capitalism

530 War
often brings violence against inoffensive dissenters. In
these ways, among others, war promotes collectivism at the
expense of individualism, force at the expense of reason,
and coarseness at the expense of sensibility. Libertarians
regard all of those tendencies with sorrow.
Much of the growth and centralization of government
during the past several centuries has been traced to war and
its various consequences. Although in this regard all great
wars present certain common aspects, the world wars of the
20th century offer the starkest examples.
World War I caused not only the deaths of some 9 million
combatants and the serious wounding of some 21 million
others, but also vast suffering among the civilian populations
of Germany, Russia, France, and other countries. Each of the
major belligerents mobilized millions of men, for the most
part by means of conscription, and exercised sweeping economic
controls—what contemporaries called war socialism.
Many industries were nationalized outright. Taxes, government
spending, and public debt soared to unprecedented
heights. The gold standard was abandoned, and vast amounts
of fiat paper currency were issued, giving rise to rapid price
inflation in each country. International trade and finance suffered
great disruption and diminution. So great was the damage
done by the conflict that not even a series of international
reconstruction efforts during the 1920s could restore the
North Atlantic economy to a flourishing condition, and ultimately,
if indirectly, the Great Depression of the 1930s
became one of the delayed effects of the Great War.
Other effects included the destruction of four great
empires—Austro-Hungarian, German, Russian, and Ottoman—
and the creation of an ill-fated house-of-cards arrangement of
new nations in their place in Europe and the Middle East, not
to speak of the Bolshevik house of horrors in Russia. Thus,
besides the death, devastation, misery, and disruption of civilized
life, the aftermath of World War I included communism,
fascism, and, after a short interlude, national socialism.
Small wonder that Britain’s wartime Prime Minister David
Lloyd George wrote in his postwar memoirs, “War has
always been fatal to Liberalism.” In many ways, World War
I can be seen as the fount from which nearly all the great horrors
of the 20th century flowed.
Nevertheless, World War II wreaked destruction so vast
that it made the catastrophe of 1914–1918 pale by comparison:
more than 60 million deaths, most of them of civilians;
countless scores of millions seriously wounded or
sickened; and property destruction on an unimaginable
scale stretching from England to Japan. Again, wartime collectivism
prevailed, this time with concentration camps for
persons of Japanese ancestry in the United States and death
camps for Jews in German-occupied Europe. The suppression
of civil liberties, conscription, rationing, government
takeovers and economic controls, huge taxes and public
debts, gigantic currency issues, and price inflation—all the
proven means by which governments mobilize resources
for war and despoil normal life—came into play, in most
places even more extensively than in the previous war.
When the madness finally ended, in the lingering smoke
of the scores of thousands of civilians incinerated at
Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the world could only look on in
dazed astonishment and wonder at what had been done.
Oddly, however, the lesson that Americans and many
western Europeans carried away from the experience of
world war was one of heightened trust in the ability of governments
to provide for the public welfare. Especially after
World War II in the victorious nations, the opponents of
active government intervention in economy and society
emerged greatly weakened. Democratic socialism, New
Dealism, and other so-called third-way systems of political
economy—“welfare states”—took hold all over the
Western world, and in many cases elsewhere in the world
as well. Collectivism was at its zenith, and individualism
was everywhere in retreat. Economist and political philosopher
F. A. Hayek feared that the Western world had set forth
on a “road to serfdom” because no one seemed to value
highly the liberties cherished by classical liberals anymore.
In the aftermath of depression and war, the great mass
of people wanted not liberty, but security, and they had
become convinced that their governments could provide it.
Since 1945, the world has avoided a repetition of warfare
on the scale of the World Wars, but lesser wars aplenty
have raged, and their effects have continued to confirm the
worst fears of libertarians. Thus, for example, the cold war
gave rise to massive civil rights violations even in the
United States as the government sought to clamp down on
groups and individuals who opposed its foreign policy.
Between 1948 and 1989, some 7.5% of the U.S. gross
national product, on average, was channeled into military
spending, consuming many trillions of dollars that otherwise
might have gone into the maintenance and adornment
of life for the general public. American military adventures
in Korea, Vietnam, Panama, Serbia, Iraq, and many other
places around the globe continued to divide the polity and
deplete the public treasury. Ultimately, the Soviet Union
fell apart, ending the cold war and its cumulating adverse
consequences for the United States and the other nations
that had opposed the Soviets. However, the world continues
to endure new wars and to stagger under heavy military
burdens even during peacetime, and libertarians continue to
regard this situation with deep regret.
See also Collectivism; Foreign Policy; Imperialism; Military-
Industrial Complex; Peace and Pacifism
Further Readings
RoH
De Jouvenel, Bertrand. On Power: The Natural History of Its
Growth. Indianapolis, IN: Liberty Fund, 1993 [in French, 1945].
Denson, John V., ed. The Costs of War: America’s Pyrrhic Victories.
New Brunswick, NJ: Transaction, 1997.