re: #165 jamesfirecat

Of course for all the people who claim that, they should realize that World War 2 what with its draft, and needing to use companies like Ford to produce Tanks and Bombers was in reality more or less THE MOST MASSIVE FORM OF GOVERNMENT STIMULUS IMAGINABLE thus even if WW2 did end the depression, that still is an argument in Keynesian economics favor.

So, the answer was to build airplanes, fill them up with young men, fly them to Germany, and blow them up, destroying the plane and killing the men? Solves unemployment two ways?

The economics of military spending is that it’s pure waste. You build it, you or the enemy blow it up, and if the war ends, it has to be scrapped.

Possibly, you could argue that getting all those men trained and experienced in coping with all sorts of emergencies made them better employees after the war, the ones who lived. You could point out that we lost 300 000, out of many millions, so the training effect might economically outweigh the fatalities.

Or maybe it was the postwar market for, well, everything, that did the trick. All over the world, there was useful work galore to be done, and we in America were the only ones who had an intact industrial plant.

We had new markets in Germany and Japan. Germany and Japan, themselves, were no longer scuttling their own economies while burning their neighbors’ stuff and killing their neighbors. That might have had something to do with it too.