horse of george

I had mentioned Krugman's lament for WWII type spending and ridiculed it with some light sarcasm - but I also thought at the time Krugman brought this argument up in a TV interview that it sounded quite flawed, that there was very little about America's position in the world then compared to now that would suggest such a huge spending spree would produce similar results - and Victor David Hanson has written this nice little piece making that very point. I like the analogy he makes that America under Obama has more in common with post war England, about to embark on a disastrous regimen of socialist policies, than with the hyper capitalist entrepreneurialism and, possibly more importantly for purposes of this post, robust industrial and manufacturing base of post war America. A soldier with just a high school education or even without had some reasonable expectation of returning home and maybe working for a Westinghouse, a Proctor and Gamble, a Bethlehem Steel, a General Motors - that is most decidedly not the case today.