The military shifts a whole lot of tax payer money to private corporations. And as Smedley Butler pointed out, without the impetus of private corporations there'd be a whole lot less war for the benefit of private corporations. From the taxpayer perspective, a bomb dropped into the middle of nowhere is just wasted money, a bomb dropped on people in a war of aggression is money wasted on murder. From the standpoint of the corporation the sold the bomb, both are highly profitable. And that's even before we get into the the spree of fucking countries to allow access to US corporations.
But the government sits in the middle, and the overall structure has some of the characteristics of a job creation scheme. What we have right now is in no way pure capitalism - it serves the interests of some people (left and right) to represent it as such.
