Yves here. Please welcome Michael Perelman, a economics professor who is more an economist manque than the conventional sort. Perelman now focuses particularly on economic history, which consist in large measure of describing not just how older economic theories have been distorted or misrepresented, but how the conventional accounts of economic development too often contain significant omissions and misrepresentations. For instance, his book The Invention of Capitalism describes how proto-capitalists managed to seize former community resources (the best known being pastureland, but hunting and other rights also came to be restricted). Part of the legitimation of this effort was to present free peasants, who could live comfortably without working very hard, as being made morally deficient by having too much leisure time. They’d clearly become better people if they were made by their betters to apply themselves.
The post that follows is excerpted from a yet-to-be-published book by Perelman, The Matrix: An Exploration of the Surprising Interactions Between War, the Economy, and Economic Theory. Please note that I have edited out some fascinating sections that go a bit more into economic history in the interest of maintaining focus on the core arguments. So if any discontinuities have resulted, the fault is mine, not Perelman’s.
By Michael Perelman, a professor of economics at California State University, Chico
World War I provided a dramatic opportunity for the muscular Christians to display American power on a world wide stage although the population of the United States was not ready for another war, especially after the negative experience in the Philippines.
President Woodrow Wilson, previously a founder of the American Economic Association, president of Princeton University, and governor of New Jersey, was first elected president in 1912, before the war had begun. He ran for reelection in 1916, with a promise to stay out of World War I, angering Theodore Roosevelt who responded, charging that “professional pacifists, through President Wilson, have forced the country into a path of shame and dishonor” (Thayer 1919, p. 419).
Once safely reelected, Wilson, in the grand tradition of American politics, quickly broke his word, calling for an American entry into the war. Unlike Roosevelt for whom war was a romantic adventure, Wilson’s war promised great material benefits.
Running as a peace candidate had helped Wilson win reelection, especially in light of the sour taste left by the war in the Philippines. Neutrality, besides being popular, made good economic sense. The war was already bringing the United States out of the depression it had entered in 1913. Its future First World War allies purchased 77 per cent of U.S. exports in 1913, generating ‘the greatest industrial boom the nation had had until that time’ (Lens 2003: 253). Large conglomerates benefited disproportionately, expanding production of munitions and other exports (Desai 2013, p. 74).
Since the British had suspended gold payments and embargoed loans “for undertakings outside the Empire,” Wall Street was now the banking center of the world (Desai 2013, p. 74; citing Lens 2003, p. 252). American business also profited from the withdrawal of British and other European businesses from Latin America, allowing the United States to take center stage as a global financial power. American business benefited further from the withdrawal of British and other European businesses from Latin America.
This situation was too good to last. Because the war so fully depleted the Allies’ financial resources, European buying power could no longer buoy the U.S. economy. The US ambassador in London reported on the international situation, which he found “most alarming to the financial and industrial outlook of the United States.” He warned that British and French inability to keep up orders would surely mean “a panic in the United States.” The ambassador concluded, in a clear anticipation of military Keynesianism (to be discussed in the next chapter), that it was not ‘improbable that the only way of maintaining our present preeminent trade position and averting a panic is by declaring war on Germany’ (quoted in Lens, 2003, p. 260).
Wilson complied with the ambassador’s suggestion. In retrospect, Wilson timed his move very well. Keeping the United States out of the war until his second term gave the European powers time to exhaust themselves, leaving an opening for a fresh United States military to play a prominent, if not decisive, role.
Wartime conditions also proved to be a dramatic turning point in the financial status of the United States, which had always been a chronic debtor, dependent upon a considerable part of Britain’s capital exports. The sudden surge of wartime costs, including American exports, turned the tables, making the Allies dependent on external credit (Desai 2013, p. 75). Between 1914 and 1917, the years between United States’ entry into the war and the outbreak of the Russian Revolution, Europe’s need for wartime financing opened the door for U.S. banks, led by Morgan, to raise massive loans for the allied governments.
Waiting to join the war until the Allies were exhausted offered an enormous geo political victory well beyond what the use of military force could have brought. As Radika Desai observed: “The United States was far from isolationist when the First World War started: Wilson kept the United States out of the war initially to wait for a stalemate so that it could step in as arbiter and architect of a US centred postwar order” (Desai 2013, pp. 74).
Making the World Safe for War
Wilson’s victory was short lived. To begin with, Wilson suffered a debilitating stroke that removed him from the political scene. Public knowledge of the human costs of World War I was temporarily limited because of intense censorship. Even though the armistice came relatively fast after the United States entered the fray, the country still lost 100,000 troops. The prosperity that massive spending on World War I brought was only temporary. By 1920, the economy experienced the second most severe depression of the Twentieth Century.
Had Wilson’s health held up, a reelection campaign would have been doomed from the start. The unpopularity of the war, the depression that followed, as well as Wilson’s internationalist vision, symbolized by his plan for the League of Nations, created a political atmosphere that allowed the Republicans to regain their longstanding political control, which they had exercised throughout most of the late Nineteenth Century.
Because a high degree of economic planning was key to the American success in the war, the belief in market efficiency waned; however, the postwar depression revived support for market fundamentalism, allowing the Coolidge administration to win election on a platform of doctrinaire laissez faire policy, despite the highly regarded performance of economic planning during the war.
