War

War MANY PEOPLE think that war is good for an economy. Princeton economist Paul Krugman, for example, wrote that the terrorist attack of September 11 "could even do some economic good" because it would lead to increased spending to replace buildings. This is false. This war may be justified, but the spending on war, the physical resources devoted to war, are not themselves a benefit; they are a clear, and often large, cost. The reason is simple: These resources would have been used in other ways and now we must give up those uses. Even for the United States, which generally manages to fight on other people's territory, war has a high cost. The most obvious cost is death. Gen. Douglas MacArthur once said, "Old soldiers never die; they just fade away." But the line should really be old soldiers never die; young ones do. World War II, for example, cost the United States more than 400,000 lives, almost all of them people under 40. Another obvious drain of war on the economy is the diversion of resources from productive, peaceful activities to military ones. We are often told that World War II was a boom time for the U.S. economy. war, government, cost, world, spent, resources, percent, money, ii, economy, people, gnp, example, even, during, because, 42, united, unemployment, true, states, prices, low, goods, depression, been, 1944, worst, withholding, well-being, value, understates, tax, spending, spend