Powell on WWI

Jim Powell has a characteristically excellent article today on LRC about WWI. It is especially good on factors that led up to WWI. Powell’s article can be supplemented with the excellent discussion of WWI in Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s Introduction to his book Democracy: The God that Failed: Studies in the Economics and Politics of Monarchy, Democracy, and Natural Order, where Hoppe emphasizes the disastrous consequences of America’s actions in WWI–how America’s intervention transformed the war from an old-fashioned territorial dispute into an ideological conflict of good against evil, a war “to make the world safe for democracy and free of dynastic rulers”… which then degenerated into a total war… which prevented the European war from being “concluded with a mutually acceptable and face-saving compromise peace rather than the actual dictate”, with

Austria-Hungary, Germany and Russia [remaining] traditional monarchies instead of being turned into short-lived democratic republics. With a Russian Czar and a German and Austrian Kaiser in place, it would have been almost impossible for the Bolsheviks to seize power in Russia, and in reaction to a growing communist threat in Western Europe, for the Fascists and National Socialists to do the same in Italy and Germany. Millions of victims of communism, national socialism, and World War II would have been saved. The extent of government interference with and control of the private economy in the United States and in Western Europe would never have reached the heights seen today. And rather than Central and Eastern Europe (and consequently half of the globe) falling into communist hands and for more than forty years being plundered, devastated, and forcibly insulated from Western markets, all of Europe (and the entire globe) would have remained integrated economically (as in the nineteenth century) in a world-wide system of division of labor and cooperation. World living standards would have grown immensely higher than they actually have.

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12:01 pm on June 8, 2005