Wars make money. What good is Peace?

Answer 1

How much exactly have YOU profited from it?

Answer 2

Nobel Peace Prize

Answer 3

Wars take lives. Peace makes better money because you have more people coming in to make it.

Answer 4

I don't think that "Wars make money" is an accurate statement. The West won the Cold War by driving the Soviet Union into bankruptcy...and they were fighting harder than the West was.

The former Soviet Union is now in relative peace and their economies are now more prosperous than ever. I wonder why that is?

Answer 5

Peace gives you an opportunity to prepare for the next war!

Answer 6

The 'stability' concept regulations in each and every thing....... if one has to make extra or extra funds, somebody else has to lose.... conflict is for this reason the perfect situation for that..... conflict won't be able to be made low priced when you consider that's in itself the balancing act for a persisted stretch of peace that has prevailed..... that's the churning agent that's constructive to create extremities and in a situation of extremities, losses and intense expenses are inevitable.

Answer 7

It enables countries to build up populations and materials for the next war. The peacetime economy needs loads of reproduction to replace those killed in major campaigns. These brush fire events that have been going on since Korea are practice runs for the next big one.

Lets hope the leaders keep the destruction to a minimum and no nuclear weapons are used.

Answer 8

Economically speaking, the assertion that wars make money is pure cockamamie.

The reason for this is in 'the law of unintended circumstances,' which is a complicated way of saying 'fuzzy math.' It's best explained with what economists refer to as the 'broken window analogy.'

One day, reckless Johnnie breaks a window. The owner is mad, but what's he going to do? He goes to the glazier and gets a new window. The glazier was just about to go out of business, but now he buys bread for his family, which benefits the Baker who buys shoes which benefit the cobbler..and so on. Until, everybody agrees that little kid was actually a benefactor who got the whole economy running again.

Of course it's garbage. The fallacy lies in seen spending vs. unseen spending. We count the benefits to the cobbler (new spending) but we don't factor in the cost to the owner (i.e. what could have been done with the window). Bottom line, the town is still less one window.

War is quite similar to breaking windows. You're not producing anything that isn't meant to go up in smoke. Yes, you're literally either burning or waiting to burn money. Sometimes, of course, you can't avoid it. In order to protect your assets, you have to build walls and put in burglar alarms.

That doesn't mean burglars are good for the economy.

Keynesian economists believe that there are cases when forced spending of money is necessary to get people to start parting with their money again and get the economic ball rolling. During the great depression, we started building roads, for example. However, one can argue that the option of building a road is an economically wiser one than bombing the rockies to smithereens.

In either case, the belief relies on the same rule: Once the economy gets going again, you must raise taxes to cover the deficit spending previously made.

As we know, most politicians like to get re-elected and raising taxes is pretty much a sure-fire way to not get the vote. Or is it? The current solution to this has been clever: Let's call it soft-taxation. Have you noticed how secondary and tertiary taxes in this country have been increasing? The rising gas prices are only one example. Real estate taxes are another. Still, it's not enough and we have a deficit.

Depending on your accounting method, the current amount of US military spending is between 19% and 51% of the GDP. At the hight of the cold war, Russia was spending about 33% of its GDP. As we all know, the drain of competing militarily with the US broke the back of communism. Why has this not happened in the US?

The answer? Foreign investment. In order to feed our hungry mouths, we depend on over $1 Billion dollars a day to come into our country. That is how we cover our trade deficit, while we are busy blowing up caves. The money comes into the US in various forms. First and foremost through the stock market, of course.

Secondly, through oil. The dollar is still the reserve currency for the global oil trade. This is known as the 'petro-dollar.'

The U.S. prints hundreds of billions of these fiat petro-dollars, which are then used by nation states to purchase oil and energy from OPEC producers (except presently Iraq and, to some degree, Venezuela). These petro-dollars are then re-cycled from OPEC back into the U.S. via Treasury Bills or other dollar-denominated assets such as U.S. stocks, real estate, etc.

In a peacetime economy, we would be using the opportunity of this cash flow to build infrastructure and increase our competitive advantage. In a war economy, our focus (and resources) is directed at keeping us safe. We thereby lose 'opportunity' and fall behind, except in those areas we are currently funding.

While we have better jets and cooler bombs, other nations are improving their competitiveness. That's how it goes. It is not a surprise that the pillars of American industry, such as the auto and steel are in trouble. Money that could be used to fostering cool new technologies is being spent on low-tech stuff like moving Hummers to Iraq.

As long as we can hold on to our foreign investment, we'll be fine. But it is a risky proposition. The danger of OPEC switching to a new currency like the Euro or of diminishing interest in our stock market could trigger a horrible effect. We'll be in trouble if we've been spending our money on bombs while the world starts to take a liking to the Shanghai stock market.

It shouldn't sound shocking, but Peace is an incredible opportunity for business. War on the other hand is a terrible necessity that one ought to only engage in as a last resort and even then, finish as soon as possible.

Answer 9

You forget the 35th Rule of Acquisition: Peace is good for business.

Answer 10

In any war there can be no victory. Every lost life costs more the you could make in a million years. You are a fool if you think war is good.

Answer 11

Actually, that is wrong. But everyone looks back at WWI and the US economy. That "boom" was because we were not being bombed. Look at England, France, Germany, Japan, ect. During the same period. Can't say that made money.