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On Sun, 13 Jun 2010 10:45:49 -0700, "nom=de=plume"
wrote:

In the short term you are right but if you look at just the bad things
that happened in the 20th century. The depression resulted in WWII and
tens of millions of people died. I suppose that "worked out OK".
Unfortunately that will be nothing compared to a nuclear war. Who will
get it started? Most likely it will involve Israel and one of the
Islamic countries but, just like WWI, it could quickly escalate to the
world powers.

Perhaps worse might actually be an economic war where all of this
phony paper we call money collapses and people start fighting for
resources because they can't buy them anymore. In that war the Chinese
win because they can just sit back and watch. Their people will suffer
for a few years but they have the industrial capacity the US had in
1945 so they will be staged to take over the world.

The depression didn't result in WW2. Come on. The depression (at least in
Germany) resulted from them being punished excessively for WWI.

The sky is falling, the sky is falling.... NOT


Without the depression, Hitler would not have been able to take power
and the war was certainly what ended the depression. FDRs most
successful program was Lend Lease. That is what got the factories
going again.
Building parks, logging roads and earthen dams may have kept young men
off the streets but it certainly did not do much to stimulate the
economy. Building ships and tanks for the brits is what got industry
going again.
Industrially backed wars are a great economic stimulant. You get to
build a lot of products and you don't have to really sell them. You
just blow them up and build more. Unfortunately we still have not paid
off all the debt from WWII. We just grew the economy enough to
obfuscate the debt. There is a limit to how much more we can grow. We
are now bumping up against the capacity of the planet to assimilate
more growth. (population, energy, water, food or just about any other
metric you can use)
In that regard "civilization" as we know it is a Ponzi.

Unemployment before WW2 under FDR went from 25% to 10%. That's pretty
amazing. WW2 certainly ended the depression finally and completely, but the
US depression had little to do with Hitler. He came into power because the
European powers after WW2 were obscenely harsh with Germany. That caused a
terrible depression and runaway inflation in Germany, which gave rise to the
extremist movement.