Candace Owens’ sentiment might seem reasonable at first; however, that is the fundamental problem with slogans: Bad ideas can sound quite intuitive if they are massaged into just the right form. Let’s consider what the real meaning of Candace’s statement is by casting it into different words.
Saying the US should not have to pay for the wars of any other country amounts to saying this: "The US should never engage in proxy war even if it is attacked through proxy war." In essence, in order to "protect the taxpayer" we should forswear a useful tool that our enemies use against us. Iran is happy, for example, to keep paying for other people's wars against us. Or worse, Candace's "thinking" is saying the US should become directly involved, risking escalation and US lives and achieving the same result (or a worse result) at an increased cost. You can go on about wanting to protect the taxpayer, whose money is guaranteed to be wasted on something regardless of how much money we "save" but it is actually profoundly stupid. Indeed, if it ever became policy, the net result would inevitably be more direct deployment of US troops and more dead Americans.
The majority of people on both sides of the political spectrum are idiots---and even among the smart people, they are still amateurs outside of their immediate area of expertise. They don't understand polling, making projections, political science, economics, military history, geopolitics, or much of anything else. Ben Shapiro, who is obviously extremely intelligent, for example, made the projection that Trump’s campaign could only be taken out if the field was whittled down: When, in fact, the field needed to be expanded to do so; a candidate that would appeal to his base and then endorse someone else needed to be found. Ben did not realize that an idea that could work if Trump had been polling below 50% had no chance of working if he was polling above 50%. Obviously, if you already have a majority, you must chip away at it to get on oneself—you can’t overtake it through consolidation. Why Ben’s brain malfunctioned here is unclear, but it could be an overreliance on verbal reasoning and associated hueristics and a neglect for spatio-mathematical thinking.
Of course, all humans make mistakes; I failed to see Putin going into Ukraine. However, these mistakes are not due to missing information or over-idealization of the opponent (I judged that Putin would make the smart move and used that as the basis of my predictions). Ben and Candace’s failures are failures of understanding. There is a difference between making a false assumption or lacking a piece of information and having a completely faulty mental picture that doesn’t seem to acknowledge even the most basic ideas—or to recognize them when they are pointed out.
Now, what the nature of the US relationship with Israel should be is a different question. However, I think Israel is fully justified in taking the actions it is taking against Hamas: But to say the US should not pay for other people's wars is to say the US should lose on the geopolitical battlefield. It makes for a nice slogan, but it is terrible policy.
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