War, the American State, and Politics since 1898.

• Author: Munger, Michael C.
• Position: Book review

War, the American State, and Politics since 1898

Edited by By Robert P. Saldin

New York: Cambridge University Press, 2011.

Pp. xii, 258. $90.00 hardback.

In his book The Rise and Decline of Nations (New Haven, Conn.: Yale University Press, 1982), Mancur Olson wrote: "The evidence that has already been presented is sufficient to provoke some readers to ask rhetorically what the policy implications of the argument might be and to answer that a country ought to seek a revolution, or even provoke a war in which it would be defeated. Of course, this policy recommendation makes no more (or less) sense that the suggestion that one ought to welcome pestilence as a cure for overpopulation" (p. 87). Most of Olson's book has to do with war, the consequences of war, and the consequences of the absence of war. He tried to capture the confusion we have about war in a way that made analysis easier and conclusions attainable.

Is war good? War is clearly not always good. So, is war bad? The question is complex because war has both domestic and international political objectives. The 1997 movie Wag the Dogis a fictional treatment of the domestic consequences of war. An excerpt of dialogue captures some of these consequences:

STANLEY MOTSS: I'm in show business, why come to me?

CONRAD "CONNIE" BREAN: War is show business, that's why we're here ....

STANLEY MOTSS: The president will be a hero. He brought peace.

CONRAD "CONNIE" BREAN: But there was never a war.

STANLEY MOTSS: All the greater accomplishment.

Fiction is sometimes perceptive. Only six years after Wag the Dog appeared in cinemas, the United States attacked Iraq. As U.S. soldiers bombarded Baghdad, American citizens canonized the president, elevating his approval ratings to more than 80 percent. The economy expanded rapidly, and unemployment fell from a high of 6 percent in 2003 to a low of 4.6 percent in 2006. We have seen war, and it is good.

Or was it? Even if geopolitical objectives justified the war, the economic costs and benefits might be difficult to measure. As Robert Higgs has argued ("Wartime Prosperity? A Reassessment of the U.S. Economy in the 1940s," Journal of Economic History 52 [March 1992]: 41-60), we have two very good reasons to doubt claims about wartime "prosperity." The first is that even though diverting our young adult population into military service is in fact a waste of resources, this diversion will show up as a misleading reduction in the measured unemployment rate.

The...