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The Loving Takeover

Author
Affiliation

Mike P. Sinn

International Campaign to End War and Disease

Abstract

The companies that lobby your government to spend money on missiles instead of medicine are publicly traded. Their shares are for sale to anyone. For roughly $90 per human, you buy all of them. Then the Optimitron calculates the budget that maximizes median healthy lifespan and median after-tax income, the new board hands that budget to the $127 million/year lobbying operation, and the lobbyists go sell Congress on the math. Expected value per $90 contributed: 6,000x to 22,000x. Nobody loses. Existing shareholders get a better strategy. Employees keep their jobs and gain new ones. The board members live longer because the diseases that were going to kill them get funded instead of ignored. The math is below.

Keywords

loving takeover, friendly takeover, shareholder coalition, military industrial complex, military contractors, 1% treaty, coordinated share purchase, lobbying optimization

COST TO BUY CONTROL OF THE WESTERN MILITARY-INDUSTRIAL COMPLEX: approximately $873 billion realistic, or ~$109 (95% CI: $107-$111) per global human.

ANNUAL LOBBYING BUDGET THE NEW BOARD CONTROLS: $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million), currently pointed at keeping the murder budget growing. After the takeover, the Optimitron calculates the optimal federal budget, and the lobbyists sell Congress on it.170 171

EXPECTED VALUE PER GLOBAL HUMAN PARTICIPANT: ~$530,000-$2,000,000 (~6,000x-22,000x the contribution).

This is the lawsuit escalated. The lawsuit is the cheap path: own one share, send the board a love letter, and the law says they have to read it. This is the expensive path: pool capital, own enough shares to control the board, and make the best lobbyists money can buy start working on keeping their shareholders alive instead of keeping their shareholders’ money in missiles.

Why “Loving,” Not “Hostile”

A normal hostile takeover is hostile to the people being acquired. This one makes every person involved richer and longer-lived. Existing shareholders get a better strategy. Directors gain approximately 12 years (95% CI: 8 years-18 years) of additional healthy life, because the diseases that were going to kill them get funded instead of ignored. The acquirers are 8 billion humans who would rather not die and have $90 each.

Why Buying the Shares Is the Selfish Move

A military contractor’s share price today reflects its current business model: sell weapons, lobby for more weapons spending, repeat. If the campaign succeeds, two things happen. First, the economy grows. Under the treaty trajectory, GDP at year 15 is roughly 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) the current trajectory. Even if military spending stays at the same fraction of GDP, the absolute military budget grows in proportion. The contractor operating in a bigger economy captures more absolute revenue without gaining a single point of market share. Second, the pivot opens. Military engineering talent applied to medical, biotech, AI-augmented drug discovery, decentralized FDA172,173 infrastructure, sensors, imaging, and materials compounds at higher rates than cost-plus military work. The same workforce produces more value per engineer-year in a medical division than in a weapons-system division.

If the campaign succeeds, the shares go up through both channels. If the campaign fails, you still own a military contractor, which is approximately what you owned before. The downside is the foregone return on whatever the share purchase displaced (typically index funds at ~7-10% annualized).

And the bet gets better as it builds. Every love letter filed, every board response received, every press article covering the math shifts the market’s estimate of the probability that this works, and the share price moves with it. It is the same way any stock reprices when new information arrives: an FDA approval, a regulatory ruling, an earnings revision. The campaign supplies the information (a structural shift in the contractor’s long-term market) and the market prices it in.

THE FLYWHEEL: THREE LOOPS, ONE MACHINE

   HUMANITY BUYS MILITARY CONTRACTOR SHARES
   (~$109 (95% CI: $107-$111) per human buys all of them)
        |
        v
   CREDIBILITY RISES
        |        \
        |         more shareholders read the analysis
        |         [LOOP A: the board pressure improves]
        v
   BOARD CONTROL ACCUMULATES
        |
        v
   OPTIMITRON CALCULATES OPTIMAL BUDGET
   → BOARD HANDS IT TO THE LOBBYISTS
   ($198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million)/year, new instructions)
        |
        v
   TREATY PASSES  ($27.2 billion/year, forever)
        |        \
        |         bondholders collect
        |         $2.72 billion/year, and the
        |         investor lobby pushes for 2%, then 5%
        |         [LOOP B: the lobbying gets stronger]
        v
   CLINICAL TRIALS FUNDED
   ($21.8 billion/year, 80% of every treaty dollar)
        |
        v
   DISEASES START FALLING
        |
        v
   ECONOMY GROWS
   (1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) the current path at year 15)
        |
        \--> the big military contractors have a better long-term market
             [LOOP C: the shareholder case improves]

The reader who does not care about disease eradication and wants only to make money has the same correct action as the reader who cares about disease eradication and would buy the shares purely to hand the lobbyists an optimal budget. Both buy the shares. The campaign requires no shared motivation, only shared action.

