The Best War

If World War II was “the good war,” Obama’s version of the war to reshape America is “the best war.” In his view, we finally have our priorities right—government organizing to transfer resources from the rich to those below them, not wasting our resources in some overseas killing venture. Total war means government in full control. As Obama’s Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said, "You never want a serious crisis to go to waste. This crisis provides the opportunity for us to do things that you could not do before."

The conventional view of why the Great Depression lasted so long—1938, nine long years after the ’29 crash, was almost as bad a year as the Depression’s 1933 low point—is that Roosevelt stopped spending too soon. Government should have spent more. We needed the gigantic government spending we had in World War II. Here’s how prominent Keynesian economist Paul Krugman sees it: “What saved the economy, and the New Deal, was the enormous public works project known as World War II, which finally provided a fiscal stimulus adequate to the economy’s needs.” Krugman wants Obama to undertake a World War II-like commitment to spending to pull us out of our current mess.

Michael Goodwin of the New York Daily News has seen what Krugman sees, and more bluntly proclaims, “the Obama administration is on a war footing. Make that a class-war footing.”

In The Forgotten Man, Amity Shlaes’ highly-readable book on the Great Depression, Shlaes says (p.31) Herbert Hoover, the president who didn’t understand depressions, believed “life was like wartime, and that government ought to plan more, as if at war.” Even Hoover, but certainly Roosevelt, wanted the country on a war footing to fight the Depression.

Obama seems after the biggest possible warlike effort at home, one that could transform America into a European-like welfare state.

But didn't government control of the economy end up throughout the world being the 20th Century’s most notable failure?