Making Economic Sense
Making
Economic Sense
by Murray Rothbard
(Contents
by Publication Date)
Chapter 104
The Glorious Postwar World
Every war in American history has been the occasion
for a Great Leap Forward in the
power of the State, a leap which, at best, could only be partly rolled
back after the war.
A conflict as seemingly minor as the War of 1812
took the Jacksonians three decades to
wash out of American life; and freedom was never able to recover fully
from the Civil War and
the two World Wars. After the two world wars in particular, statists
had a seemingly irresistible
argument: America should use the wonder and the glory, the united
martial spirit, the singleness
of national purpose, to wage wars at home against a battery of domestic
ills.
There are always problems aplenty at home against
which to mobilize the national will:
depression, poverty, injustice, what have you. And that mobilization
necessarily means
collectivism in action: increased federal power under the
commander-in-chief.
After the full-fledged War Collectivism of the
first World War, a collectivism that joined
Big Business, Big Labor, statist intellectuals, and technocrats under
the aegis of Big Government,
the youthful planners of that collectivism: the Bernard Baruchs,
Herbert Hoovers, and Franklin
Roosevelts, spent the rest of their lengthy lives striving to recapture
those delightful days, and to
fasten them permanently upon peace-time America. The institutions and
the rhetoric of wartime
collectivism were recaptured during the Hoover and Roosevelt New Deals
to "combat" the Great
Depression, often with the same institutions and the same people
running them.
Thus, Eugene Meyer's War Finance Corporation
lending federal money to corporations,
which had lingered on during the peacetime 1920s, was renamed the
Reconstruction Finance
Corporation and enlarged by Hoover in 1932, with the same Eugene Meyer
happily running the
show, starting from the self-same offices in Washington, D.C. And then,
World War II brought
back the collectivist planning of World War I. Baruch's War Industries
Board was reconstituted
as the War Production Board of World War II, and was resurrected once
more under General
Electric's Charles E. Wilson during the Korean conflict.
The War Labor Board, designed to privilege unions,
set wages, and arbitrate disputes,
inspired the National Labor Board in the early Roosevelt New Deal, to
be succeeded by the
National Labor Relations Board under the Wagner Act and to
be supplemented by a
reprised War Labor Board during World War II.
Particularly dangerous for an acceleration of
statism are successful wars; while Korea and
Vietnam led to an intensification of State power, they did not generate
the lifelong nostalgia, the
eagerness to recapture the glory days, of a successful war. No American
war has been quite as
successful as the Gulf War, particularly if we take the kill ratio of
enemy to American, or that kill
ratio per day.
We would therefore expect a supercharged atmosphere
of bringing the war home to
domestic life. In a world where television seems to speed up public
responses, that postwar
domestic mobilization has already begun. This spirit of domestic war,
appropriately enough, was
launched by President Bush in his victory address before Congress on
March 6, 1991:
In the war just ended, there were clearcut
objectives, timetables and, above
all, an overriding imperative to achieve results. We must bring that
same
sense of self-discipline, that same sense of urgency, to the way we
meet
challenges here at home.
After summarizing some of his current domestic
agenda, proposals for "reform and
renewal" including "civil rights," highways, aviation, transportation,
and a "crime package," and
hailing the past year's "historic" Clean Air Act, his "landmark"
Americans with Disabilities Act,
and his Child Care Act as portents for the future, the president gave
Congress a deadline: "If our
forces could win the ground war in 100 hours, then surely the Congress
can pass this legislation
in 100 days."
The president then noted that in his State of the
Union address, five weeks before, he had
posed this question to Congress: "If we can selflessly confront evil
for the sake of good in a land
so far away, then surely we can make this land all that it should be."
By their victory, the
president told us, our troops "transformed a nation at home." The
president concluded that "there
is much that we must do at home and abroad." And we will do it.
Hold on to your hats, and to your wallets and
purses, Mr. and Ms. America, here we go
again!
Previous Page * Next Page