The Tragic Imperial Dance
Wars, of course, always have unforeseen consequences. In a biblical sense, wars beget more wars. Consider the case of World War I. In the lead up to the war the same war which was sold as a war to end all wars three challengers United States, Germany, and Japan were already nipping at the heels of the great imperial powers of France and England. All three were experiencing very rapid economic growth without enjoying comparable political and economic influence around the world. Germany was the great looser in the conflict, although the Ottoman Empire lost the most territory. The resulting instability in the Middle East has troubled the world ever since.
Germany’s military defeat and the even more humiliating conditions of its surrender set the stage for a far more devastating challenge to the world order. Crushing reparations, along with the loss of territory, created untenable political conditions. As John Maynard Keynes, a major representative of the English government during the peace negotiations, predicted: “(People in) their distress may overturn the remnants of organization, and submerge civilization itself” (Keynes 1919, p. 144).
Conditions in Germany eventually led to the rise of the Nazis. France and England suffered lesser setbacks. Besides their human and economic costs of the war, the United States demanded that they repay their immense war debts to American creditors, allowing the United States to gain power and influence at their expense. This demand was part of the United States’ effort to use its postwar power to dislodge the colonial holdings France and England.
Japan, following its defeat of Russia in the early part of the century, was not involved in World War I, sparing her the heavy costs experienced by the great European powers. Instead, Japan was busily building up its military power and extending its sphere of control. Most worrying was its expanding occupation of China, a country lusted after by all of the five rival imperial powers. Unlike France, England, Japan, and Germany, which already had beachheads in China, the United States had only gotten as far as the Philippines.
After the War, the United States, concerned about Japan’s rising influence in the Pacific, used embargoes of strategic materials, such as petroleum, tin, and rubber to strangle the Japanese economy. Eventually, Japan responded in the attack on Pearl Harbor. Germany began carving out territory in Europe to regain and expand its prewar powers.
When the United States entered the war, just as was the case in World War I, the country’s intentions were to elevate its degree of international influence. In particular, the United States was intent on ramping up its efforts to strip France and England of their colonies, especially in the case of India. The American goal was not to create its own traditional colonial empire, but to build a new kind of empire based on trade rather than direct colonial authority. Opening the previously colonial territories to American trade would give the United States what it wanted. It could dominate territories by virtue of its economic muscle without incurring the expense of administration. This kind of policy was expected to be capable of displacing much of the French and English power, without the need to resort to military force – an ideology that came to be known as free trade imperialism.
Because the expected benefits from American market efficiency in the new territories turned out to be insufficient to create conditions in which the territories were free from effective resistance to American influence, the United States lacked a means of control that would serve as an alternative to direct colonial rule.
The experience in the Philippines, where extensive military surveillance allowed the United States to shame or blackmail people to refrain from challenging the power of the United States proved to be extremely effective. After World War II, the CIA raised this practice to a much higher level, but the agency never acquired the means to operate as extensive a network of informants that the military had in the Philippines.
As a result, the CIA frequently resorted to overthrowing uncooperative governments. Doing so also gave considerable force to threats of installing a new government. Such actions frequently created blowbacks that worked against the interests of the United States.
Military Keynesianism
One of the most embarrassing episodes in the relationship between war and economic thinking came at the end of World War II. The combination of the Great Depression followed by World War II led to a period of unparalleled economic success in the history of the United States. However, few economists recognized the role of the Depression in eliminating old and obsolete businesses, clearing the way for this period of prosperity. Alexander Field has recently made a powerful case for the rapid productivity gains during the Depression (Field 2011). The Depression set the stage for the New Deal, which put the economy on more solid ground – a thesis that has become increasingly controversial in the face of growing market fundamentalism.
Instead, most economists emphasized how World War II created enough government spending to rescue the economy. This perspective gained powerful support in John Maynard Keynes’ influential book, The General Theory of Employment, Interest and Money (Keynes 1936), which laid out the case for government intervention during economic downturns. However, doctrinaire supporters of laissez faire still believed that depressions should be allowed to run their course. Other than giving tax cuts, the best government policy would be to remain neutral, allowing market forces to make the necessary corrections.
Antagonists of government activism tarred Keynes as a socialist, or even worse, a communist. In reality, Keynes was hardly attempting to lay out a roadmap to socialism; Instead, Keynes himself was deeply conservative, writing once: “[T]he class war will find me on the side of the educated bourgeoisie” (Keynes 1925, p. 297).
Seeing how the Great Depression unleashed a powerful disgust with what markets wrought, Keynes had feared that capitalism was threatened, especially since the Nazi takeover in Germany and the communist revolution in Russia were elevating the role of the state relative to private business. This trend was not limited to these two dramatic examples. All of the great capitalist states were increasing the role of government relative to the market. In that environment, Keynes saw his work as an effort to safeguard capitalism by stemming the growing tide of socialism.
Because Keynes’ American followers mostly advocated a relatively a crude application of his work, narrowly emphasizing government spending alone, without taking Keynes’ far broader approach into account, they were partially responsible for business’ hostile response to Keynes. Keynes expressed his distance from the crude version of American Keynesian in 1944, when Lady Keynes enquired after some prominent Keynesians gave a dinner for Keynes in Washington, “How was it?” Keynes replied, “I was the only non Keynesian there” (Ballard 1995, p. 335; citing Robinson 1972).
