Minsky contra the military-industrial complex

Okay, last one of these for now. In my defence, this one was just too good not to share. Here we have St Louis post-Keynesian leading light Hyman Minsky laying straight into the American military-industrial complex as a key driver of hypercapitalist accumulation and the acceleration of inequality:

Another reason why capital income has not withered away in the post-war period may lie in the structure of the government programmes that have been developed to maintain full employment. In the pre-World War II emergency of the Great Depression, government programmes designed to increase employment were heavily weighted toward the direct employment of labour. During World War II, a series of contractual devices for war production were developed which used private facilities for the manufacture of war materiel. In the postwar period, this contract system has been continued, both for the production of military equipment and in the production of more civilian-oriented goods. These contracts always provide for a substantial profit margin for the contractors. Not only has the postwar structure of policy designed to maintain income been heavily weighted toward the capital-consuming military needs, but the social structure of these policies has tended to subsidise capital income. Furthermore, inasmuch as the combination of military demand and the much larger schemes of transfer payments (social security, etc.) requires a heavy tax load, tax measures designed to aid capital income at the expense of consumers’ income are available…

It might well be that the euthanasia of the rentier in the form Keynes envisaged it requires prior constraints on the growth of relative needs, and the constrained growth of relative needs requires an income distribution based on low or no income from capital ownership. Underlying Keynes’ vision of a world in which capital is no longer scarce [to the majority of people] is a world in which income distribution is such as to avoid encouraging ever more extravagant consumption, and in which ‘civilised’ standards discipline and control relative needs and move consumption away from capital-intensive patterns.