Politics & Power Quote by Thomas Paine

Abolish war, and you bankrupt the state. Paine’s line lands because it refuses the flattering story governments tell about conflict - that war is a tragic last resort undertaken for lofty ideals. He frames war as a revenue stream, a “lucrative branch” of governance, as if it were taxation or customs, institutionalized and dependable. The shock is the point: he strips the romance from patriotism and leaves the machinery underneath.

The specific intent is polemical. Paine isn’t merely lamenting violence; he’s warning that any plan for peace will collide with incentives, not ignorance. If war enriches those who administer it, then proposals to eliminate it threaten entrenched interests, careers, and the political advantages of emergency. In other words: peace is not just morally hard, it’s economically and bureaucratically inconvenient.

Subtextually, the quote is an early diagnosis of what we’d now call the political economy of war. Conflict expands budgets, legitimizes coercive power, and concentrates authority. Even when “advantageous…to Nations” in the aggregate, peace offers diffuse benefits, while war offers concentrated spoils - contracts, patronage, plunder, and the rally-round-the-flag leverage that makes dissent look like disloyalty.

Context matters: Paine wrote as a revolutionary propagandist and a skeptic of monarchy and imperial ambition, when European powers treated war as routine statecraft and debt-financed militaries were becoming permanent fixtures. His brilliance is to treat war not as an aberration but as a business model. The line endures because it attacks the incentive structure, not the rhetoric, and it implies an uncomfortable corollary: you don’t end war by preaching; you end it by changing what governments profit from.