Today it was emphasized how much World War II transformed American life. And that’s a truth most people forget. World War II, like the previous world war, regimented American civilian life among regimental lines. High taxes, high spending, massive food shortages, massive shortages of a lot of life’s essentials actual, economic central planning, wage and price controls, the military draft, the mass creation of daycare and the withering of the American family unit, etc. Fascism to defeat fascism.

Next we looked at how the Cold War helped develop technology like the internet and our modern information technology. It was pointed out how much of it was due to the need for good targeting and aiming systems. We have the internet because of the Cold War. But I’d like to take a moment and bash the argument that war is a great generator of technology and without conflict we’d have no new developments. Undeniably, there is a long list of products and useful things developed based on military prototypes and created out of military necessity. I don’t deny that. But the first rule of economics, as laid out by that great Frenchman Frederic Bastiat, in economics you must look at “that which is seen, and that which is unseen.” If resources are used in a certain way, that means they were not used in another way; literally any other possible fashion. Trillions of dollars were spent over the course of the 40 year Cold War. Some of it helped lead to important things we cherish today. Most of it was wasted and might as well have been burned. If even most of this money was not wasted on illogical wars, endless foreign aid, purposeless military buildups against an overhyped threat, and subsidies to corrupt arms industry figures, what good could it have done? What if the market was allowed to allocate those trillions of dollars to their greatest use, like it does with all other things so successfully? Would we have an even better version of the internet? Would we be a decade ahead technologically? Two decades? I don’t know and can’t say with absolute certainty. But that’s the key to economics; just because something was used in one way, doesn’t mean that was it’s greatest use. We get some technological progress from war. But how much more would we get in peace?

But at the end of class it was noted that “information wants to be free.” Modern technology allows the kind of individual freedom and mass decentralization never before thought possible. Although created through central planning, the internet can possibly serve as the greatest weapon against it.