Did World War 2 really “get us out of the Depression?” According to Paul Krugman it sure did:

Think about World War 2, right, that was actually negative social product spending, and it brought us out.

Really? Spending vast swathes of capital, labour, life, sweat, tears, infrastructure, time and effort to fight a war “brought us out.” Well, that’s news to me. World War 2 was one huge festering conflagration, diverting productive resources to global destruction. Now that was the fault of Hitler, not Chamberlain, or Churchill, or Roosevelt, or indeed Krugman. But the point stands — the opportunity cost of World War 2 was all of the productivity, all of the infrastructure, all of the life, all of the goods and services, everything that could have been created in lieu of fighting the war. Sure, the years following World War 2 were boom years — but that’s precisely because societies mobilised to compensate for the years lost to destruction, infernos, genocide and bomb building. In reality, the 1950s were a lost decade — lost in making up for the destructive excesses of the 1940s.

“No!” Cries the Krugmanite. “Stop misquoting our beloved Krugman! All he is arguing is that WW2 mobilised us to end the destructive austerity of the 1930s! And he never, ever advocated for building bombs (or ginormous space lasers) ahead of creating real productivity!”

Really? The point is not that Krugman ever advocated war over productivity or infrastructure. The point is that he advocates it over doing nothing, which is still wrongheaded. War spending is more destructive than doing nothing because it diverts away from potential productive investment and labour that could be realised, if not for the diversion of productivity into bomb-building and weapons factories, etc. Additionally it very often destroys pre-existing production and infrastructure around the globe. So unless war spending can be explicitly and concretely linked to a specific and material threat of complete annihilation, it is a waste and a racket.

And is it really the case that there are many establishment politicians in Washington who are against the government mobilising spending? The reality of the American fiscal picture, as I showed in detail here, is that it is a permanent war economy. America’s greatest exports are war and weapons. When it comes to war and weapons, there is no austerity, and that is a sacred cow even to elements of the Tea Party. Look at the world’s top 10 nations in terms of military spending:

Is that a portrait of fiscal restraint? Or is that a portrait of ever-expanding military spending, flying in the face of the fact that the United States won the Cold war, and has no serious global rivals? And has this huge fiscal spending on war and weapons created a resilient and prosperous economy? No — there has been no real growth in the United States since 2007, unemployment is persistently high, food stamps participation is rising, reliance on Arab oil and Chinese manufacturing is ever-present, road infrastructure is worsening, and so forth. That’s because spending hasn’t been targeted to what people need, like alternative energy infrastructure, but instead to the destructive and perverse racket that is ongoing warfare. And if Krugman wants to claim that WW2 “brought us out”, then there are war hawks like Rick Perry who will be spoiling to take him at face value, and ignite more and worse wars around the world in the name of economic growth and “bringing us out.”

So, I give you Bastiat, the originator of the Parable of the Broken Window, on war and its terrible destructive cost to humanity: