Conservatism Has Built a Wasteful Garrison State

Some of the human and economic costs of conservative economic policies during the 1980s have been widely noted: rising public and private debt, mounting trade deficits, epidemic homelessness and soaring inequality.

But one of the most serious costs has largely gone unnoticed. Steadily and surely, the U.S. economy is building a garrison state.

This should come as no surprise. By increasing economic inequality and insecurity, conservative economic policies have exacerbated social tensions. As a consequence, an ever-increasing fraction of the nation’s productive potential must be devoted simply to keeping the have-nots at bay.

Similarly, on the international scene, hawkish foreign and military policies aimed at reasserting U.S. global power have a comparably high price tag: A mounting fraction of the labor force is not producing goods for consumption or for investment but is either producing military goods or working for the Pentagon.

This tendency toward a garrison state can be illustrated with some fairly simple numbers. In our forthcoming book, “After the Waste Land,” Samuel Bowles, Thomas E. Weisskopf and I highlight this dimension of the costs of conservative economics by focusing on the proliferation of what we call “guard labor” and “threat labor.”

Guard labor enforces rules. In any society, many people do not produce goods and services directly, but rather enforce the rules that govern economic life. The presence of some guard labor is hardly an indictment of an economic system: It’s a fact that rules are necessary.

But some rules are harder to enforce than others, and some economic structures must rely more heavily on guard labor. In the workplace, it takes large expenditures on surveillance and security personnel to enforce rules that workers often perceive as invasive, unfair, unnecessary and oppressive--and far less when workers themselves are setting rules in a relatively democratic workplace.

By our count, the amount of guard labor in the U.S. economy is mammoth. We include three main groupings in our estimates:

* Workplace supervisors, who must monitor and discipline workers to extract more intensive labor.

* Domestic guards, including police, judicial and corrections employees as well as private security personnel, who protect against rule violations and deal with violators.

* International guards, the armed forces and civilian defense employees as well as producers of military and domestic security equipment.

By our estimates, guard labor constituted 22.5% of non-farm employment (plus the armed forces) in 1987. This comes to about 25 million in guard labor alone.

Added to this burden is another category of unproductive labor in an unegalitarian society--the wasted activities of what we call “threat labor.” Employers in conflict-filled workplaces rely on the threat of job dismissal to help intimidate workers and extract greater labor intensity. The more hierarchical and conflict-filled the workplace, the more important the presence of this threat becomes. And the greater the reliance on this threat, the more important it becomes that unemployed workers are clamoring outside the workplace for jobs, making the threat of dismissal credible.

We include three groups in our estimate of threat labor:

* The unemployed, the front line of the threat battalions.

* “Discouraged workers,” those who want to work but have temporarily abandoned their search.

* Prisoners, the rear guard battalions of the threat labor force, those members of the unemployed or irregularly employed who got out of hand.

In 1987, threat labor made up 10.4% of non-farm employment (plus the armed forces), accounting for 11.5 million people.

Taken together, more than 34 million Americans occupied roles as either guard or threat labor in 1987, accounting for almost a third of non-farm employment (plus the armed forces).

What is more stunning is the rate of growth of the garrison state. To look at that growth, we compared 1987 to the previous business cycle peak to hold constant, for example, the effects of the expansion and contraction of the economy on unemployment. In 1979, guard and threat labor accounted for 26.7 million in the U.S. labor force. We can see, therefore, that the burgeoning garrison state accounted for an increase of 7.6 million in total guard and threat labor during those eight years.

Conservatives often boast of the U.S. “employment miracle” during the 1980s. Indeed, total non-farm employment (plus the armed forces) grew by 12.6 million between 1979 and 1987. But, as we have seen, the increase in guard and threat labor over that period amounted to 7.6 million, or three-fifths, of that total of 12.6 million.

Had those additional workers been put to work in productive employment in the investment-goods sector, U.S. net investment would have been more than double its actual levels in 1987.

The prophets of austerity insist that millions of ordinary households must tighten their belts, cutting back on consumption, to boost savings and investment and revive the U.S. economy. How about tightening the belt of the garrison state instead?