The Unseen Costs of War on Iran

by Antonius Aquinas,Antonius Aquinas:

While events in the unprovoked Israeli-U.S. aggression against Iran remain in flux due mostly to the quixotic, contradictory and downright duplicitous policies and actions of a seemingly mentally unstable American president, it is quite difficult to assess the effects of the war on U.S. and world energy markets and thus their overall economies.

What is certain is that all wars are exercises in mass murder and the lowering of living standards for most. The notable exception, of course, is the Military Industrial Complex and the political class that wantonly feeds it.

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The detrimental effect of war on human life outside of the killing is best explained by Henry Hazlitt’s “Broken Window” essay in his most popular bookEconomics in One Lesson. Building on the work of the great French economist Frédéric Bastiat’s essay “What is Seen and What is Not Seen,” Hazlitt’s analysis can be applied to the destructive aspect of warfare.

The labor, resources, and land that could have been used to create new capital and consumer goods – hammers, drills, tractors, refrigerators, cars, houses, etc. – have to be used to rebuild the destruction caused by bombs, drones, and missiles. Fewer goods and diminished and/or compromised infrastructure – water, heat, sewage, electricity – means that a society is worse off.

This obvious aspect of warfare is sometimes lost among even the most keen observers of geopolitics. A number of these analysts have opined that the Russian economy has not been adversely affected from the losses it has suffered during the Ukrainian conflict which most sources have estimated to be between 1 to 1.2 million in casualties – killed, seriously wounded, or missing. The Ukrainian losses are likely double as much.*

In economic terms, however, the loss is the foregone production that would have occurred (unseen) with the labor that these unfortunate souls would have contributed to the creation of goods and services.

More tragic is the hit to the Russian and Ukrainian populations that will be felt in the reduction of families and the children that would have been brought into the world. This is happening at a time when the white population of the world is shrinking at an alarming rate.