The Case That Wars Fuel U.S. Economic Booms

By Mark Ames, AlterNet. Posted February 24, 2009.

Of course, like every economic model bandied about these days, this one has its flaws -- and yet, it's the most obvious model of all. The only difference is that this most obvious model is the one model no one, left or right, has the guts to consider. Maybe because it's too obvious; more likely because it offends the sensibilities of both liberals and conservatives, whose professed openness for the "hard truth" only refers to "truths that are hard on the other side." As Paul Krugman recently admitted, "Well, the Great Depression did eventually come to an end, but that was thanks to an enormous war, something we'd rather not emulate."

The left wants to believe that the economic history of nations has a moral to it, and that moral is that greed inevitably leads to the collapse we're witnessing today; the right wants to believe the flipside to this morality tale, that a nation's economic history serves a Calvinist god and his "invisible hand": individuals must be allowed to prove themselves, freed from the shackles of a secular and therefore evil state, and God rewards the economically pious (i.e. free-marketers who believe in hard work); if the state assumes the role of god and interferes in the wealth-division, then the Calvnist god gets very angry and strikes down that state with stagflation or smites it with nagging low growth. Or something silly like that.

So now I'm wondering: if the right-wing wants to put a giant fence around its new argument against the New Deal, stopping their own line of reasoning at the point where it debunks Keynsian economists, censoring their own line of reasoning before it can go to the next logical step, which is that victorious wars which destroy your competitors are good for the American economy, and are the reason why America had such an unprecedented boom in the post-war period; and its opposite: when you lose a war like the one in Iraq, the right-wing Republicans' pet project, it leads to the sort of economic collapse we're witnessing today. By their own logic, they are responsible for screwing us for the next decade because these would-be imperialists are circus monkeys, as useless as AIG's bosses when it comes to managing their imperial fantasies.

It also raises the question of what the hell we're doing ramping up the war in Afghanistan, just as it's become clear that we've lost. It's the graveyard of empires; what is Obama planning there, two consecutive losses? Has any nation ever screwed up that badly? Moreover, wars are only good for the American economy when there's something to plunder at the end of it all. What's there to plunder from Afghanistan, assuming we even win: dirt? Opium? (Well, OK, I'm all for the opium, but even I know that won't create a nation of happy nuclear families; happy junkies, yes, but not wealthy new homeowners.)

If war is what fuels American prosperity, as the George Wills and others on the right are half-arguing in their sly, cowardly way, then have the guts to say so, and stop lying about private enterprise.

See more stories tagged with: war, economy, world war ii, new deal

Mark Ames is editor of the Moscow English alt weekly, the eXile. He is the author of Going Postal: Rage, Murder and Rebellion: From Reagan's Workplaces to Clinton's Columbine and Beyond.

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