Also, I don’t think I reasonably implied that the military strongly competes with prisons and mental institutions for its recruits. Quite the contrary, I mentioned the latter two to illustrate how stark the options are for more boundedly rational citizens: folks who have trouble maintaining the economic planning and foresight necessary to maintain an apartment, save for retirement, or have a good work performance if they face penalties no more severe than fire-at-will. I suspect we’d have a consequentially better society with a stronger (but opt-outable) paternalist structure. The military currently seems to me to be the least extremely limiting/stigmatizing of the three public sets of institutions that provide relatively strong paternalism for adults that need it.

The military is actually reasonably selective, and while it does recruit substantially from the bottom half (although for only a minority of its headcount) entrance requirements largely exclude the bottom third, so it’s not strongly competing with prisons and mental institutions.

In similar vein, I think the military’s strongly deviant benefits and job security might be capitalists buying out violent but economically unintelligent people, in the similar way that highly paid legal work for law firms mostly to protect against other lawyers might be capitalists buying out excellent arguers/propagandists who also have limited economic aptitude or interest. May also be a factor to be considered when making adjustments to size of the military population or its benefits.

I think you’re missing part of the point. You’ve got the cart before the horse.

If you take a typical American two car family, you can easily make an economic/financial case that cutting their car costs in half will be of major economic benefit, especially over the long run. You can also point out that it’s not as difficult as they might think to only be able to use one car and perhaps rent a car for specific situations that absolutely require a second car, such as one driver needing to drive out of town for a long trip.

However, you can’t start with “What if we cut your car expenses in half?” and then expect them to see the “obvious” benefits to losing the second car. You have to start by convincing them that they’re fine with one car. Once they’re ok with that idea, you can easily convince them to cut their car expenses in half, because at that point it will make sense to them.

In a similar fashion, you’ll have to convince the American people that it’s just fine for the US to not be in control of what happens militarily outside of North America. Convince them to not demand we do something the next time some dictatorship invades someone else. Convince them that it’s ok if China, or Iran, or North Korea, takes over whichever neighbors it wants to. Once you’ve accomplished that task, it becomes a simple matter to cut the US defense budget down to the EU level.

The reason for current US military spending isn’t just economic and defense benefits for the US, although those do exist. The reason is what US voters expect the US to do with it’s military, which is a much larger role. Change the expectations and the budget can be easily cut.

You can’t change the expectations of the voters by cutting the budget in half. You have to cut the budget in half by changing the expectations of the voters. That task is of course complicated by the possibility that the voters may prefer whatever you want to call the utility they get when the US is a lone superpower to the utility of the smaller federal budget.

For an extensive and detailed analysis of where we are and some of the near-future possibilities in US military strength and relations from a world economic and social standpoint, I’d suggest “The Shield of Achilles”, by Philip Bobbitt.

And for the record, there are two adults and four children in my household and we do fine with one car in a semi-rural area.