World War II Didn't End The Great Depression

One of the greatest myths ever...government spending creates economic freedom and prosperity.

When my dad returned from the War he had to beg for a job. The old racist junk that divided Italians, Polish, etc. into their neighborhoods was well entrenched. Dad was Army Airborne, 503rd under MacArthur. He was the first-born US Citizen of his large family. The rest were Naturalized. His last jump was Corregidor, as Sgt he and a PFC under sniper fire put the first US Flag up on a telegraph pole, as a gift for Gen. MacArthur. Corregidor.org has the photo. https://corregidor.proboards.com/thread/503. That job was for Youngstown Sheet and Tube Steel Mill. Where he worked as a boilermaker till the day he fell off a Cat Walk, and broke discs in his neck.

When people stop complaining about a depression the depression is over.

So MILLIONS of men left the American civilian workforce for a government (military) paycheck, and the workforce was reduced so much that women left the house to take jobs.

And that had no effect on ending the depression? Okay. Some ideas are so stupid that only professors and other liberal elites can believe them.

....While it’s true that draftees and volunteers were “employed” by the armed forces, all these millions of men — no matter how noble their overseas missions may have been — weren’t doing anything to create prosperity at home.

A pretty piss poor way of trying to make an argument about government spending and the economy. No matter what one might say about "the depression wasn't ended by...." it effectively ended and the economy on the whole did improve.

The fact is that some of the impacts of depression translated into other problems like future recessions, vastly increased MIC spending and government learning that all they need do is to "borrow" money to enact its goals. And when the next impending depression comes it won't be because of WWII; it will be because of Biden's NWO and voter victim group pandering coupled with rampant unchecked illegal immigration.

Another blogger trying to pull smartness out of the jaws of stupidity.

What this dimwit fails to acknowledge was that the US was bearing the brunt of the financial and manufacturing burden for ALL of the Allied nations. The US manufactured $50 billion USD ($800 BILLION in 2024 dollars) in war materiel and LOANED IT to the other Allied nations (Lend-Lease). The joke back then was that the Russian Army rode into battle in Studebaker trucks. Formerly great Britain borrowed so much hardware ($31 billion) that despite the US generously reducing its debt (which means the American taxpayer absorbed it), Britishland didn't manage to pay it all back UNTIL 2006!!!!!

Not only that, the US was all but virtually responsible for staving off mass starvation in the UK brought on by the war. England has not been able to feed itself since the 17th Century and has for centuries been dependent on imported food for its survival. Karl Dönitz's submarine wolf packs were interrupting those shipments and had them on the brink of mass starvation until the US started shipping 50,000 tons of food stuffs A DAY (on average) in trans-Atlantic convoys. Which amounted to a pound of food per day for every person (including children and infants) in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. And that also was 50,000 tons of food American were planting, growing and harvesting but not getting to eat.

There damn sure WAS a war-driven recovery in the manufacturing sector, and it began BEFORE WWII began because America already had become arms manufacturer to the world, and the Euroweenies were buying all they could because they were scared spitless of Herr Hitler. And that wasn't government spending, that was Remington and Olin-Winchester and Pratt & Whitney and Curtis-Wright and 10,000 other American companies building aircraft and ships and arms and ammunition that they sold overseas FOR PROFIT and hard currency.

The GDP went UP 20% in the 15 months between the invasion of Poland and the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor.

Note also that wartime America reached peak GDP in 1944 and manufacturing wasn't that strong again until 1950.

Anybody who tells you that the fact there was inflation and rationing the US shows there was no recovery is blowing smoke up your skirt.

People then were tougher then they are now. They were contented with less. They would tell you, “I don’t have to worry about where my next meal is coming from or where I will sleep tonight. The Depression is over.”

The depression was over prior to the war

It took it off of the front page.

I think the premise still stands even with your response. My emphasis in bold

"A principal goal of Stark Realities is to “expose fundamental myths across the political spectrum” — and few myths are as universally embraced as the notion that US participation in World War II lifted the American economy out of the Great Depression.

