Prohibition Max, 2020
"World War II was, above all, a burst of deficit-financed government spending...[that] created an economic boom...[that] laid the foundation for long-run prosperity."
"Paul Samuelson, a future Nobel Prize winner, wrote in 1943 that upon cessation of hostilities and demobilization 'some ten million men will be thrown on the labor market.'"He warned that unless wartime controls were extended there would be 'the greatest period of unemployment and industrial dislocation which any economy has ever faced.'"Another future Nobel laureate, Gunnar Myrdal, predicted that postwar economic turmoil would be so severe that it would generate an 'epidemic of violence'."
"Between mid-1945 and mid-1947, over 20 million people were released from the armed forces and related employment, but nonmilitary-related civilian employment rose by 16 million. This was described by President Truman as the 'swiftest and most gigantic change-over that any nation has made from war to peace.
"When the war ended...the command economy was dismantled. By the end of 1946, direct government allocation of resources—by edict, price controls, and rationing schemes—was essentially eliminated. Tax rates were cut as well, although they remained high by contemporary standards."By any measure, the economy became less subject to government direction. Despite the pessimism of professional economists, resources that previously would have been directed to the production of war goods quickly found their way to other uses...the elimination of wartime economic controls coincided with one of the largest periods of economic growth in US history."