Business leaders as a whole initially appreciated the immediate beneficial results of the New Deal in healing some of the wounds that the Depression caused. However over time, many of them became increasingly suspicious of government involvement in the economy. In addition, while business had also been supportive of the government’s economic activism during World War II, they also realized that successful government wartime planning had improved the public’s faith in the government’s capacity to manage the economy. Given the woeful performance of business leading up to the depression business had good reason to be nervous about public opinion.
As a result, the political climate became increasingly antagonistic to the gains of the New Deal and unreceptive to Keynes’ analysis. Shortly after the war, business interests began a concerted effort to undo some of the gains of the New Deal, beginning with the weakening of the labor movement. For this reason, the opening shot in the attack on the New Deal was the Taft Hartley law, which greatly weakened the power of unions. Business’ support for this measure was strong enough that Congress was able to override a presidential veto.
McCarthyism made the political atmosphere poisonous. Economic issues became framed in terms of patriotism rather than serious economics. Economists soon became reluctant to advocate anything that could be even remotely associated with socialistic tendencies, learning from the case of a Canadian economist, Lorie Tarshis, who wrote the earliest textbook that included Keynes’ economic theory. A firestorm pressured universities to cease assigning it. Paul Samuelson, who later became an advisor to Presidents Kennedy and Johnson in addition to being the first American economist to win the Nobel Prize in economics, followed with his own offering, which became the most popular introductory economics textbook in the United States.
The attack on Samuelson’s book was fierce. The Veritas Foundation was a leader in this war on Samuelson’s book (Leeson 1997, p. 125). A commentator in the right wing Educational Reviewer asked: “Now if (1) Marx is communistic (2) Keynes is partly Marxian, and (3) Samuelson is Keynesian, what does that make Samuelson and others like him? The answer is clear: Samuelson and the others are mostly part Marxian socialist or communist in their theories” (quoted in MacIver 1955, p. 128). Despite Samuelson’s long history of antagonism to Marxian ideas, tarring him along with Keynes was effective.
Samuelson recalled how much he felt the pressure, “having tasted blood in trying to root the Tarshis text out of colleges everywhere, some of the same people turned toward my effort” (Samuelson 1997, p. 158). Samuelson succeeded at defending his work, but at a serious cost. In a 1977 lecture, Samuelson described how he felt compelled to go to great lengths to make his book less controversial, undermining its quality:
… if you were a teacher at many a school and the Board of Regents of your university was on your neck for using subversive textbooks, it was no laughing matter. Many months were involved in preparing mimeographed documentation of misquotations on the part of critics and so forth. Make no mistake about it, intimidation often did work in the short run …. My last wish was to have an intransigent formulation that would be read by no one … As a result I followed an Aesopian policy of paying careful attention to every criticism of every line and word of my text …. In a sense this careful wording achieved its purpose: at least some of my critics were reduced to complaining that I played peek a boo with the reader and didn’t come out and declare my true meaning. [Samuelson 1977, pp. 870 72]
In the United States, during the end of the 1950s, the economy was showing signs of sluggishness. Economists took to heart Keynes’ idea that special efforts are necessary to revive the economy when demand is insufficient.
Cold War antipathy toward anything even vaguely related to socialism made one vulnerable to accusations of dangerous political sentiments. While support for government spending might be dangerous, military spending was patriotic because it was largely directed against the Soviet Union.
In addition, much of the anti-government rhetoric in the United States was built on a dogmatic insistence that government spending is, by its very nature, an unproductive drain on the economy, while private business spending alone is productive.
Given this environment, many of the leading Keynesian economists in the United States learned to avoid the scrutiny that Samuelson and Tarshis experienced, shielding themselves from any taint of socialism by using the military as a cover. Either because they succumbed to the anticommunist climate of the day or because they feared they had no chance of stimulating the economy through any productive government spending, they recommended unproductive spending. These Keynesians adopted a stunted version of their master’s approach to immunize their brand of economics from the charge of socialism or communism. They did so by restricting their calls for increased spending to military programs, presumably intended to assist in the fight against communism – an approach that became known as military Keynesianism.
The underlying principle of military Keynesianism was not new, as shown by the advice of the ambassador in the last chapter; however the benefits of advocating military Keynesianism were undeniable. Military Keynesianism allowed economists to burnish their patriotic credentials while getting credit for improving the economy at the same time. In this way, economists could win the gratitude of powerful interests in government, business and the military.
Here is Business Week writing about the position of a one time radical, but highly respected economist, Lawrence Klein:
Some Keynesian economists adapted nimbly to the Pentagon State, touting warfare for work relief. They earned the name of “Keynesian Hawks”. Here is model building Lawrence Klein, President of the American Economic Association, 1976: “Defense spending … has been a large part of the whole expansion of the American economy since World War II.” The key question is “whether we should hold down defense spending for either economic or security reasons, and I think not, on both counts …. Every cutback of a dollar in defense will cut two dollars from overall GNP and drag down a lot of jobs …. If we were to hold spending to $395 billion, the recovery of the economy would fade away (Anon. 1976, pp. 51 52).
Klein’s example suggests how thoroughly McCarthyism still affected the political climate, long after the senator had faded from the scene. The leading U.S. Keynesians also proceeded as if they could ignore the relative merits of different kinds of spending, treating military spending as the default. Although Keynes himself preferred that the government spend its funds on productive activities, his theory offered few specifics to dissuade the new cold warriors who acted in his name (Perelman 1989).