This myth is dangerous not only because it leads citizens and politicians to see a bright side of war that doesn’t really exist, but also because it helps foster a belief that government spending is essential to countering economic downturns. That belief, in turn, has helped propel us to a point where the national debt now exceeds $34.6 trillion, with interest payments alone on pace to reach $1 trillion a year in 2026, inviting financial catastrophe."

Nothing you wrote, which is accurate, said negates this premise.

https://mises.org/mises-daily/world-war-ii-did-not-end-great-depression

My emphasis in bold

The Depression and the War

What about World War II? Did it end the Great Depression? More generally, is war good for the economy? I answer both in the negative and borrow here from Ludwig von Mises: "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings."

As Higgs points out, because of the array of interventions in the wartime economy, war material was valued incorrectly and therefore the GDP data overstate economic conditions. Moreover, conscription and arms production gave a misleading employment picture. Instead, Higgs argues, the war was a period of capital consumption rather than capital accumulation. Tanks, bombs, and helicopters have limited uses outside of military applications. The labor that was used to produce them was not available to produce consumer goods and services; in fact, people went without consumer goods. The warships at the bottom of the world's oceans represented lost opportunities for real consumption and prosperity. Conflict is sometimes necessary, but we should recognize what wartime expenditures represent: destruction of life and resources. If a depression constitutes a widespread contraction in living standards, then the Great Depression cannot have ended during the war.

The illusion of wartime prosperity is rooted partly in how national income was calculated and partly in how the statistics were compiled. Gross Domestic Product, one measure of a country's output, is defined as the sum of consumption expenditure, investment expenditure, government expenditure, and net exports. A serious problem arises with government spending: How do we assess something not traded in markets? We can assess my computer, my shirt, and my pen because I voluntarily exchanged money for them. How do we assess government purchases? In the national-income accounting they are valued at cost, but at best this only tells us what those resources could have earned in alternative lines of production. The costs don't indicate the value of what the government has produced.

This problem was compounded by price controls during World War II — official prices simply did not reflect the true cost of the war. If we are going to have meaningful economic calculation, we need real market prices. Price controls and similar interventions introduce arbitrariness and uncertainty. Procurement at below-market prices is a way to mask the cost of any endeavor. Consider the draft, which forces people into military service at wages below what they would earn on the unhampered market. The amount spent on wages and board for conscripts is an underestimate of the real cost of maintaining the force.

Economists increasingly acknowledge that institutions — the rules, norms, and enforcement mechanisms that make up a society's structure of incentives — are important determinants of economic outcomes. Changing the rules changes people's incentives, and some of the long-run effects of the New Deal and World War II have encouraged people to use political means (expropriation and redistribution) rather than economic means (production and exchange) to gain wealth.

As an economist interested in institutions, I think that the relationship between the New Deal interventions and political incentives remains understudied. Higgs pointed out that part of the ideological and institutional legacy of the New Deal is apparent in the expanded powers exercised by the Bush administration. I anticipate further expansion under the Obama administration. The protectionism and interventionism of the last several years have created incentives to seek wealth by developing cushy relationships with government officials instead of developing products people want to buy at attractive prices.

The experience of the last several centuries and of the American economy during the Great Depression and wartime suggests that the kinds of plans people advocate during crises require knowledge that is not merely beyond political leaders' grasp but that can only be revealed by the competitive market process. As we move further into the 21st century, I can only hope that we take those lessons to heart.

Sound familiar after our COVID "crisis":

From https://mises.org/mises-daily/world-war-ii-did-not-end-great-depressionM

The Great Depression did more than chill the investment climate. In Crisis and Leviathan, Higgs argues that during a crisis a "ratchet effect" produces net increases in government discretion that are not completely reversed after the crisis. Two things happen when government intervenes. First, the bureaucracy naturally tends to expand beyond its stated goals — mission creep. Second, intervention alters incentives; that is, the creation of a bureaucracy to address some problem also spawns a rent-seeking pressure group with interests that will prevent reversion to the status quo ante.