Excellent
It worked for Germany. A country that was dragging itself out of a dead economy where a loaf of bread provided less calories than was needed to carry the huge wedge of Deutschmarks to the shop to pay for it.

I know bugger all about such economics and can't possibly imagine how having to print 10m DM banknotes so people could pay for stuff could be remedied by building a Wermacht
( sandettie light vessel automatic New Twitter - @bollocksreally, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 8:47, 1 reply)

I think this is right:
when you have bad economic times, both people and businesses are reluctant to spend money, or simply don't have it to spend. But nobody spending money makes for worse economic times, which can be a vicious circle.

Whereas war encourages companies to spend money. For example Halliburton wants to get in on the government contracts that are going, so they hire people. But then the companies that supply eg office furniture see that Halliburton are going to be buying a lot of desks for all their new people, so they want to expand their operations to be in the best position to take advantage of this new demand. And then it flows on to the companies that supply them, and so on, making a virtuous circle from a purely economic point of view.

I'm not sure how accurate this all is, but I think that's the basic argument of how capitalism leads to war (aside from the obvious one, getting control of valuable resources and cheap labour from militarily weaker governments).
(apeloverage committed the vile act of onanism on, Tue 27 Jan 2009, 15:12, closed)