet Union and had to scramble to replace it with the Columbian drug cartels, and while we were busy looting Russia for all we could get our greedy paws on, the leadership vacuum was filled by crime syndicates, which was not a good thing, them having large stockpiles of WMD and all.