Declare War on Declaring War

President Obama’s new drug czar, R. Gil Kerlikowske, said in a recent interview that we need to abandon the phrase, “war on drugs.”  The Los Angeles Times offered editorial support, arguing that “The phrase itself shaped flawed thinking and yielded disastrous policies.” 

Recognizing that framing the drug issue in terms of war distorts our understanding and, with it, our responses, is insightful.  However, there are a host of other government-sponsored domestic "wars" to which that same argument applies, yet the policies and programs adopted to fight those wars are more often escalated than abandoned.

It is ironic that there is widespread opposition to real wars, because of their adverse consequences, yet politicians and their backers like to call every new domestic policy initiative of theirs a war, in order to galvanize support. In fact, war imagery may be the most commonly abused analogy in politics.

We have heard that "war is hell," "all's fair in love and war," and "war is politics by other means" (any combination of which illustrates the risks of compounding imperfect analogies). We heard that the 1970s oil crisis was the moral equivalent of war (although government price controls did far more damage than OPEC, making one wonder who declared war on American citizens). And government wars have been declared not just on drugs, but on a host of problems, from crime to poverty to illiteracy.

Unfortunately, the imagery of urgency, resolve and "giving all we've got" for the good of the country doesn't match the policies actually implemented or their effects on taxpayers' pockets and citizens' liberties. Rather, declarations of such "wars" are often just dramatic rhetoric used to promote politicians' pet programs.  Further, those programs often do far more harm than good, such as the vast invasions of property and privacy, as well as increases in violence and corruption, triggered by the war on drugs.

War imagery is invoked to show determination to win. But shooting wars have no winners; just those who lose more and those who lose less as casualties mount. However, the casualties caused are the last thing social "war on X" supporters ever discuss, although any honest evaluation would find many casualties, as with large public housing projects which became instant slums or the litany of failed training programs promoted as part of the war on poverty.

“Real” wars are against people who intend to harm us.  But domestic policy wars target the social consequences of actions of citizens, who America was created to protect, made necessary by scarcity, which we cannot eliminate.  They cannot be won in the same way. When such wars cannot be won, we should abandon war rhetoric that can only mislead us.

Because of its powerful emotional impact, war imagery and language is also used in other ways that would make George Orwell proud.

We hear of trade wars, in language implying that they are contests between domestic and foreign producers, so that protectionism for "our" firms against "their" firms sounds sensible. However, both buyers and sellers expect to gain by trading, or they would not voluntarily participate, so that trade creates wealth (which is why every defensible study of protectionism finds that it destroys wealth). Protectionism, in fact, is an alliance between domestic producers and the government declaring war on domestic consumers to force them to pay higher prices.

Many public servants declare war to “solve” every domestic crisis (often caused by their "solutions" to earlier alleged crises). But those policy wars are never won. Rather than being abandoned, however, programs created through war rhetoric tend to not just persist, but grow, expanding government encroachment on our shrinking freedoms, with increasingly adverse effects. The last thing we need is to employ the language of foreign wars on the problems of our domestic peace.

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Gary M. Galles is a professor of economics at Pepperdine University. He received his Ph.D. in Economics from UCLA in 1988. His research focuses on public finance and public choice (better termed the economics of government), the theory of the firm, the organization of industry and liberty­.