The “war is good for the economy” meme just won’t die, even among people who should know better.
All we need to do is blow up Europe again, and also China and Japan and every other country with significant industrial capacity, and we’ll be good to go for another two or three decades.
I can actually see a possible argument here:
“War destroys an enormous amount of value in the form of lives wasted, resources burned, and infrastructure destroyed, but it can also break a political deadlock and allow reallocation of production within the economy that leads to increased efficiency after the war, as well as smoothing the way for redistribution programs to ex-soldiers that reduce inequality and boost demand.”
Like, maybe? But the fuckin’ annoying thing is that killing a few million people and sending millions of tons of shipping to the bottom of the Atlantic is a very indirect way of passing legislation and it would be nice to just do it directly.
Actually I meant that America was one of the very few countries with significant industrial capacity that had not been hit by strategic bombing campaigns reducing major cities to rubble. As such, it had a major competitive advantage in the aftermath of the war.
Most of the rival countries destroyed were already economically developed beforehand, so the survivors were able to reconstruct their advanced economies, which represented monumental growth - but only relative to the conditions caused by the war.
