First off, I'm going to call "straw man". No one is forced to clean old people's bedpans. They all do it for money, or because of a sense of obligation/love. B

First off, I'm going to call "straw man". No one is forced to clean old people's bedpans. They all do it for money, or because of a sense of obligation/love. But, there are a few other big differences between waging war and providing social services. Perhaps the biggest is that a particular war is a one-time, no-easy-turning-back event, that generally provides little direct benefit to the population funding it. By way of contrast, I'm not saying that civil defense should in general go unfunded. I'm saying that a single massive expenditure of blood and treasure, which will almost certainly result in the violent deaths of tens or hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children, should probably need to meet a somewhat higher bar than the requirement and funding of compulsory high school. Whenever many extra innocent people are likely to die prematurely, extra scrutiny of the decision-making process is required. Because it is precisely when people are asked to pay for something that they seriously evaluate whether it is worth the expense -- and this is a calculation that needs to be made for war more so than for anything else. In general, I think most populations are more than willing to spend what's necessary to defend themselves from a large, immediate threat -- there was little trouble in getting people to pay extra taxes for WWII. Also, because of its one-time nature, the cost of the war could easily come at the expense of other services. In general, people have consented to paying for social services (yes, in the long run they'll cause America to run a deficit if nothing changes, but for now it's being paid for with tax dollars).