Why This Works

The military-industrial complex is not a sovereign power. It is a collection of publicly traded corporations whose shares are for sale to anyone with a brokerage account. The lobby that has driven military budget expansion for eighty years is a line item in those corporations’ SG&A. The line item is controllable by whoever holds the board. The board is electable by whoever holds 50%+1 of the shares. The shares are for sale.

Stated as a chain: the diseases that will kill you and your family stay in the trial queue because the trials are not funded. The trials are not funded because the federal budget pays for missiles instead of cures. The federal budget pays for missiles instead of cures because the military lobby tells Congress to. The military lobby tells Congress to because the military contractors authorize and pay for it. The military contractors authorize and pay for it because their boards vote to. The boards vote to because their shareholders elect them. The shareholders elect them because nobody has yet pointed out that they could elect a different board for the price of a coffee per global human.

The Math

Major Western military contractors (approximate market caps)

Contractor Ticker Approx market cap 50%+1 control cost
RTX (Raytheon) RTX ~$160B ~$80B
Boeing BA ~$130B ~$65B
Lockheed Martin LMT ~$110B ~$55B
General Dynamics GD ~$80B ~$40B
Northrop Grumman NOC ~$75B ~$38B
L3Harris LHX ~$45B ~$23B
Leidos LDOS ~$20B ~$10B
Booz Allen Hamilton BAH ~$20B ~$10B
CACI International CACI ~$11B ~$6B
Huntington Ingalls HII ~$10B ~$5B
SAIC SAIC ~$8B ~$4B
US primes subtotal ~$670B ~$336B
BAE Systems (UK) BA.L ~$76B ~$38B
Thales (France) HO.PA ~$55B ~$28B
Allied primes ~$131B ~$66B
Total Western primes ~$801B ~$401B

Numbers are approximate. Verify against current 10-K filings before acting on them.

Per-person cost (with 1.8x (95% CI: 1.5x-3x) acquisition premium)

Cost distributed across Per-person cost (realistic)
Global humans (8 billion) ~$109 (95% CI: $107-$111)
Global adults (~5.5 billion) ~$130
Global middle class+ (~3.5 billion) ~$200
US adults (260 million) ~$2,700
US households (130 million) ~$5,400
US households earning >$100k (~50 million) ~$14,000

The entire Western military-industrial lobbying apparatus can be brought under common shareholder control for less than the price of a coffee per week per global human for a single year.

How much you actually need

$873 billion is the price of certainty, not the price of victory. It is what it costs to own 50.1% and need nobody’s agreement. Board control usually arrives much earlier:

Tier Stake What it gets you
One share (~$200) A letter the board is obliged to read The lawsuit campaign
A fraction of a percent, plus a campaign to put your own people on the board Board seats, if the financial case persuades the index funds Engine No. 1 won three ExxonMobil seats with 0.02% of the shares
1-5% across the primes Agenda-setting positions at every annual meeting The activist tier
50.1% Nobody has to agree with you

$873 billion

Three institutional investors hold 60-75% of every big military contractor, and their job is to vote for whatever makes the shares worth more. The pitch to them is the same: the optimal budget makes the companies more valuable. Each tier is insurance against the cheaper tier failing. You climb only as far as the persuasion fails.

What You Do Once You Own the Companies

You replace the boards. The new boards plug the Optimitron into each company’s lobbying budget. The Optimitron is an optimal policy generator174: it takes every measurable input (disease burden, economic output, military readiness, infrastructure, climate, education) and calculates the federal budget that maximizes median health-adjusted life expectancy and median after-tax inflation-adjusted income. The optimal budget generator175 produces the specific line items. The board hands that budget to the lobbyists and says: sell this.

Military contractors currently spend $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million) per year lobbying Congress to expand military appropriations. This is the most effective political-influence operation on Earth. It has driven US military spending from its 1939 baseline to current levels and prevented every serious proposal for reallocation.

