[marron]

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.

FDR was from the "never let a good crisis go to waste" school, and used it to try to turn the US into some variation of Mussolini's Italy or Stalin's Five Year wet dream.

In those days, everyone thought those were the wave of the future.

Not surprisingly, it took what ought to have been a two year crunch and turned it into a 10 year nightmare.

I agree that the war did not end the depression. The depression ended after the war, when the enormous manufacturing capacity we built to wage war with was turned to other uses. Oh, that, and FDR was long gone by that time and couldn't dream up any new Rube Goldberg government schemes.

As an aside, I think no one should be allowed to vote who hasn't read Bastiat.

cheers

[Tublecane]

“As an aside, I think no one should be allowed to vote who hasn’t read Bastiat.”

That’s not a bad idea. Of course, limitations on the franchise are almost impossible to enact these days. Perhaps we could bypass civil rights issues by telling everyone he was black.