Leading Democrats followed a similar trajectory, becoming closely associated with military contractors, so much so that Eisenhower’s farewell address, warning about the Military Industrial Complex (Eisenhower initially intended to condemn the Military Industrial Congressional Complex), referred to the Democrats’ defense spending.
To be fair, Keynes’ General Theory blandly looked at the economy as a whole, paying no attention to what was produced. To make matters worse, Keynes’s followers could take heart from Keynes’ humorous aside about burying bottles of money and then digging them up, suggesting that society could disregard the direct benefits from any particular program. Economists often fell back on saying that a rising tide supposedly lifts all ships. According to this line of thinking, spending of any kind – even wasteful military spending – stimulates the economy.
The Democratic Party followed a similar line of retreat, casting aside the occasional daring ideas that had bubbled up during the New Deal and the early postwar period. Instead, the party almost completely purged itself of leftist or even progressive influences, largely pinning its hopes on increased government spending – all too often military spending.
In his widely praised, but largely unheeded Farewell Address, President Eisenhower warned of this unprecedented power of the military industrial complex in American life: “In the councils of government, we must guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence, whether sought or not, by the military industrial complex. The potential for the disastrous rise of misplaced power exists and will persist.” Eisenhower was directing his warning at the military Keynesianism of the Democratic Party, which had just alarmed the public about an imaginary missile gap vis à vis the Soviets during John F. Kennedy’s presidential campaign. But then, it was Eisenhower who had ramped up the atomic arsenal that was a key element of the Cold War.
The policy of military Keynesianism was self defeating for two reasons. First, Republicans at the time emphasized the importance of budget deficits. Increasing taxes to pay for military Keynesianism would have neutralized some of the stimulative capacity of military expenditures. Consequently, military Keynesianism effectively increased pressure to rein in nondefense spending, especially those programs intended to help people toward the bottom of the income scale – the same people who were supposed to benefit from economic growth.
A second contradiction of military Keynesianism seems to be far more dangerous. The early English aristocrats were probably correct in their fear that a standing army might tempt the government to launch wars. Similarly, access to a huge arsenal of weapons of mass destruction creates an irresistible drive to brandish them, or even worse, to deploy them.
Military Keynesianism never went so far as to say that business benefits from war, just that military spending is an important component of maintaining a sufficient level of employment. Proponents of military spending my even argue that striving for military dominance is necessary to maintaining peace. Of course, striving for military dominance can unleash arms races, which require even more defense spending, or even worse, run the risk of triggering wars in which rivals attempt to prevent others from acquiring dominance.
Military Keynesianism poses another danger: military spending drains resources from productive sectors of the economy, potentially weakening both the domestic economy and military power, which ultimately depends upon the strength of the domestic economy. William Nordhaus of Yale University forcefully made this point with an (unintentional?) allusion to Curzon’s chessboard:
At best, an excessive military budget is simply economic waste. At worst, it causes problems rather than solving them by tempting leaders to use an existing military capability. During the Clinton administration, Madeleine Albright is reported to have asked Colin Powell, then Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, what’s the point of having this superb military if we can’t use it? Colin Powell is said to have replied, wisely if not presciently, that American soldiers are not toy soldiers to be moved around on some global game. [Nordhaus 2005]
Powell’s thinking echoed a widespread suspicion that the urge to use untested modern weapons in battle was one of the major causes of the Vietnam War. In that way, military Keynesianism may bear some responsibility.
In short, military Keynesianism was a clever tactic for putting Keynesian like economics in effect. However, the unintended consequences more than wiped out any positive benefits. Nonetheless, military Keynesianism remains a major part of fiscal policy despite its serious negative consequences.
In 2013, a hypocritical form of military Keynesianism swept across Washington, when a foolish program was about to take a meat ax to all government spending. In 2007, the same political forces that normally insist that all government spending necessarily has a negative effect on the vitality of the economy turned on a dime, welcoming lavish bailouts, especially for the nearly fatally wounded financial sector. Admittedly, many of these hypocrites denounced the bailouts, but would have gone bananas if the government had let the financial system fail. By 2011, in line with the virulent anti government ideology that was sweeping across the country, Congress passed a ridiculous law that imposed devastating, future cuts in domestic programs, as well as cuts in military spending. These cuts were to be imposed unless a bitterly divided Congress could agree on a program to reduce the budget by the beginning of 2013. This sequestration should have pleased those who held to the popular anti government dogma, which insisted government spending does not create jobs; at best, it only transfers employment from the private sector to the public sector.
As the deadline approached, the Anti Keynesians developed a modified version of military Keynesianism, claiming that military spending (but military spending alone) creates jobs. This revisionist Keynesianism set off a hysterical cry about the large number of jobs that would be lost if Congress went along with the cuts to military spending that it had legislated. To save the economy, non defense spending must be cut to stay within the bounds of the sequestration, while ruthlessly directing tax cuts to programs intended to help the less well off.
Because the combination of defense spending, massive tax cuts, and the bailout had led to large budget deficits, the proponents of this perverted military Keynesianism insisted that programs for productive government expenditures had to be cut in the name of fiscal responsibility to make way for (wasteful) military spending.
Whether the weapons acquisition pushed by the military Keynesians actually played a major role in instigating the Vietnam War remains a matter of speculation, but the long term negative economic effects of Vietnam seem indisputable, as will be discussed in the next section.
