The Economy: Something New Under The Sun

One of the most often quoted verses from the Bible is, “There is nothing new under the sun.” (Ecclesiastes 1:9 Lots of folks don’t know they’re quoting biblical writ.) But once in a great, great while something that sure looks new comes along.
At least it seems unusual enough that we don’t know how to deal with it, why it’s happening or whether it is ultimately real or not. That happened to the United States in 1945. Politically we went into a state of nervous shock, hysteria to the point of mental breakdown.
Sociologically we began tossing out norms that had been with us since the early Seventeenth Century—on race, to start with. A civil rights movement that would have been unimaginable before we discovered Hitler’s death camps rose to divide us violently.
Geopolitically we went from being a nation with a very small military, snuggled in the bosom of an imperial British fleet (we went through most of the Eighteenth Century with no more than about seven thousand cavalry troops and no navy to speak of.
As late as 1916, a French general could sneer, “We lose more men before breakfast each morning than you have in your entire army.” Suddenly, in 1945, like a Caesarian birth we were ripped out of our snug womb. The British fleet that had made our tiny military possible was gone.
We were exposed to the world. Britain’s century long feud with Russia was suddenly our feud. Recreating a viable but PEACEFUL Europe and Japan was OUR responsibility—alone. Many historians have looked at these factors, but how many have looked at what happened to us economically?
World War I took us from the status of debtor nation to creditor to the world. (Not being able to handle that reality very much led to the Crash of 1929.) World War II was like walking into a casino, plunking a single dollar into a one armed bandit and suddenly finding ourselves covered with uncountable billions in cash.
Never in all of human history has one nation won so total and world-wide a victory. Never. The other winners? France was covered with humiliation and confusion. China was wracked with corruption and civil war. Britain was penniless with an empire collapsing under her. Russia? Imagine the United States with EVERYTHING east of the Mississippi burnt to the ground, about 30 million casualties to bury and millions more to tend.
Every other industrialized nation was a wasteland of shattered and ruined industrial plants. Britain, which had escaped occupation, had for five years built ALL of its new factories in the continental United States—out of bombing range. British war rationing would continue until 1960.
We were unbombed. We had relatively few casualties. Anyone who wanted to build or rebuild just about anything was going to have to buy it from us. We had almost uncountable cash reserves to fund this rebuilding—which our factories would carry out.
We spent that money—in many cases relatively wisely. Japan thrives today. Germany has one of the most powerful economies in Europe. London and Paris are centers of world banking. China spent decades in non-threatening isolation. All of this made individual Americans rich.
All of this frantic financial activity (Note the Communists never called us the “Washington Imperialists” or the “Atomic Bomb Imperialists”—they called us the “Wall Street Imperialists”. They understood us better than we did.) The enhanced dollar became the real world power.
It enabled us to rule much of the planet—and reap the produce of that planet—while, at the same time, using the loot and booty of war to enrich our citizenry to a level unimagined by any previous human empire. Did we ever stop to think that this wealth was finite, that we could run out of someday? No, we began to accept it as our prerogative.
Let’s take a closer look at what went on domestically tomorrow.