Proportionality

Probably “statistics” would have been a more appropriate heading, but what the hell. I have a pet peeve about proportionality, and especially the federal government, the man on the street and the media’s inability to have a perspective on the scale of disasters and other historical events. The Bush Administration has taken this to crazy level, spending literal trillions to prevent another 3,000 dead Americans, whereas that much money could save hundreds of thousands, more likely millions of lives if applied to medical research. (Stem cell, anyone?)

On 9/11, I was in London for a board meeting, and I’ll never forget the hours spent staring at the TV in my hotel room. The most bizarre part was watching a CNN interview at a Wal-Mart in South Dakota. A woman who must have weighed 300 pounds was sucking on a cigarette and telling the reporter, “You couldn’t get me into one of those deathtraps” referring to commercial aircraft. I’m thinking diabetes, heart disease and cancer are much more appropriate concerns, but that’s the way most people have come to think. Just be afraid of the last thing you heard about on the news or talk radio or wherever oblivioids get their misinformation.

Economics is the study of scarcity. If there’s enough of something, there’s no market for it, like air for example. The free market does one thing pretty well, and that is to set a price for stuff. One key shortcoming is that there is no market for public safety or national defense. How much we spend is based on policy decisions by the current rulers and reflects their mindset and worldview. For the last eight years, we’ve tried to become the Death Star, Fortress America, and Fort Apache.

Costa Rica dismantled its’ military in 1948, and they’ve never had a problem with it. Average incomes are 1500% (yup, fifteen times) neighboring Nicaragua’s, and they have a better health care and education system than we do, not to mention longer life expectancy. I’m not saying we need to completely dismantle the military, but is it really necessary to spend more than the rest of the world combined?

Here’s another stumper. In the last decade, around 3,000 Americans have died in terrorist attacks. Every day, it’s estimated that around the world about 30,000 children starve to death. A decade is 3,562 days, so for our 3,000 killed, there were over ten million children starved to death. So over 36,000 kids starved for every American killed in a terror attack. Doesn’t that make it seem a little silly to focus so completely on this stupid Global War On Terror? Maybe a little more help with food aid? How the hell does a country in which most citizens claim to be Christians get its’ priorities so completely fucked up? The Big Guy famously said, “You still lack one thing. Sell everything you have and give to the poor, and you will have treasure in heaven,” and “Blessed are the peacemakers.” How the hell do you square that with Bush doctrine and actions?

Even if you take the logic at face value, it’s more than a little hard to buy the sense of proportionality. Suppose you lose a hundred thousand Americans in a nuclear terror attack on a large urban center EVERY YEAR. That would make terrorist attack the sixth leading annual cause of death, behind heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents, and barely ahead of diabetes.

I can’t find the data, but it sure as hell seems like we’re spending more in Iraq (which had nothing to do with 9/11), Afghanistan and in the Department of Homeland Security (doesn’t “Homeland” kind of smell like a swastika?) than we are working to prevent heart disease, cancer, stroke, respiratory illness and accidents? How does this make any sense if you have even the vaguest sense of proportionality?