With all of this talk about stimulating the economy through gummint borrowing and consumption, and the likes of Krugman saying that even more need be spent (echoing Republicans who dismiss the New Deal by saying the Depression didn’t really end until WWII, thus inadvertently promoting even more gummint action), how long will it be before someone decides that the United States (or NATO) needs to wage a nice, long, destructive war? I don’t mean a war on the scale of Iraq or Vietnam, but rather, a global war, well-managed and destructive enough to prompt all kinds of government control, one that will draft millions of men and women, a war that needs infantry and not smart bombs? Because war as it is waged now needs neither mass armies nor mass production.
Even worse, it is possible someone could suggest a limited nuclear war. After all, if stimulus is needed to prompt consumption, and destruction is a good way to do that, what better way than a small-scale, well-managed nuclear exchange — between, say, the US and China, or the US and some alleged “rogue state” — that would afford for massive enough reconstruction in the US and elsewhere to “spur consumption.”
I’m not suggesting this will happen, I’m suggesting it could. Or at least someone will talk about it openly. Especially if 2009 will be, as I fear it will, a nearly full-scale rerun of 1930.
10:49 am on December 24, 2008
