Bryan Caplan and David Henderson have put together a set of very interesting and provocative posts at Econlog that deserve comment. First, Caplan has been reading Ralph Raico’s splendid Great Wars and Great Leaders: A Libertarian Rebuttal, which incidentally is the first book I’ve read from cover to cover on my iPad. Second, Henderson points out the importance of numeracy and innumeracy in shaping our understanding of policy. Caplan points out how Raico highlights a lot of things that most of us probably don’t know, like the fact that in comparison to Woodrow Wilson, Joseph McCarthy was a moderate. One of the things I find most stunning about Raico’s book is its comparative analysis.
Throughout his book, Raico emphasizes how our victories in the World Wars were not free lunches. The US was on the winning side in World War I, but we helped create the conditions under which Hitler could rise to power. The US was on the winning side in World War II, as well, but when all was said and done a large chunk of Europe was under communist control and the conditions were right for Mao to rise to power in China. Raico highlights the connections between the wars of the twentieth century and bridges the gaps between the World Wars, Korea, Vietnam, and the Middle East--most of which are probably viewed as isolated and independent incidents by a lot of observers.
I think the takeaway points for casual readers are clear: there are no free lunches when we are talking about war, and Victory might be more expensive than defeat. Henderson makes a related point about our difficulty comparing numbers that differ by orders of magnitude. Henderson discusses a visual example by Roy Beck, who argues that as one million people is one five thousandth of five billion people, allowing a million people to immigrate to the US won’t cure global poverty. Henderson points out that every one of those million people still matter, and just because something isn’t a panacea doesn’t mean it isn’t worthwhile. This is related to the points raised by Raico and Caplan.
The number of deaths at the hands of the twentieth century’s great tyrants is simply staggering; they involve numbers that a lot of us simply have a hard time wrapping our minds around (as usual, XKCD is great on numeracy). R.J. Rummel offers a breakdown of the blood on the hands of twentieth-century “mortacracies.” Recent estimates put the body count from Mao’s “Great Leap Forward” at 45 million people. US bombings of Japan, Germany. Hiroshima, Dresden.