After the takeover, the same $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million) lobbies for the optimal budget instead. The lobbyists do not need new skills. They need new talking points, and the talking points are better because the math is better. A budget optimized for median healthy lifespan and median income outperforms the current one on every metric Congress already claims to care about: GDP growth, job creation, national security, deficit reduction. The lobbyists are selling an upgrade, not a sacrifice.

US military and foreign policy follows military-industry lobbying with high fidelity. Hand the lobby better math, and the senators who depend on military PAC money to keep their seats follow within one election cycle. China and Russia become the only remaining holdouts, and they are easier holdouts to address with the US lobby championing the optimal budget than with the US lobby blocking it.

The Minimum Viable Payload

A campaign with no central organizer needs a message that copies itself. The question is what the smallest such message has to contain. The author can be hit by a bus the day after writing it; if the message is built correctly, the bus changes nothing.

A message spreads and acts on its own only if it carries all six of these at once:

  1. Problem. What is wrong, stated in one number a stranger can repeat.
  2. Mechanism. How the wrong thing gets fixed, in one sentence.
  3. Action. Something the reader can do right now, with no further research and no waiting for anyone’s permission.
  4. Motivation. Why this particular reader, personally, is going to die if nobody does it.
  5. Replication. An instruction to pass it on, because a message that does not tell you to copy it does not get copied.
  6. Proof. A reason to believe the other five, ideally one the reader can check.

Drop any one component and the message stalls. Drop the action and you have a lecture. Drop the motivation and you have a charity ad. Drop the proof and you have a rumor. Drop the replication instruction and you have a message that dies with its first reader, which is most messages.

History runs the experiment for us. The ideas that spread on their own, with no agency behind them, are exactly the ones carrying all six. The ones that needed an institution to drag them along were missing a component.

Message Problem Mechanism Action Motivation Replication Proof Result
“Wash your hands” yes yes yes yes no weak Correct. Took roughly forty years and an institution to spread.
“Sleep under a treated net” yes yes yes yes no yes Works, but needs a charity to hand out the nets.
“Vote” vague no yes medium no no Spreads as a slogan, executes nothing in particular.
“E equals m c squared” no no no no no yes True, immortal, and entirely dependent on universities to do anything.
Buy a share, send the board the math yes yes yes yes yes yes Carries all six. The only one that forces its recipient to answer.

The handwashing message was correct in 1847 and still took four decades to spread, because it told nobody to pass it on and offered the busy doctor no proof he could check at the sink. The bed-net message has five of the six and still needs a charity, because the action (“acquire a net”) is not executable on the spot. The last row is the only one where the action itself compels a response: a shareholder’s letter is a thing the board is legally obliged to read, so the message does not merely ask to be believed. It makes the people it names answer in writing.

That last property is what lets the message run without an organizer. The reader buys a share, sends the board the math, and tells one person. Each of those people becomes the next sender. No headquarters, no mailing list, no permission. The math does the recruiting.

“But They’ll Lose Their Government Contracts”

This is the objection that sounds serious. It is not.

The objection goes: if a shareholder coalition takes over military companies and points their lobbying at medicine, the government will punish them by canceling their contracts. The companies go bankrupt. You bought an expensive pile of nothing. Congratulations.

The problem with this objection is that it assumes the Pentagon has options. It does not.

Huntington Ingalls Industries is the sole builder of nuclear aircraft carriers on planet Earth. There is no backup aircraft carrier factory. If the Pentagon cancels HII’s contract, the US Navy stops getting aircraft carriers. Not “gets them from someone else.” Stops getting them. Northrop Grumman is the sole builder of the B-21 Raider stealth bomber. General Dynamics is the sole builder of Columbia-class nuclear submarines. These are not competitive markets. They are monopolies, and the customer cannot leave.

The government does not contract with these companies because the companies lobby well. The government contracts with them because nobody else on the planet can build what they build. The lobbying wins marginal contracts, cost-plus expansions, and favorable terms on the next procurement cycle. It does not win the core work. The core work exists because a nuclear submarine requires roughly 10 million person-hours of specialized labor, and exactly one company has the workforce, the facilities, and the security clearances to deliver it.

So the real question is narrower than it sounds: does the marginal ROI on lobbying (winning the next cost-plus expansion) exceed the marginal ROI on diversification (pivoting that same money into health tech, renewable energy, AI-augmented drug discovery)? For a company operating in a post-treaty economy where GDP at year 15 is roughly 1.43x (95% CI: 1.22x-1.56x) larger, the diversification bet is obviously better. You are not choosing between revenue and no revenue. You are choosing between a slow-growth monopoly and a fast-growth monopoly that also has new product lines.

