ARE they worried? When the presidents of DC's two most powerful conservative think tanks team up with America's most prominent cheerleader for war to jointly author a Wall Street Journal op-ed defending the United States' unfathomably colossal military budget, one suspects a bit of anxiety.

The folks of the tea-party movement are clearly upset at what they see as out-of-control spending, and frequently express a desire to slash the size of government. A quick glance at the federal budget is enough to see that military spending is far and away the largest expense after Medicare and Social Security. That fact combined with the observation that America's titanic military budget is larger than the military budgets of China, Britain, France, Russia, Germany, Japan, Saudia Arabia, Italy, South Korea, Brazil, Canada, and Australia combined is more than enough to suggest to common sense that there's room here to cut a bit of fat.

But not so fast! According to AEI's Arthur Brooks, Heritage's Ed Feulner, and the Weekly Standard's Bill Kristol, any attempt to shrink the big government of garrisons and guns will "make the world a more dangerous place, and ... impoverish our future." Whose side are you on, tea partiers?

Messrs Brooks, Feulner, and Kristol assert that military spending "is neither the true source of our fiscal woes, nor an appropriate target for indiscriminate budget-slashing in a still-dangerous world". They aver that "anyone seeking to restore our fiscal health should look at entitlements first, not across-the-board cuts aimed at our men and women in uniform".

This is bogus. Sure, Medicare and Social Security cost more, but spending on war and its infrastructure remains a titanic expense. The path from debt, whether for governments or families, is to cut back across the board. If you're in the red and you spend a ridiculous amount of your income on your porcelain egret collection, the fact that you spend even more on rent and student loan payments is obviously no excuse not to cut back on egret miniatures. And, in fact, America's martial profligacy is a "true source of our fiscal woes". According to Joseph Stiglitz and Linda Bilmes:

There is no question that the Iraq war added substantially to the federal debt. This was the first time in American history that the government cut taxes as it went to war. The result: a war completely funded by borrowing. U.S. debt soared from $6.4 trillion in March 2003 to $10 trillion in 2008 (before the financial crisis); at least a quarter of that increase is directly attributable to the war. And that doesn't include future health care and disability payments for veterans, which will add another half-trillion dollars to the debt. As a result of two costly wars funded by debt, our fiscal house was in dismal shape even before the financial crisis—and those fiscal woes compounded the downturn.

Perhaps because they see the wrong-headedness of their line of defence, Messrs Brooks, Feulner, and Kristol retreat to the claim that in order to make money, America has to spend money:

Furthermore, military spending is not a net drain on our economy. It is unrealistic to imagine a return to long-term prosperity if we face instability around the globe because of a hollowed-out U.S. military lacking the size and strength to defend American interests around the world. Global prosperity requires commerce and trade, and this requires peace. But the peace does not keep itself.

Again: completely shabby. The real question at issue here is how much military spending is necessary to keep the trade routes open, and how much of that the United States must kick in. By asserting, rather audaciously, that America's level of military spending is not a "net drain" on the economy, they imply the return on the marginal trillion is positive. I doubt it. The return on the three trillion blown on the war on Iraq, for example, is certainly much, much, much less than zero once the cost of removing financial and human capital from productive uses is taken into account. Also, if prosperity requires peace, it's utterly mysterious how starting expensive wars is supposed to help.

When thinking about peace as a global public good, it can help to recall that the United States is not the only country that benefits from it. Suppose the United States were to cut its military budget in half to something like the size of the combined budgets of the next five or six countries. This might not suffice if you're itching to invade Yeman, Iran, and who knows what else Mr Kristol's got his eye on. But if the argument is that the purpose of military spending is to secure a calm climate conducive to global trade, it's hard to believe $350 billion per annum will not suffice. But let's say it doesn't, for the sake of argument. Will nations with an equally strong interest in keeping the peace simply faint on their divans whenever a commerce-threatening war breaks out? Of course not. Even the French are perfectly capable of keeping the sea lanes open.

The reality is that much of the world is free-riding off the security provided by American military dominance. Were American taxpayers to refuse to bear so much of the burden of keeping the world safe for Danish container ships, other countries would surely step up. Furthermore, considerations of basic distributive fairness suggest they should.

So listen up tea partiers! Slashing military spending will not only shrink government and help put us on a path to fiscal responsibility while stripping unaccountable, fat-cat defence contractors of hundreds of billions in corporate welfare. It will also strip foreigners, many of whom speak ridiculous languages, of large defence subsidies paid out of your pocket! What's not to love?

Messrs Brooks, Feulner, and Kristol have offered the tea-party movement an excellent opportunity to show what it's really made of. Will it allow itself to be captured by Washington's establishment conservative elite? Will it follow the example of the American Enterprise Institute, the Heritage Foundation, and the Weekly Standardandfight, fight, fight for big government, just as long as it's big government bristling with the tools of conquest and mass death? Or will it recognise that war is the health of the state, the enemy of liberty, and the bane of humanity and stand up to the big-government Washington war machine?

I'm putting my money on capture. Never bet against Bill Kristol.

(Photo credit: AFP)