If you look at GDP charts, the US is very dynamic in comparison to the EU. I think the EU is a better model, but when it comes to raw economic, military and diplomatic power, there's no comparison.

If you go back to the decades in which the US became the world hegemon (post-war era) the difference is way more stark. It's not that the EU resigned - it's that the US muscled them out!

But that is precisely because a lack of autonomous spending in the EU!

One theory is that in Europe in the 1980s, workers became so much more empowered that the private sector lost the will to invest. Start with https://delong.typepad.com/kalecki43.pdf for the basic concept here, but there are many more examples.

A VAT-funded balanced budget welfare state is a purely redistributional mechanism which, while great, is not sufficient to undo this sort of thing.

Direct government spending like the military sort is a way around this. Maybe the workers are militant, but will the democracy just allow itself to decline military because you don't feel like dealing with that?

Workers vote too, so I don't think so.

I don't know. It seems to me that compared to every other form of state spending (roads, healthcare, etc), military spending is conspicuously poor in terms of return on investment.

I think the US is a very weird state - it's probably the most consistently old-school liberal state in the world, it has negligible worker activism, colossal natural resources, and its position as world hegemon gives it all sorts of non-imitable economic advantages. I don't think you can copy the US if you're not the US - the closest in terms of economic policy is the UK, and the UK economy is kind of like a corpse in a bin bag.

Europe was rebuilding after WW2 and it only started presenting a somewhat united front 30 years ago.

The EU is barely a confederation, let alone a federal state.

> A little "Military Keynesianism"

Is how a military industrial complex starts. Then it seeks to justify its existence by either meddling everywhere.

Just because the Americans have this problem doesn't mean the rest of the world is doomed to have it as well. I submit that there is a significant cultural element at play, here: Europeans have known war at home in a way that the US never has, and are much less gung ho about military power. In fact, you might even argue they are gun shy to a fault, so it seems unlikely that this slippery slope will cause actual slippage.

I address that will the welfware state helping: industrial complexes are surprisingly grassroots in the United States, because if you loose your job you are so fucked.

If people simply don't need jobs as much, on the margins, it's much easier to have healthy conversations about what investment is actually good, vs what is just make-work or worse.