What War Does To Your Wallet That The TV Won't Tell You | Between The Lies 028

War. Who is it good for? If you answered "Raytheon shareholders and K Street lobbyists," congratulations — you're paying attention.   This week on Between The Lies, Luke Tatum, Rob Brayton, and I dug into the economics of war and why the "war is good for the economy" argument is one of the most persistent lies in mainstream financial thinking. With another Middle Eastern conflict dominating headlines and defense stocks ticking up, it felt like the right moment to pull back the curtain.   What We Cover: We start with Frederic Bastiat's broken window fallacy — the idea that destruction creates economic activity. Yes, technically. But every dollar funneled into Halliburton is a dollar that didn't go toward something durable, something generational, something actually useful. Rob makes the point that the best minds in academia get siphoned into defense industries because that's where the money is. What if that intellectual capital got redeployed into solving real problems instead?   Luke breaks down why 1946 — the year troops came home from World War II — was arguably the single greatest year for economic growth in U.S. history. Not because of government spending. Because private citizens came home, started companies, and got back to building wealth for themselves and their families. That's what actually drives an economy.   We also get into the ethics of investing in defense contractors (Luke drops a technical point on how secondary market stock purchases actually work), the Pentagon's missing $1.8 trillion that apparently nobody can locate, and why DARPA's budget is basically a black hole with a government seal on it.   The conclusion: war misallocates capital, destroys resources that could have compounded for generations, and benefits a very small group of people who are not you or me. If you want to protect yourself from the economic fallout of endless conflict, the answer isn't betting on Lockheed Martin — it's building your own financial infrastructure that governments and defense contracts can't touch.   Your focus should stay where it belongs: your family, your community, the things you can actually control.   Free toolkit with Luke's Amazon bestselling book and two video courses available at PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast.   Websites Referenced: PerfectSpiralCapital.com/podcast