Freedom’s real warriors labor with little support (and by “true” warriors I do not mean the Republican TV circus animals and tele-tarts who get face time and popular love in excess of their worth). Economist Robert Higgs laments “the bitter disappointment of seeing the [invaluable] research and writing [he has] carried out over more than forty years prove to have been completely in vain.” He wonders whether perhaps his mother ought to have strangled him in the crib, to spare him the bitter disappointment:
For all of the good I’ve done in correcting people’s understanding of what happened to the U.S. economy during World War and what lessons one might justifiably draw from that experience about, say, the scientific validity of the Keynesian model or its related fiscal-policy implications, I might just as well have held my breath and turned blue. Here we are in June 2011, and millions of Americans are being presented with the purest potion of economic misinformation one can imagine, an account in no way superior to those the young Keynesians were peddling so confidently in 1944, when I was born. …
When I began to teach U.S. economic history at the University of Washington in the late 1960s, I quickly realized that this tale of the wartime “Keynesian miracle” could not withstand critical scrutiny once one went beyond the barest account of it in terms of the elementary Keynesian model and the standard government macro measures, such as GDP, the consumer price index, and the rate of civilian unemployment. Almost immediately I saw that unemployment had disappeared during the war not because of the beautiful workings of a Keynesian multiplier, but entirely because about 20 percent of the labor force was forced, directly or indirectly, into the armed forces and a comparable number of employees set to work in factories, shipyards, and other facilities turning out war-related “goods” the government purchased only after forcing the public to pay for them sooner (via wartime taxes and inflation) or later (via repayment of wartime borrowing). Thus, the great wartime “boom” consisted entirely of (1) some people’s mass engagement in wreaking death and destruction and (2) other people’s employment in producing supplies for these warriors after the government’s military labor drain, turning out ”goods” never valued by consumers or private producers in voluntary transactions, but rather ordered by government functionaries and priced completely arbitrarily in a command-and-control economy. In no sense was the alleged ”wartime prosperity” comparable to real, normal prosperity. The pervasive regimentation, rationing, price controls, direct government resource allocations, and forbidden forms of production (e.g., civilian automobiles) should have served as a tip-off.
READ “World War II: Still Being Touted as the Quintessential Keynesian Miracle.”
UPDATE (March 5): “WARTIME SOCIALISM”: “… what politician would not warmly welcome an economist who, with the aid of indecipherable econometrics, legitimizes immoral power and property grabs? This is why the anti-free market central planning advocated by the late John Maynard Keynes has been embraced with renewed verve…”