Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
- Dwight D. Eisenhower, "A Chance for Peace"
As the clouds grew darker over Europe following Germany's invasion of Czechloslovakia in March of 1939, John Maynard Keynes took to the radio to argue that the return of tensions between Germany and Britain brought with it a silver lining: Expenditures on arms would contribute to aggregate demand which might alleviate problems of unemployment in Britain:
It is not an exaggeration to say that the end of abnormal unemployment is in sight. And it isn’t only the unemployed who will feel the difference. A great number besides will be taking home better money each week. And with the demand for efficient labor outrunning the supply, how much more comfortable and secure everyone will feel in his job. The Grand Experiment has begun. If it works–if expenditure on armaments really does cure unemployment–I predict that we shall never go back all the way to the old state of affairs. Good may come out of evil. We may learn a trick or two, which will come in useful when the day of peace comes.
A recording of Keynes' speech can be found here. The outcome of that experiment, though, wasn't governments figuring out new means to rationalize their economies and to manage aggregate demand to maintain full employment. There were many outcomes to that experiment, including helping the development of the Postwar Consensus, but the most important one wasn't felt in Britain, but in her ally, the United States. That outcome was the gestation of the military-industrial complex.
Dwight D. Eisenhower was right. Good did not come of evil; instead the evil persisted and become stronger in peacetime. The squandor of the United States' resources in useless armaments programs became a part of America's own postwar consensus that the United States had to become an active participant in world politics lest the Soviet Union triumph. Eisenhower criticized this development of a perrenial aramement industry in his 1961 Farewell Address:
A vital element in keeping the peace is our military establishment. Our arms must be mighty, ready for instant action, so that no potential aggressor may be tempted to risk his own destruction.
Our military organization today bears little resemblance to that known by any of my predecessors in peacetime, or indeed by the fighting men of World War II or Korea.
Until the latest of our world conflicts, the United States had no armaments industry. American makers of plowshares could, with time and as required, make swords as well. But now we can no longer risk emergency improvisation of national defense; we have been compelled to create a permanent armaments industry of vast proportions. Added to this, three and a half million men and women are directly engaged in the defense establishment. We annually spend on military security more than the net income of all United States corporations.
This conjunction of an immense military establishment and a large arms industry is new in the American experience. The total influence -- economic, political, even spiritual -- is felt in every city, every State house, every office of the Federal government. We recognize the imperative need for this development. Yet we must not fail to comprehend its grave implications. Our toil, resources and livelihood are all involved; so is the very structure of our society.
Rather than aramaments providing the knowledge of how to manage an economy, araments became its own interest, and ensured the development of a new pattern of crony capitalism in America. War shall ever be the friend of the crony capitalists, and workers will always suffer the costs of a little bit less butter on their tables to satisfy the appetities of the gun producers. War simply shall never be for the health of the commercial society. Those who argue otherwise don't understand its essence as a system of cooperation rather than as a system of production.