If this sounds theoretical, it has already happened. In 2021, a twelve-person hedge fund called Engine No. 1 won three board seats at ExxonMobil, one of the largest companies on Earth, on a platform of accelerating the energy transition. The stock did not crash. It went up. Shareholder activism that aligns a company with long-term secular trends makes the company more valuable, not less. The market is not confused about this. The market prices it in, which is why Engine No. 1’s investors made money.

The sole-supplier argument is not a reason the takeover fails. It is a reason the takeover is structurally safe. You are buying monopolies whose customers cannot leave, and pointing their discretionary spending at higher-return opportunities. The downside is “you own a monopoly military contractor.” The upside is “you own a monopoly military contractor that also does health tech in a substantially bigger economy.”

Relationship to Buying Politicians Directly

There is also the rent-versus-own question. You can buy the politicians directly: roughly $25.5 billion (95% CI: $17.5 billion-$36.3 billion) for the American set, $128 billion (95% CI: $71.7 billion-$206 billion) for the world’s. It works, but it is rent. The money is spent, the politicians need re-buying every election cycle, and the other side can outbid you at the next auction. Shares are different. If the campaign works, you own the machine that buys the politicians, permanently. If it never works, you still own the shares and whatever they gained along the way. Buying politicians is an expense. Buying their owners is an asset. This is why the more expensive path is the cheaper one.

Your Money, Your Choice

The entire plan on this page, stated once: buy the military contractors, replace the boards, let the Optimitron calculate the optimal budget, hand it to the lobbyists, and let every human alive set the priorities through the Wishocracy176.

The optimized $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million) per year does not go to a committee. It does not go to a czar. It does not go to a panel of experts who will thoughtfully allocate it on your behalf while charging 40% overhead. It goes to a Wishocracy176: every person gets a proportional say in how the funds are spent, under real budget constraints, with tradeoffs visible. You want the money spent on cancer trials? Vote for cancer trials. Pandemic preparedness? Vote for that. You think the whole thing is stupid and the money should stay in military spending? Vote for military spending. The system does not care what you pick. It cares that you pick.

If you are conservative: this is smaller government. The money currently disappears into a military bureaucracy that has failed its own audit every single year it has been tried. Giving it back to the people who earned it and letting them choose is the most conservative fiscal policy available. Less bureaucracy, more accountability, your money back.

If you are progressive: this is direct democratic allocation of public resources to healthcare, education, climate, and poverty reduction. No intermediary. No lobbying. The people who need the services choose the services.

If you are libertarian: this is individual choice replacing government planning. Instead of 535 members of Congress deciding how to spend a trillion dollars, 330 million Americans decide how to spend their share. The mechanism is voluntary. The outcome is decentralized.

If you are religious: this is what “love thy neighbor” looks like when you write it into the budget. Your neighbor is dying of a disease that has a cure stuck in a trial queue. You take the money currently pointed at building the next missile and point it at finishing the trial. You do not need to use the word “love.” You just move the decimal point.

The closest thing to a loser is the roughly 2,000 people currently paid to keep the budget pointed at missiles: the members of Congress collecting military PAC contributions, and the lobbyists whose fees depend on the budget growing. The plan’s response to them is a raise. The lobbyists get a client with a bigger budget and better math. The politicians get the Senator Smith arithmetic: more campaign money and a better post-office career, for voting yes. The only way to lose under this arrangement is to be offered more money to stop helping kill people, and refuse. Some will refuse. That is a decision, not a casualty. The number of people who benefit is roughly 8 billion of people (95% CI: 7.8 billion of people-8.2 billion of people).

The Ledger

Who Status quo After the takeover
Existing shareholders Hold military contractor stock Same stock, repriced upward by the buy-up
Employees of the primes Build weapons on cost-plus Same desks plus the medical pivot; headcount up
Directors and officers The same disease risk as everyone ~12 years (95% CI: 8 years-18 years) of additional healthy life
Early buyers Hold cash Bought probability while it was cheap
Every other human The disease queue ~$518,879 (95% CI: $221,703-$860,930) in lifetime income, plus the healthy years to spend it
Pharma Casino: 90% failure on its own money Salary: trials become treaty-funded revenue
Insurers Pay chronic-disease claims forever Claims fall as cures land
Doctors Paid to argue with insurers Paid per trial participant
Soldiers Deployed to defend budget lines Same paycheck (99% of the budget stays), fewer occasions to die for it
Politicians who vote yes Military PAC money More money: campaign support now, a better career after
Lobbyists A $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million)/year client A richer client with better math
Anyone who refuses the raise Paid to expand the budget Outbid and replaced. Self-inflicted.
The diseases 6,650 of them, operating freely Eradication queue, fully funded

The plan has exactly one structural adversary, and it is on the last row.