Another commonly held explanation for the war concerned the relationship between China and Japan. Although anti Japanese feelings must have been strong in China, given Japan’s recent, brutal invasion of the country, physically, China and Japan seemed to be natural trading partners. Japan had a modern manufacturing economy and a very poor resource base. China, with far more extensive resources and a relatively primitive productive sector with modest resource requirements at the time, would seem to be a very likely trading partner. By “clearing” Vietnam of dangerous influences, the United States could offer Southeast Asia to Japan as an alternative trading partner to China – an important consideration given the high priority for “containing” communism at the time.
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The major problem with defense spending is there is no accountability up and down the chain. We went to war in Iraq and Afghanistan with no clear strategy and no one in a position of authority has been held to account for its failures. We are where we are. Trillions of dollars will be needed to care for veterans because of failed Washington policy, money that could have gone to infrastructure or to other welfare programs. We will pay dearly for many years because of Washington elite ‘boots-on-the-ground’ policies. Republicans are onerously succeeding in stymying advancing more money for veterans in order to protect their rich friends, at some point their silly filibustering will break.
I think it’s pretty obvious that there was no strategy or point (in my view) to the post-9/11 wars. The GWOT was and is a fraud from start to finish to keep the national security state in power. In fact, all wars since and including Vietnam were fought to keep the national security state firmly in the driver’s seat in Washington. None of the wars that have been fought needed to be fought and all the conflicts could have been resolved through diplomacy–the thing we have to understand is that Washington wants conflict because it is running a kind of protection racket on the American people.
“Washington wants conflict because it is running a kind of protection racket on the American people.” Yes, indeed.
Yet, since the MIC only protects us from vaguely defined “threats” and leaves us vulnerable to the obvious depredations of the banksters, we will soon run out of money to pay them. They are even now desperately searching for new targets to shake down overseas, as it dawns on them that there is precious little blood left to squeeze from the stone of the shrunken American middle class.
Exactly correct! Mafia politics at its most effective.
One part of the above piece of concern is that if the idea of keeping standing armies means creating conflict for them, then what about a standing nuclear arsenal?
For more on the security of nuclear weapons, see:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/00000000
It’s funny AND scary, kind of like a shampoo AND a conditioner!
Military Keynesianism — humm wasn’t there someone else who deployed military Keynesianism. Oh yes and his name was Adolf Hitler. While the rest of the world was wallowing around in the Great Depression, Germany after the Weimar Republic, came roaring back under military Keyneianism and that is why people world wide flocked to the altar of the Nazis as economic geniuses. Oh, and how did he finance that — government bond sales. Sound familiar. That experiment ended well.
I ran into a claim some weeks ago that WW2 was fascists vs fascists, and both vs communists…
Since fascism = government for the rich, I believe you are correct since central banking favors the rich by presuming they are so-called “creditworthy” of the public’s credit. So the US has been fascist since 1913 and the UK perhaps as far back as 1694, with a lapse into socialism after WWII.
Hmm. By that definition, can you name a government in this world that is not fascist?
Maybe Cuba until recently. Not that Cuba is an ideal of a just society since producing wealth is important too,
Roughly speaking:
Fascism is good at producing wealth but not sharing it justly.
Communism is good at sharing wealth but not producing it.
Both systems rely on theft, btw.
Michael Perelman and I will be giving our annual talk at noon at the Left Forum this May 31 in New York. (It’s at 540 W. 59th St.)
Some bloke named Shafqat Mehmood liked this post.
‘According to this line of thinking, spending of any kind – even wasteful military spending – stimulates the economy.’
In the notorious Report From Iron Mountain (1967), practically the opposite is argued:
In the case of military “waste,” there is indeed a larger social utility. It derives from the fact that the “wastefulness” of war production is exercised entirely outside the framework of the economy of supply and demand. As such, it provides the only critically large segment of the total economy that is subject to complete and arbitrary central control.
If modem industrial societies can be defined as those which have developed the capacity to produce more than is required for their economic survival (regardless of the equities of distribution of goods within them), military spending can be said to furnish the only balance wheel with sufficient inertia to stabilize the advance of their economies. The fact that war is “wasteful” is what enables it to serve this function. And the faster the economy advances, the heavier this balance wheel must be.
————
Although the balance wheel analogy may sound superficially plausible, the underlying assumption that economic surplus needs to be bled off to prevent the economy from throwing a piston is nonsensical.
Our overlords don’t really care about how it works. It’s all about ‘complete and arbitrary central control.’ Even our KongressKlowns have no clue what’s in the $50 billion black budget.
War is a racket.
This is how the Republic became an Empire. The only way the Constitution could be tortured to create an authoritarian state is through claiming there are threats out there that only the elites fully understand. The film and TV industries were critical in creating the idea that we are surrounded by enemies and the mainstream media’s cooperation with the national security state sealed the deal.
First time I have heard of the notion that the postwar boom benefited from the Depression clearing out uncompetitive firms. Makes perfect sense.
Note that many economists thought that the return of the troops post WWII, along with the reduction in military spending would result in a 2nd depression. But it appears that the spending continued, but instead directed overseas via “Keynesian” programs to rebuild Europe, as well as Cold War military ramp up after a few years needed to demonize ex-WWII allies.
There was a sharp contraction in 1946, but that was in part due to women leaving the workforce as soldiers came back to work, plus one-time adjustments from switching back from war to peace time production. But as we know, the economy grew impressively after that.
Then there was the GI Bill which put many returning soldiers in University rather than unemployment lines.
