Remember: Lack of efficiency would have denied us the symphonies of Beethoven, the Sistine Chapel of Michelangelo, the Beatles' Sgt. Pepper a lbum, the art of Jackson Pollack, and the architecture of Frank Lloyd Wright.
But efficiency's greatest fault is its short term view of the world. It is efficiency that makes the bottom line and the quarterly dividend so preeminent in American business, resulting in a total lack of long range planning. It was in the name of efficiency that we spent a trillion dollars fighting a war in Vietnam without a clear objective, and it is in the name of efficiency that we are fighting wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, once again without a clear objective, while spending three times what we spent in Vietnam.
Our wars are destroying us: our economy, our hearts and our souls. It is bleeding the middle class dry, killing off the best of the working class and the poor, and enriching the wealthiest Americans even further. Voltaire was right: the primary if unspoken purpose of government is the redistribution of wealth.
Unfortunately, for the last thirty years, that redistribution has been from those with the least amount of money to those with the most. And our "defense" spending has been one of the primary causes for this shift in wealth. We must reverse this trend while we still can. For all of our sakes; for the sake of Peace.
War! ain't nothing but a heart breaker.
War! Friend only to the undertaker.
"War," Edwin Starr;
War and Peace, 1970.
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