This is Wishocracy applied at its simplest: instead of the government deciding what you need, you decide what you need. The government’s track record on this question is a trillion dollars a year on missiles and zero dollars a year on the diseases that will probably kill you. Your track record on this question is that you would rather not die. The data favors your judgment.

The Funniness of This Loving Takeover, Mathematically

~$109 (95% CI: $107-$111) in, ~$530,000-$2,000,000 out. This is also the funniest loving takeover in the universe, and the funniness is calculable.

A normal hostile takeover produces one laugh: the laugh of the acquirer counting their gains. This one produces approximately 3.51 quadrillion laughs (95% CI: 971 trillion laughs-9.71 quadrillion laughs).

The chain:

  • Average human laughter rate: 17 laughs per day, or 6,205 per healthy life-year.
  • The takeover hands the $198 million (95% CI: $190 million-$210 million) per year lobbying operation an optimal budget calculated to maximize median healthy lifespan and median income.
  • The treaty compresses the disease eradication queue from 443 years to 36 years, recovering approximately 565 billion healthy life-years across humanity.
  • 565 billion recovered healthy life-years × 6,205 laughs per year = 3.51 quadrillion laughs.

The full calculation:

\[ \begin{gathered} L_{shirt} \\ = DALYs_{max} \times L_{year} \\ = 565B \times 6{,}200 \\ = 3510T \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} DALYs_{max} \\ = DALYs_{global,ann} \times Pct_{avoid,DALY} \times T_{accel,max} \\ = 2.88B \times 92.6\% \times 212 \\ = 565B \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ T_{accel,max} = T_{accel} + T_{lag} = 204 + 8.2 = 212 \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} T_{accel} \\ = T_{first,SQ} \times \left(1 - \frac{1}{k_{capacity}}\right) \\ = 222 \times \left(1 - \frac{1}{12.3}\right) \\ = 204 \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} T_{first,SQ} \\ = T_{queue,SQ} \times 0.5 \\ = 443 \times 0.5 \\ = 222 \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} T_{queue,SQ} \\ = \frac{N_{untreated}}{Treatments_{new,ann}} \\ = \frac{6{,}650}{15} \\ = 443 \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} N_{untreated} \\ = N_{rare} \times 0.95 \\ = 7{,}000 \times 0.95 \\ = 6{,}650 \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} k_{capacity} \\ = \frac{N_{fundable,ref}}{Slots_{curr}} \\ = \frac{23.4M}{1.9M} \\ = 12.3 \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} N_{fundable,ref} \\ = \frac{Subsidies_{trial,ref}}{Cost_{pragmatic,pt}} \\ = \frac{\$21.8B}{\$929} \\ = 23.4M \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} Subsidies_{trial,ref} \\ = Funding_{trial,ref} - OPEX_{trial} \\ = \$21.8B - \$40M \\ = \$21.8B \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ \begin{gathered} OPEX_{trial} \\ = Cost_{platform} + Cost_{staff} + Cost_{infra} \\ + Cost_{regulatory} + Cost_{community} \\ = \$15M + \$10M + \$8M + \$5M + \$2M \\ = \$40M \end{gathered} \]
where:
\[ L_{year} = L_{day} \times 365 = 17 \times 365 = 6{,}200 \]

The ratio of laughs produced to laughs generated by a typical joke is approximately 3.51 quadrillion to 1. The ratio of laughs produced to the ~$109 (95% CI: $107-$111) per-human cost is approximately 39 trillion laughs per dollar. The cost-per-laugh is approximately $0.000000000000026.

Carl Linnaeus, Charles Darwin, and the entire history of biology never had a sample size large enough to measure a joke this funny. This page contains the first known calculation of a joke at quadrillion-laugh scale. The other contenders (the ozone treaty, the eradication of smallpox, the Marshall Plan) all produced fewer than 10^12 laughs each. This one produces more than 10^15.

Any remaining objection has to outweigh 3.51 quadrillion laughs.