4 ms·

George Washington didn't have Lockheed Martin's hand in his pocket. Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arms.

sigmoid10 2y ago
And when you didn't have to fight the war on the other side of the planet.
- tempfile 2y ago
  Britain and America are not exactly close...
  - sigmoid10 2y ago
    Did any of the founding fathers intend to bring the war to Britain?
  - philipov 2y ago
    And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war. The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning. It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.
    - dpc050505 2y ago
      The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
      - philipov 2y ago
        That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did. Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered. Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn. Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control. Or any number of other scenarios.
    - cykros 2y ago
      The British also realized that as long as the Americans would borrow from the Bank of England, and were willing to trade their raw goods to England where they could be processed into industrial goods and then sold back to them, there wasn't much of a need to win the war in the first place -- though they didn't realize this all at once (as evidenced by the War of 1812). It was when the Americans (in the North) got to disrupting this economic situation that things really kicked off that they needed to back the Confederacy in what was effectively America's third revolution. Despite losing that one too, America's economy and politics were impacted enough that it was just a few decades later the British agent and American turncoat Woodrow Wilson was able to bring the former colonies back to heel with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, and entry into WWI as Britain's ally. It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.
ekianjo 2y ago
> Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arm. Certainly not. You could not print money out of nothing for a fairly long time.
rcxdude 2y ago
Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.
- justsid 2y ago
  Being able to outspend the other side is definitely a good indicator of winning odds. There is some friction of course, but it’s a very rough approximation of how much industrial might you can put into the field. And just having money isn’t enough either, you have to be able to spend/convert it into a military power in some way. So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.
- oooyay 2y ago
  That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.
- cykros 2y ago
  They were also financed with a finite resource, or at least, one that grew at a much slower rate, governed by the laws of physics as they impacted the economic feasibility of gold mining. Rather than an indefinitely large supply of "money future generations will pay back."

sigmoid10 2y ago

And when you didn't have to fight the war on the other side of the planet.

tempfile 2y ago
Britain and America are not exactly close...
- sigmoid10 2y ago
  Did any of the founding fathers intend to bring the war to Britain?
- philipov 2y ago
  And that's the primary reason that Britain lost the war. The war was much more expensive for the British than for the Colonists, and became even more expensive once France joined. The British didn't lose because they couldn't keep fighting, but because the cost of the war grew to be higher than the expected value of winning. It was also expensive for the French, and that cost helped bankrupt the state, which led to the French Revolution. One of many causes.
  - dpc050505 2y ago
    The French revolution happened because real wealth was basically left untaxed, leaving an enormous tax burden on everyone that wasn't nobility. The situation was not unlike what Piketty described to win his nobel prize.
    - philipov 2y ago
      That is also one of the many causes of the French Revolution, but on its own isn't enough to explain why it went down exactly how and when it did. Had the runway to bankruptcy been longer, a more decisive king than Louis 16th might have managed to successfully reform the state without it being shattered. Perhaps the crisis wouldn't have landed at the same time as weather-driven economic downturn. Maybe if it had been a few years later, different people would have gotten into power and Brissot wouldn't have started a disastrous war with Austria that spiraled everything out of anyone's control. Or any number of other scenarios.
  - cykros 2y ago
    The British also realized that as long as the Americans would borrow from the Bank of England, and were willing to trade their raw goods to England where they could be processed into industrial goods and then sold back to them, there wasn't much of a need to win the war in the first place -- though they didn't realize this all at once (as evidenced by the War of 1812). It was when the Americans (in the North) got to disrupting this economic situation that things really kicked off that they needed to back the Confederacy in what was effectively America's third revolution. Despite losing that one too, America's economy and politics were impacted enough that it was just a few decades later the British agent and American turncoat Woodrow Wilson was able to bring the former colonies back to heel with the Federal Reserve Act, the 16th Amendment, and entry into WWI as Britain's ally. It was a nice sovereign republic while it lasted, or so I've read.

ekianjo 2y ago

> Wars were much cheaper when all you needed were men, horses and small arm. Certainly not. You could not print money out of nothing for a fairly long time.

rcxdude 2y ago

Not relatively. They were incredibly expensive compared to the resources at the time, not least because of the difficulty of moving supplies around and the huge amount of opportunity cost in the lost work of the men recruited into the military.

justsid 2y ago
Being able to outspend the other side is definitely a good indicator of winning odds. There is some friction of course, but it’s a very rough approximation of how much industrial might you can put into the field. And just having money isn’t enough either, you have to be able to spend/convert it into a military power in some way. So it stands to reason that wars will be as expensive as possible. It’s pay to win to a degree.
oooyay 2y ago
That's a point, but frankly the wars were expensive because you have an organized, uniformed military that has to abide by UN regulations and the Geneva convention fighting people (guerilla units) that aren't held to any of those things. There's a cost to being legitimate and it's more than people would think.
cykros 2y ago
They were also financed with a finite resource, or at least, one that grew at a much slower rate, governed by the laws of physics as they impacted the economic feasibility of gold mining. Rather than an indefinitely large supply of "money future generations will pay back."