Hi everyone, I’m new here, though I’ve been reading this site [and its forums] a lot over the last month or so. Anyway, my question is whether war socialism is more “successful” in pursuing a war than the alternative of having the government leave its hands off the economy. I appreciate you reading this, since I’ve been pondering this off and on for the last day or so.
Peace, broskis. :V
Hmmm. War Socialism (Fascism) or Laissez-Faire.
For the purpose of conducting the war, Socialism.
You can’t fight a war without inflation. Eventually the people get war exhaustion (they lose their vigor and don’t want to pay increased taxes). Laissez-Faire by definition should be less inflationary than Socialism.
Aye, I see what you mean. If this is a war of self-defence, I’m assuming that it would be a lesser wrong to adopt a policy of war socialism and abridge people’s rights to property than to abridge government’s role in protecting people’s lives from the invaders. But suppose that once the war is over (assuming that the government hasn’t been overthrown by the invaders), the government remains entangled in the economy. (I know, I know. It’s a given.) So does this really make war socialism a lesser evil than the laissez-faire approach, or are there other factors to look at?
Thanks for the speedy reply, by the way.
Well, I don’t want you to take away that I endorse socialism or even government responsibility for defense.
A defensive war is much different than an offensive one. I had assumed you were speaking about an offensive war.
In a defensive war, laissez-faire might be best. A decentralized enemy (like you see in Afghanistan and Iraq, previously Vietnam) is very hard to defeat because there is no central command, no centralized munitions, no centralized finance process.
Capitalism wins no matter what. The only reason the USSR was able to beat Nazi Germany was because they had a ton of cannonfodder they could throw at the Germans… soldiers without guns, soldiers without bullets, etc. The Soviet military was a joke.
On the other hand, a free market would be superior in both an offensive and defensive war. If a country would try to mess with an anarchocapitalist society, do you think private courts, insurance companies, and police will take it? No! They will lose business if they take sh!t from a foreign aggressor. If anyone tried to mess with them, you’d see a repeat of Dresden all over the aggressor’s nation.
I don’t think a PDA would do a dresden on an enemy -too unjust and expensive -it is more likely that they would focus their attention on attacking the enemy gov./leaders and using propaganda and good works to arouse people against them.
Exactly, seeing as the PDAs actually have to attract customers rather than being able to force their “service” upon them, such atrocities simply wouldn’t happen.
They’d probably send a Special Forces type team and and start pruining the enemy goernment from the top until they got to someone who would call the whole thing of. That sounds like a win-win to me.
I’m assuming here a serious transgression of the rights of their customers by a sovereign nation. This thread is about “total war” not some border incursions. If it really comes down to “total war,” mass bombings would be a more cost effective way of bringing the enemies to their knees.
All this would do is generate support for the invading nation from both their populace and other nations as well raising costs for the PDA and causing them to lose support as a result of their actions (the killing of innocents). How again would this be viable?
It would be viable because it would avoid the massive cost of waging a full out land war. There’s a reason why the United States didn’t have to invade Japan. I’ll give you a hint: it had something to do with 16 square miles of Tokyo being burned to the ground during a firebombing.
Again, we’re assuming total war here, not a normal war. This isn’t Iraq or Vietnam. This is the US Civil War or WWII. Civilian casualties don’t matter in a total war.