“If World War I gets insufficient notice from students of the growth of government, World War II gets even less. Too often, it is viewed as a discrete event, an episode when government took on awesome
dimensions but then relinquished the new powers after victory had been won, more or less returning the relations between government and civil society to the prewar status quo. Nothing of the sort happened, or could have happened. A politico-economic undertaking of such enormous magnitude does not just come and go, leaving no trace.”
Recorded at the Mises Institute’s “Costs of War” conference in May 1994 in Auburn, Alabama: https://mises.org/library/the-costs-war
Dr. Robert Higgs is retired and lives in Mexico. He was a senior fellow in political economy for the Independent Institute and longtime editor of The Independent Review; he was also a senior fellow of the Mises Institute. He is the 2007 recipient of the Gary G. Schlarbaum Prize for Lifetime Achievement in the Cause of Liberty, and the 2015 Murray N. Rothbard Medal of Freedom.