I’m not overly convinced that wars are good for the economy. I know the big story is that WWII got the U.S. out of the depression but wasn’t it actually the post-WWII boom?
If you add it all up, I think wars cost more than they create.
Wars aren’t good for the economy. People weren’t better off during WWII. Everything created during war is for destructive ends.
“I know the big story is that WWII got the U.S. out of the depression”
The “war got us out of depression” myth perpetuates itself mostly because people don’t think things through, and partly because certain people desperately want to FDR to have been our savior. As for the former, they are under the old delusion elucidated 150 years ago by Bastiat as The Broken Window Fallacy.
Employment is up. GDP is up. People have wages, and assembly lines are humming. That must mean we’re back in business, right? No. There is the seen, but then there’s the unseen. We see guns, bombs, and tanks. We don’t see what would have been produced had the money not been spent on them. In the case of the broken window, you can talk all you want about the benefit to the glassmaker. But had the window not broken, the shopkeeper would have spent the window money anyway. Plus, he’d still have a window.
Jobs are not jobs. There is a difference between produc ing products customers want to buy and producing tanks the government intends to ship overseas and destroy. If you can’t understand that much, you have no business being an economist or a historian, in my opinion.
>>I know the big story is that WWII got the U.S. out of the depression but wasn’t it actually the post-WWII boom?
Many Austrian school economists would tell you that it didn’t happen until Eisenhower and the end of price controls and the effective use of the Taft-Hartley Act, which greatly weakened union strangleholds on business. It had been passed over Truman’s veto, but really needed a President to wield it to get the full business-friendly effect.
And we were the only industrial nation that wasn't devastated by WWII, giving us a huge competitive advantage for at least 20 years.