Jim
Michael,
It would be useful to look at the role of Leon Keyserling as chairman of the Counsel of Economic Advisors in the Truman administration and NSC 68 in promoting the idea of an arms buildup that “paid for itself” through stimulating economic growth.
council
NSC 68 in full.
Thanks.
Note the pithy summary of military Keynesianism in part 6:
“With a high level of economic activity, the United States could soon attain a gross national product of $300 billion per year, as was pointed out in the President’s Economic Report (January 1950). Progress in this direction would permit, and might itself be aided by, a buildup of the economic and military strength of the United States and the free world; furthermore, if a dynamic expansion of the economy were achieved, the necessary build-up could be accomplished without a decrease in the national standard of living because the required resources could be obtained by siphoning off a part of the annual increment in the gross national product. These are facts of fundamental importance in considering the courses of action open to the United States (cf. Ch. IX).”
Yep. War or the threat thereof provides jawbs and groaf.
So then, why aren’t all or nearly all of us independent of the NEED for a job (not to say work, which many seem to forget does not require a job) except perhaps for a few hours a week? For the sake of world peace?
ans: Because our current money system has been/is based on theft rather than just sharing.
Btw, the “lazy peasants must be kept busy” theme Is not found in the Bible; instead family farms could only be lost for 50 years at most – permanent dispossession was out of the question.
Otoh, the sooner those unconcerned with justice (including JG advocates) wreck the world, the sooner the righteous will inherit it, well fertilized with the ashes of the arrogant and evil doers.
Hard to disagree the rise of American Empire, This is broadly the story that many associated with the union movement here would tell against the use in the UK (60s, 70s) of the US as a management-productivity exemplar, though obviously not updated to today. There was popular resentment of the US as ‘Johnny-come-lately’ entrants to the world wars, but you were also the good guys, a bulwark against the humourless Germans, cruel Japanese and dreadful Soviets. We could cling to notions that we had stood alone (Battle of Britain). Though popular notions of geopolitics were credulous, there was some notion we were in some kind of push to democratic modernity, led by the USA. We had little idea of the US as ‘evil empire’ or that we had been the previous one.
We slip easily into being British, American, French and the rest. As a kid I imagined Americans sophisticated and that they would have eschewed such junk as patriotism! These days one is left wondering just who ran our appalling histories. At best we might be chimpanzees going to war when resources get tight, ignorant of what we do. At worst we look like the dupes of rubber-masked aliens. I’ve read several books recently promising penetrating analysis of the role of finance in war and empire. All fail almost as a complex criminal investigation relying on material in the public domain is likely to. The evidence we want is behind closed doors and we are diverted into a massive effort to try and correct the false history and propaganda of centuries. One can read literature from 100 years ago with the ‘same’ message as this good piece (obviously related to times then). We need to recognise something beyond ‘bearing witness’.
If you get a chance, I seem to remember there is good coverage of the role of the various German industrial trusts in Caroll Quigley’s book, Tragedy and Hope. I think it was based in archival research carried out after WWII. It gets a bad rap because the Birchers picked up on it, but I found that the book generally seemed to agree with the facts I found when reading the records of the Nuremberg Industrialist Trials. The trial of Hans Flick [PDF] in particular lays out how Flick took control of companies via voting rights, even when he did not have a majority capital interest. I seem to recall that Quigley details how this information was hidden and unknown before the war, and only came to be public as a result of the victors rifling through the records.
The report on the German industrialists includes such gems as the fact that many wealthy people sponsored the Nazis:
Thanks Tim – now I’ll be up late perusing! I have a wad of stuff coming via inter-library loan. Marx made some interesting analysis, that sounds like, say, Hugh on kleptocracy – http://www.gutenberg.org/files/32370/32370-h/32370-h.htm
Secret Diplomatic History of the Eighteenth Century
He’s pointing to British involvement in the Swedish – Russian conflict. He has it that British trade with Russia was small and did not improve with our involvement on the Russian side. The idea is a small number of lobbyists caused Britain vast costs just for their profits at the expense of the rest of the economy.
“The oligarchy which, after the “glorious revolution,” usurped wealth and power at the cost of the mass of the British people, was, of course, forced to look out for allies, not only abroad, but also at home. The latter they found in what the French would call la haute bourgeoisie, as represented by the Bank of England, the money-lenders, State creditors, East India and other trading corporations, the great manufacturers, etc. How tenderly they managed the material interests of that class may be learned from the whole of their domestic legislation—Bank Acts, Protectionist enactments, Poor Regulations, etc. As to their foreign policy, they wanted to give it the appearance at least of being altogether regulated by the mercantile interest, an appearance the more easily to be produced, as the exclusive interest of one or the other small fraction of that class would, of course, be always identified with this or that Ministerial measure. The interested fraction then raised the commerce and navigation cry, which the nation stupidly re-echoed.”
He talks of ” the mercantile Machiavelism of “perfide Albion,” of which Palmerston is supposed the unscrupulous and unflinching executor”.
Guido Preparata’s ‘Conjuring Hitler’ probably fails to establish that Hitler’s rise to power was financed by British and American political classes after WW1, but does lead to an archive of material like Tim’s link. One needs some kind of control theory database to show the nodes, percolations and so on. And no doubt all the material still kept under secret wrap.
I’m not directly interested in the history. It’s whether we can glean knowledge of why we end up with oligarchy finance and can’t just get on with projects as Mark suggests above.
