There was a flash one day, and another a few days later and the war was over. Millions of Americans and Japanese that had just had their date with death cancelled turned around and went home. In Europe the fighting had stopped with Hitler dead, but the squabbling had begun already. Germany had been reduced to ashes in some precincts and barely touched in others. The Soviets were digging in and laying the chaulklines for the Iron Curtain which of course split Germany just as Berlin herself was split into a sector for each of the Allies. British, American and French sectors were Free Berlin. The Soviet sector, less so.

Victory sure was sweet but it didn’t seem that hard times were over or even nearly over. The effect of demobilization of the men and industries of the war effort looked like it could be disastrous. Indeed, the fiscal picture of the nation and the world was so perilous that to this day nearly any economic fact you hear is always described as “post-war”. Yes, proportional debt and spending was higher than we know even today. Wage and price controls ruled the workplace and the markets. Every malefaction of “socialism” existed in the US and global war effort. In the UK, it survived and flourished… in the US it sputtered on but failed to nationalize the economy. But nearly everywhere the boon of peace brought the boom of the economy.

These were the Happy Days and American Graffitti times. Tract houses metastasized. Plants that turned out tanks now turned out cars as big as tanks. College enrollments exploded. It was nearly magical. West Berlin was a wasteland as Hitler was immolated in his back yard. A few years later it was a bustling business center, not least because it was the gateway to the bleak hinterland of the East. London rebuilt. And so did Stalingrad. The Marshall Plan seemed able to print reams of any currency. Trade flourished and new technologies born from the war would make right much of what they had ruined.

It seemed that, with the proper administration, even the ravages of World War could be rather quickly overcome. That being the case it would be a churlish reactionary indeed who would object to Lyndon Johnson when he invoked the Moral Equivalent of War in enacting his program of the Great Society.

Do you know what this is? Like The Matrix, the Great Society is all around you and you feel it most certainly when you pay your taxes. Medicare and Medicaid, the federal home financing apparatus, these things we once called “welfare”… all these were part of a grand scale War on Poverty, the first of our many Wars that were not wars. In any case, as has always been so, those who invoke war whimsically do so to silence objections. Hey, we just whipped the Nazis AND the Japs. You don’t think we can pay for your grandmomma’s hernia? That’s some effective stuff.

And it worked. Anything as mundane as actuarial study was considered rude and not just for LBJ’s projects. Was Social Security a foundationless pyramid scheme? Um, yup. But as long as there is growth overall and it can be tweaked here or there and, most importantly, we can increase the taxes that support it, we will soldier on.

But eventually the mathematics catches up. And this is where we are now. This is why it all seems to be coming to a head at once, it is that our diverse maladies all have one underlying cause. All these schemes that alleviate this or that were conceived and sold on false pretenses but with a confidence that comes from saying, it once was worse and we bounced back. The “how” is deftly ignored but that floor is undeniable and it is coming up fast. What will they say when we actually ARE in a worse position than at the war’s end? When we are twice as bad? Three times as deep in the hole? Yes, this and worse, much worse is already baked into the cake, as the saying goes. The Moral Equivalent of War has given us the Fiscal Equivalent of War.

And that is just today.

The Fiscal Equivalent of Four or Five World War IIs is already signed, sealed and about to be delivered. Are you ready?

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