Originally
posted by
Syko_Killa:
So i'm guessing your point is that it is more financially costly to host a series of wars as opposed to just letting the terrorism take it's course and lives? You can't put a price on life. Life is priceless. Especially when it's a life that deserves a real chance in this universe.
That's not what I'm saying.
The closest I come to making that argument is this: I believe that if the money we spend on fighting terrorism were spent fighting another cause (or causes) of death -- the increase in lives lost due to terrorism (if any) would be far smaller than number of people we could prevent dying from other causes.
But that's not the core of my argument.
Basically, I believe this:
We know that the costs of how we fight terrorism are significant.
- Lots of soldiers have died.
- Lots of money has been spent.
- Lots of rights have been given up.
There can be no debate that the costs of fighting terrorism the way we do are high.
At the same time.
- We don't know if our methods are particularly effective (pretty much all the terrorist plots we've disrupted were done through pre-9/11 methods).
- There's good reason to think our methods are leading to far more dangerous secondary effects (ISIS?)
- There's little reason to think that the planned/attempted attacks would have done a significant amount of damage (The disrupted attacks we know about, and the government has every reason to not keep them secret, might have killed hundreds more... but not many multiples of what we've seen)
We know for a fact that fighting terrorism costs us a lot -- and not just financially.
And we have every reason to think that doing less to fight terrorism would only lead to a very modest increase in risk.
So why pay a huge cost, for unclear returns, when we know that if we invested that much elsewhere we could get so much more back?
-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.