Growing up I heard in history class, "World War II got America out of the Great Depression." That may have been true, but I feel like people extrapolate this and thing that War is good for the country. It's actually the plot of Canadian Bacon (a movie that was ruined when I learned that Michael Moore wrote it). Regardless, there are certainly some people who mistake war as being good for the economy. The truth is that war does create a lot of government spending, but ultimately that is spending, not investing. So the return on investment is zero. Colonialism made it marginally worth it, but it is expensive to have a war. What benefited us in WWII was the fact that everyone else was at war and we had a bunch of production capacity. Additionally we were giving Europe a bunch of loans. Nothing can beat that. Give someone a bunch of loans so that they can buy stuff from you? That's great. Things actually would have turned out terrible for us if they didn't pay those loans off.