German multi-national firms such as IG Farben, DAPAG and A.E.G, most of them partnered in cartels with U.S. multi-national firms, were among the Nazis’ biggest financial backers. The IG Farben chemical cartel (partnered with Dupont, Standard Oil , General Electric, etc.) reportedly was the single largest contributor of campaign and support money to the Nazis. Other major contributors included coal magnate Emil Kirdorf, steel magnate Fritz Thyssen, industrialist Hugo Stinnes, banker Kurt von Schroder, and industrialist Frederick Flick. Kirdorf was head of the coal association, which was a major contributor (Allen and/or John Foster Dulles were board members of the Upper Silesian Coal company and reportedly wanted Hitler’s help to control labor costs – Hitler’s men worked as union busters for business and land owners). Henry Ford and William Randolph Hearst were also contributors to the Nazis, with Hearst publishing favorable articles about Hitler (as well as Mussolini) in his U.S. newspapers and magazines. A large percentage of the Nazis’ military vehicles were made in factories in Germany that were owned by Ford, GM and Chrysler. Standard Oil, among others, continued supplying oil to the Nazis after they declared war on the U.S. A GM vice-president named Graeme Howard was an American Nazi who wore his Nazi uniform at work and published a book titled “America and a New World Order” (1940) which suggested that America should support the Nazis in the fight against communism.
“The evidence we want is behind closed doors and we are diverted into a massive effort to try and correct the false history and propaganda of centuries.”
And to avoid being “diverted,” the process would be?
In playing a small role fighting a landfill up here, it seems evident to me that the players — that is, the landfill operator, the lawyers, and the Democractic nomenklatura — are using something like a playbook, much as professional football teams each have a playbook (different in detail, but the players can always pick up the playbook when they join a new team). The landfill was sold to the community as the replacement for the mill that was closing down; a play right out of shock doctrine. It would be nice if there were something like Games Rentiers Play that named each game, named the players, and so forth. (Books about con games have a similar structure and purpose. There are probably others.) Much as I love history writing, and I do, material like that would be of far more immediate use. Such a work wouldn’t have to be perfect, just good enough.
I don’t quite follow Lambert – though sense I agree at the action level. You can organise local fights, but these often fail. Even failing, as in the history of strikes can be important later. One might wonder if TINA worked so well because ‘we’ were rendered apathetic. Back in 75 negotiations of police pay went from ‘sod off and take your pittance offer’ to 40% overnight. A Canadian college sent me some lurid videos of their 68 strike and we put in a proposal for a right to strike with that. There is a kind of playbook.
I was thinking in the broader sense Peter Dale Scott always points out – that we are working with (often) government bureaucrat records, memoirs and such that are already doctored. I’d probably put it in terms of interviewing financial crooks after they’ve been shredding for a month and have swamped the interview room with lawyers. Handy to have the wire-tap, chat room conversations and people turned Queen’s evidence from the transaction trail, plus the cheated-on wife.
All subjects relying on institutional data have the problem is may have been produced to lie. The stuff from the hidden drawer in Al Capone’s accountants is likely to be more use than what they put in the public domain, though this doesn’t render the latter irrelevant. Marx states i the link above that the very publication of the documents he has found should shock all. It didn’t. Perelman, from my skim of chapter 5 isn’t telling us anything we don’t already know.
I like the idea of ‘outing the playbooks’. In a sense all we get as data is really ‘what they were willing to tell us, often written or said to give us what they think we want’. I used to think one could find the smoking gun, but in fact even most well conducted police enquiries don’t. Hard to be abstract about this. We teach a lot of naff cut down psychobabble like halo and horn and stereotyping, but most don’t get to the ‘I do them’ recognition. We could pack a line of literature from this paper by Marx to Perelman over the 150 years. But the penny that this kind of literature has been around a long time and we still seem to be doing the same things doesn’t drop. Of course, in Marx, we are the schoolteachers, drill sergeants and others modernising without teaching people to think. We seem, somehow, to be part of not teaching people how they are being played.
Thanks a lot this is very interesting and informative.
How does job creation through military spending compare to other ways of spending money, such as building, repairing roads, or manufacturing installing wind turbines / solar panels for instance?
I have read that military spending is one of the least effective ways to create jobs.
Robert Pollin has done great work in making that point.
Thanks very much.
The complete text of Chapter 5 of Perelman’s “The Matrix” is available on his website:
Chapter 5: Vietnam: Invitation to a Morass
http://michaelperelman.wordpress.com/2014/05/17/vietnam-invitation-to-a-morass-chapter-5-of-the-matrix/
“He who holds or has influence in Vietnam can affect the future of the Philippines and Formosa to the east, Thailand and Burma with their huge rice surpluses to the west, and Malaysia and Indonesia with their rubber, ore, and tin to the south. Vietnam thus does not exist in a geographical vacuum ‑‑ from it large storehouses of wealth and population can be influenced and undermined. [Boston Globe (28 February)]
The U.S. motives for the war may have been U.S. access to tin and tungsten, more general anti‑communism, or just plain stupidity. No matter, the war had enormous consequences.”
This comment–“no matter!”–points to the inadequately answered question, “Why Viet Nam?” I don’t know how much time he has to work on this, but I think Perelman should advance a theory about this. What does he really think?
If his opinion is “controversial,” no matter! For anyone with a sufficiently established reputation, controversy drives the cultural conversation drives book sales. I think he should go for it.
