The amount spent on the bombs ($22k) or missiles ($110k) used to [possibly] kill enemy targets could rather easily pay to accommodate a few refugees long enough for them to either assimilate and find jobs or wait out the crisis and return home.

All it takes is a commitment to finally throttle the military materiel manufacturing economy--that was ramped up during World War 2--back to a peacetime proportion of the budget.

As it is now, the U.S. has to continually go out and look for new conflicts, and beat loudly the drums of war, to justify that high level of military spending. We have been waiting a long time to beat those swords back into plowshares, and they just keep making more swords.

I think that the entire quota of 70k refugees can be adequately provided for in less than one month just by taking the buildings on a bare handful of shuttered military bases out of mothballs.

We can accommodate millions more, and take care of the poor people that are already here. Our elected politicians prevent such occurrences using the flimsiest of justifications.

Friend, I think you'll find that a proposal to deeply restructure whole economies and societies will not be well-received by people reluctant to accept smaller changes.

Have you considered appealing to what your audience is likely to care about, rather than the goals you find appealing?

What audience? I'm just some guy complaining about things on the Internet.

Rent-seeking behavior seems intrinsic to human society, such that any group of people larger than a certain size will be forced to deal with it in one way or another.

At this point, nothing short of a constitutional amendment is likely to put a dent in the military industrial complex. And that's not happening any time soon.

Complaining about it helps me to not lose my sanity. And that's good, because without my sanity, I might do something like endorse an armed revolution to reduce the political and economic influence of the military in the U.S. See, as a sane person, I know that doesn't make any sense. There is a right way and a wrong way to fight fire with fire; that's the wrong way.

And it gets a dissenting opinion out there, on the off chance that someone might stray far enough from their own echo chamber to see it.

On the off chance that someone strays outside their echo chamber and encounters your dissenting opinion, the likely response is not what you would hope for. As written, the likely response will be for them to conclude that people outside their echo chamber are disconnected from reality and not worth paying attention to. Then they'll go back into their echo chamber, and your dissenting voice will have wasted a perfectly good opportunity.

So, friend, I ask you to stop and consider how you want people who encounter your lone voice in the wilderness to react. Assuming you care - perhaps you value having something to complain (and thus wish to ensure its continued existence) about more than you do persuading people that It Doesn't Have To Be This Way.

The reactions of others are irrelevant to my desire to express my own opinion.

As a political minority, I am well aware that there are literally tens of millions of people who will dismiss my opinions without even pausing to think about them. That doesn't mean that I should stop having them, or stop expressing them in whatever way that pleases me.

I'm not exactly sure what you hope to accomplish by your responses. It almost sounds like you agree with the sentiment, but not the expression. If so, it is not a tad hypocritical to complain about how I am arranging my words rather than try to say it better yourself?

There's always going to be something to complain about. If not how the military-industrial complex is preventing the realization of peacetime prosperity, it might be how we have all this peacetime prosperity, but can't keep the mosquitoes from biting everyone at the picnic. If we run out of truly awful things to complain about, we can always complain about the merely annoying things. So I find your suggestion that complainers would actually prefer that the things they complain about not be fixed to be misguided.

I'm suggesting that if you want to standing a snowball's chance in Hell of fixing the things you identify as problems, you need to think about how to persuade people. Bluntly, ranting in a person's general direction tends not to be a great way to change their mind, and changing minds is almost certainly what you need to further your stated goals.

I perhaps could say it better myself, but that's not my goal at this juncture.

Not all of them, but a lot of them. Anyway just because we haven't doesn't mean we can't.

I'm positive FED will be able to print some more money, there's always enough for military actions in middle East in the first place.