You may be interested to know: more than twenty years ago, James Dale Davidson and William Lord Rees-Mogg said that Communism benefitted the West by acting as a global set-aside program. Just as agricultural set-aside programs kept crop profits up by restricting supply, Communism kept manufacturing profits up by ruining the industrial base of Communist countries. There was no way in Hades that Communist manufactured goods could ever outcompete those of the States in the global marketplace.
It wasn't just the U.S. that benefitted from that set-aside; Western Europe and the rest of the free world did too...once their industrial base was no longer flattened. Communism ruined potential competitors, which lowered the competitive pressure on free-world manufacturers.
They used that argument to predict another Great Depression for the 1990s, which we've avoided.
As an aside, the nation that "war benefits the economy" is a conceit only holdable by residents of countries that were not turned into battlefields.
I am interested to know that -- I did not know it earlier. Am copying a few FRiends who are equally interested in gaining more knowledge
Thank you, daniel!
Davidson and Rees-Mogg have a point -- communism and socialism kept enslaved Eastern Europe, Russia, China, India, South-East Asia, etc.
you are also correct that the entire "war benefits the economy" is a conceit only holdable by residents of countries that were not turned into battlefields. --- I live in Warsaw now and we non-Poles never realise the level of destruction wrought on this nation (and others) during WWII. Warsaw was levelled -- pictures of it show a gigantic pile of ruin. Much of Poland was devastated by being the battlefield for two giant armies to run across. On every street corner in Warsaw one sees a monument saying "here on xxx date, Nazis killed yyy number of poles". The country was devastated, a quarter of it's population (Gentile and Jewish) was obliterated, it's industries destroyed, it's senior intelligentsia systematically targetted by the Nazis and the Soviets (think Katyn).
It took the Poles 40 years to recover (the Western countries with the exception of Germany was not devastated nearly as much), and the recovery was of course slowed down by communism