Life & Wisdom Quote by John Ralston Saul

Armaments are one of capitalism's strangest products: brilliantly engineered, lavishly funded, and designed to be destroyed. Saul’s line lands because it refuses the romantic fog that often surrounds military spending. He treats weapons as a category error inside a civilian economy: they look like “growth” on a balance sheet, but they don’t behave like productive capital. A factory that turns steel into tractors expands future capacity; a factory that turns steel into missiles expands the state’s ability to negate capacity.

The sharpness is in “deadweight.” It’s an economist’s insult smuggled into moral language. Armaments don’t circulate as public benefit the way infrastructure or healthcare might; they sit, depreciate, demand maintenance, then get replaced. Even when they’re exported, the gains are lopsided: jobs and contracts at home, instability and dependency abroad, with politics acting as the hidden subsidy. Saul’s subtext is that the “defense economy” isn’t a neutral sector but a structural temptation: a permanent industry looking for permanent justification.

Context matters: Saul writes as a Canadian public intellectual skeptical of managerial ideology and the way modern states launder power through technocratic budgets. Coming out of the late Cold War and into the post-9/11 security boom, “armaments” became an all-purpose argument for industrial policy, regional employment, and national pride. Saul punctures that by drawing a hard line between wartime utility and peacetime drag, forcing the uncomfortable question: if your economy needs weapons procurement to stay healthy, what does that say about your definition of “health”?