"Prior researchers have deployed the Vietnam-era draft lottery as an instrument to estimate causal effects of military … service on health and income. This research has shown that effects of veteran status on mortality and earnings that appeared … shortly after the war seem to have dissipated by 2000. While these are important outcomes to economists, by focusing on them …

’s ability to provide such protection ultimately rests on its power to wage war. Governments therefore have tended to devote more … resources to war than to anything else. Indeed, prior to the advent of the modern welfare State, they usually spent more on war … than on all other things combined. Governments were essentially war making institutions that did a few other things on the …