The narrative skips over the Kennedys. I remember a very strong speech given by RFK on the subject of the Gross National Product at a midwestern university I think. And JFK wasn’t rattling any sabers once in office, though his Berlin Airlift probably spent a few dollars, and the Cuban missile crisis had some warships going extra miles as well, backchannel diplomacy notwithstanding. One could well have expected there to be a ‘pivot to the poor’ for Kennedy’s second term, something RFK seemed determined to accomplish when he was running for president. (Let’s not leave out Martin Luther King, either.)
Maybe leaving all that out is intentional?
JFK ran for office on a fake missile gap. The US had the missiles and the Soviets had the gap. After the Cuban Missile Crisis, according to Daniel Ellsberg, the US placed a thousand intercontinental missiles in silos. Some people attribute Khrushchev’s attempt to put missiles in Cuba as a response to McNamara’s talking about US counterforce capability. So, I find it hard to accept JFK as not have rattled sabers while in office.
Michael Perelman is awesome! I’m really glad to see him writing for NC!
Interesting comments about the Schumpeterian creative destruction during the GD – that (alleged) beneficial removal of the economic equivalents of dead and diseased tissue is of course one of the lessons which “students of the GD” such as Bernanke completely dismiss or ignore. Noninterventionist (or less-interventionist, in the sense that productive-economic utility is the only metric to be considered when weighing whether to intervene and if so, in what manner) “you rendered yourself uncompetitive, so our only interest is in letting you fail in a manner which disrupts the genuine economic producers as little as possible” approaches are simply not palatable to the politician, policymaker and central-banker class to whom arrogation of personal influence and power and PR-sound-bite-friendly “being seen as doing something” (which plays into their personal omnipotence fantasies) are preeminent concerns. Thus, micromanagement of business cycles and interest rates and massive bailouts of the Looter Elite are the order of the day. The canard the bailer-outers throw up in order to justify paying GDP-order-of-magnitude protection money to the great criminal syndicates of Big Finance in the aftermath of the late, great GFC is “we had no option but to step in massively in order toa avert a complete collapse”, but that falsely (but oh so conveniently) omits what might be called the “conscientious Schumpeterian” option along the lines of “we need a functioning financial system, but any individual institution is not sacrosanct, no matter how large and ‘systemically important’ it may be.”
One other aspect of the GD/WW2 economic story I would like to see more discussion of, which may sound superficially like advocacy of military Keynesianism but which most decidedly is not, especially in modern times where the specialization of military hardware effectively rules out any cost-effective form of such dual-utility arguments: To what extent did the WW2-mandated crash course in industrial efficiency and throughput constitute a kind of “shock modernization” of large swaths of inefficient and obsolescent US industry, which then – fueled by rising demand from the postwar baby boom generation – served as a springboard for the huge surge in production and postwar wealth creation, which led to the great middle class prosperity of the 50s and 60s?
Obviously ’twas not all efficiency and lean-and-meanness – as with all major wars there was no small amount of graft and profiteering going on – but the sheer requirements to crank out the truly massive amounts of matériel and hardware, both specialized-military (tanks, planes, artillery, munitions, ships) and more general-purpose (soldier’s gear, rapid-build housing, trucks, jeeps, rubber/chemicals/plastics, etc) that were needed for the war effort mandated a great upgrading and expansion of the nation’s industrial infrastructure. One crucial difference between then and now lies in the dual-use aspects of that effort: Upgrading a 40s-era Detroit auto plant to crank out a huge volume of WW2-era tanks and planes would not only be useful for manufacturing tanks and planes. (I am thinking here not just of direct assembly-line efficiency but also of the wider-ranging industrial-process and supply-chain aspects of the wartime-forced boost in throughput). Nowadays, the technological and manufacturing-process overlap between (say) a stealth fighter and an electric car are miniscule, in other words the cost of our ongoing military subsidization is grossly disproportionate to any plasuibly arguable amount of useful backflow in the form of technology transfer to the private sector economy, which is miniscule. And “military contracting as models of efficiency” is of course a sick joke.
(Another interesting aspect for a separate discussion: “The postwar social compact as an inequality mitigator: myth or reality?”)
Really enjoyed this piece – it connects a lot of dots.
JFK was elected as a typical liberal Cold War warrior. Once President he appeared to change in a very different way than Obama has revealed himself. I think the Bay of Pigs fiasco and the Cuban Missile Crisis changed his world view. The generals JFK had to deal with were of the mind “If we go to war with Russia and there are two American left and one Russian, we win.” – General Carl Spaatz He did come to be able to negotiate with Khrushchev from whence came the Nuclear Test Ban Treaty. No saber rattling there. I remember reading about how RFK had to clean up the mess that the Eisenhower administration had left with their meddling in Indonesia trying to get rid of Sukarno who was too much of a nationalist for the power freaks who run things.
The lies of the Vietnam war had awakened the teenage me to a more realist picture of the US government. This article explains why liberal Democrats of the time went along with the Vietnam War and the military industrial complex. Many mainstream Democrats today delude themselves by thinking they are good for women’s rights and gay people and are not anti-scientific as the right wing in America grows ever so loony.
Meanwhile I hear the jets fly over my head in their low flying training exercises as the Appalachians are much like the Urals.
I wish this chapter was being taught in U.S. high school students’ history classes. The dialogues which might follow….