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re-allocation October 24, 2007

Posted by ocmpoma in : economics , trackback

At Cafe Hayek, Don Boudreaux notes, with regards to the government using National Guard units that could be fighting fires deployed to Iraq, that

“…this war, while it does interfere with efforts to extinguish wildfires, does not interfere any more so than does nearly any other government program you care to name… To use a worker or raw materials fighting a war is to take that worker and those materials, at least for a time, away from other potentially valuable uses… …But the fact that the war effort detracts from the ability to get other goodies is not itself a sound argument against the war.”

While I of course agree that any usage of available resources detracts from a government’s ability to use those resources elsewhere, I think a key point is glossed over in the post. Taking all of, say, Arizona’s state police forces and re-deploying them along the border with Mexico, it would seem to me, has a much more significant effect on the state government’s ability to fight crime than does cutting funds from other programs in order to form an equivalent force.

In other words, the federal government’s use of resources which are already dedicated to fire-fighting for war-fighting has a greater effect on fire-fighting than other things such as using police to prosecute a “war” on drugs — especially when one factors in re-deployment costs. It would take much more time and money to pull the National Guard units deployed overseas back to the States than it would to pull police off of anti-drug units and deploy them to evacuate a fire zone.

So, I find that while I do agree that any government program automatically detracts from the government’s ability to engage in any other program, I must disagree with the equivalence that is stated (”…does not interfere any more so than does nearly any other government program…”). Of course, it is only fitting to note that putting National Guard units stateside to fight fires would dramatically lessen the government’s ability to prosecute the war.

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