A letter writer in The Wall Street Journal‘s Tuesday Letters section was unhappy with the spending proposal for and attendant priority given to defense spending. He didn’t seem to see any need for spending there.
I read with some alarm the enthusiastic commentary in your editorial regarding the proposed $1.5 trillion defense budget….
… Diverting expenditures to military weapons and away from social needs—housing, food and medical care—isn’t sensible nor is it possible, given current domestic needs.
What isn’t sensible is not funding our ability to defend ourselves in a world of many powerful enemy nations, at least one of which has sworn to surpass and dominate us.
Any free nation needs to be able to defend itself, or it won’t be free for long, and all the social needs—housing, food, and medical care—it gets, such as they might be, will be dictated by that nation’s conqueror. National defense must be that nation’s government’s first priority.
I decline to live under a People’s Republic of China tyranny. Or to see my nation simply destroyed by a nuclear armed Iran that has no other goal aside from visiting the same extermination on Israel.
The letter writer assumes – without evidence – that it is the responsibility of the federal government to provide (not merely ensure) “social needs.” That’s an open ended stretch of the Necessary and Proper clause, and is responsible for the explosion of federal programs which have enabled massive graft and federal debt.