The Pentagon is asking Congress for $200 billion, in no small part because of the outrageous war with Iran. The Center for Strategic and International Studies estimates this war has cost $12.7 billion and counting. Can we afford this? Yes, for now. Should we? Of course not. I cannot express strongly enough how unnecessary, harmful, and wrong this war is. But we should oppose this because of that, not because it’s expensive. And we can oppose this war better if we think beyond price terms— we should treat them as invitation to deeper analysis rather than a fact or argument in and of themselves. One of democracy’s great virtues is that unlike the “consumer’s democracy” of markets, it allows us to make decisions collectively based upon values, not just individually based upon prices.

American military expenditures prompt near-ubiquitous complaints about cost. The Guardian’s analysis of this is a case in point: the dollar cost of the first six days of the Iran war would be enough to pay nearly a tenth of American elementary school teachers for a year, a year of middle care for over half a million veterans, Medicaid for millions of kids, etc. These comparisons are useful in demonstrating America’s priorities.

But as anything more than a numerical comparison they fall flat. I’ve previously written about the pitfalls of comparing money across time– here we face a similar problem in comparing money across space and context. There are two reasons we can afford military expenditures. First, dollar hegemony. Everyone wants dollars: the US dollar is the international reserve currency of choice, US bonds are seen as the one of the safest global financial assets, US financial markets are the largest and most significant, etc. Virtually no one alive has experienced a world where this wasn’t the case, and most of us have spent most or all of our lives in the post-gold-standard world where American dollars were not even theoretically backed by anything else. 

That’s a good thing! It allows us to collectively make economic decisions without being limited arbitrarily by how much gold or silver happens to exist or be circulating at any given time. There’s nothing special about gold except that it’s rare, and a gold-based order can collapse for all kinds of reasons– an inability to sustain growth, preference for other minerals, political discontent. You can’t eat gold. All money is varying configurations of social agreement, which means it’s fragile. Without going into too much detail here on the why of dollar hegemony, it’s not inevitable, because it’s a feature of our particular political and economic order. I can’t tell you whether it’s at risk or from what (which should be all the more reason for caution with the global economy and international relations rather than… all of this). For now, it’s the way things are.

The second reason we can afford massive military expenditures is that we have cultivated infrastructure and institutions that can actually fulfill them. Iran cannot “afford” Tomahawk missiles because it cannot produce them, and the US can. The purchase price would be infinity dollars (and dollars, remember, come from America). Our military-industrial complex has a reputation for waste in the public eye, but it can be very effective. The F-35 stealth fighter was famously a “boondoggle”-- behind schedule, over cost– but it is undeniably effective. We don’t necessarily make wise decisions at the high level on, say, how many submarines to build, but we’re pretty good at building those we choose to.

The third, most important reason we can afford expensive war and “cannot” or do not afford alternatives is, of course, politics. Some of this is sentiment, and some of it is system. While cutting the military is a popular enough populist call, there has long been real support for large military expenditures. Increasing teachers’ pay… perhaps not so much. 

But structural factors determine how public opinion matters. The federal government can debt spend (and it should), while towns and states cannot. If the Senate jacks up the budget for the US Navy, it only harms you and me indirectly at best– general inflation impacts from big spending, or, say, auto costs going up because of increased steel demand. In contrast, if teachers in your town want a raise, that will have to trade off with local spending or taxes, almost dollar for dollar, because while Uncle Sam can obtain dollars from the future and/or from thin air, your town and state cannot. This doesn’t just shape how or which public opinions matter, it also shapes public opinion itself: the right can pit homeowners against teachers a lot more easily than the left can pit ordinary citizens against Lockheed Martin, because money given to Lockheed Martin, and this is important, does not directly trade off with most Americans’ personal well-being in easily measurable ways.

Money presents itself as the final resource to which all other things can be reduced– that’s what makes it useful. Politics requires us to mentally undo the collapse of all into one value that money usefully does in economics. Monetary exchange is only possible within limits, and so our conception of money as perfectly fungible is true only within those limits. Sometimes this is obvious– Iran not being able to buy Tomahawk missiles. Much of the time it’s more subtle. Military dollars come from a gerrymandered Senate that’s highly insulated from public opinion, particularly on individual decisions: it is very hard to discipline a legislator for particular items in the military budget, and difficult for them to meaningfully respond to that discipline in some cases. School dollars come from states and towns that have to pinch pennies because they cannot print dollars. The federal government can invest in the future with deficit spending; states and towns cannot.

One particular tragedy is that this is a problem with the US Constitution itself: the Framers wanted to restrict, as Woody Holton wrote, an “excess of democracy” at the local and state level, where in particular farmers had more power to pursue inflationary and public spending policies that disadvantages wealthy merchants. If you want to fully make use of the power of public money, you have to run through antidemocratic institutions like the Senate. This is how we end up in a situation where the University of Connecticut, my current employer and the flagship of the wealthiest per capita state in the country, has confiscated office garbage cans to save on custodial costs even as the White House sets dollars on fire in Iran. I don’t know what my ideal reform would be here— and it certainly would not be resurrecting the demands of pre-constitutional farmers— but a more democratic federal government and experimentation with democratic money at other levels would be good starts.

When the administration attacked the Houthis in Yemen, there were jokes that “this is why Americans don’t have healthcare.” It’s actually worse than that: we could very well have universal healthcare and engage in foreign misadventures. The American dollar has incredible power. We’re just using it for violence and self-sabotage instead of investment in collective well-being or economic development. 

Understanding money and its limits is important in pushing for better policy. Many of the most important things this country could do right now would cost a lot of money: if we affirm the idea that government spending is zero sum, it will be harder to do those things. Of course we can’t spend infinite sums of money either. That’s why paying attention to macroeconomic constraints– inflation, rather than debt– real resource issues– we need more hospitals, factories, etc. to achieve particular objects, not just “more money”-- and political constraints– doing things in a way that makes them acceptable as long-run policy– is so important. We can do that better if we get beyond sticker price comparisons. Thinking in terms of prices might help us shape individual spending decisions. But thinking in terms of politics and economics can help us reshape, for the better, the entire structure through which those decisions are made.