Motus Mentis

Yesterday the Times‘s Nicholas Kristof posted a risibly bird-brained column entitled Our Lefty Military. In it he lauds the U.S. armed forces as a socialist paradigm, comparing them in glowing terms to the morally inferior “gimme” mentality of the private sector.

We read:

The United States armed forces knit together whites, blacks, Asians and Hispanics from diverse backgrounds, invests in their education and training, provides them with excellent health care and child care. And it does all this with minimal income gaps: A senior general earns about 10 times what a private makes, while, by my calculation, C.E.O.’s at major companies earn about 300 times as much as those cleaning their offices. That’s right: the military ethos can sound pretty lefty.

…And while the ethic of business is often “Gimme,’ the military inculcates an ideal of public service that runs deep.

That’s all very nice, though I’ll confess I’ve never imagined “knitting” to be an important military function. (I guess that just shows I’m behind the times; at the very least, I’m obviously behind the Times.) On the other hand, the military also tells all its members, with the full force of law, when to eat and sleep, what they will do each and every day, what they can and cannot say, what they will wear, where they will live, and much much more. If the participants don’t like it, that’s too bad; they can’t leave until their term of service is over. Nicholas Kristof may wish that the whole nation were more like that, but I don’t.

Mr. Kristof quotes Wesley Clark, offering a dazzlingly moronic assessment:

“It’s the purest application of socialism there is,’ Wesley Clark, the retired four-star general and former supreme allied commander of NATO forces in Europe, told me. And he was only partly joking.

“Only partly”, indeed. What Mr. Kristof and General Clark overlook, in their wistful longings — and this is the equivalent of a botanist overlooking a mature sequoia in his driveway — is that the military is a fully taxpayer-funded agency of the U.S. government, created and maintained solely (ostensibly at least), for a specific, vitally important purpose. It is not, and cannot be, “socialist”, because socialism refers to a economic system of national government in which the State controls the means of production and the flow of capital (i.e., the source of the funding for agencies like the military, which produce nothing, create no wealth, and exist only as debits — really big ones — on the national balance sheet). Socialism has nothing whatsoever to do with how government agencies themselves are managed — and certainly not, for God’s sake, with Army pay-grade differentials. If we now have a “lefty” military that imagines its mission is to be a community-outreach/public-assistance program instead of a maximally effective strategic and tactical force, that is simply a symptom of political ideology gone off the rails at the highest levels of government, not any brief for the alleged blessings, or practical feasibility, of socialism.

That this sort of applesauce (I’m reminded also of Tom Friedman’s wishing, in his own columns, that we could be more like China) can be published, with a straight face, by our nation’s newspaper of record makes it awfully hard to keep one’s spirits up.

Read it all here.