[profcj@profcj.org]

The Austrian free market explanation as I understand it is that most of the WWII economic controls were relaxed or eliminated in 1946-7, not as part of some grand free market strategy, but just sort of de facto. Spending was massively cut compared to what it was during WWII, and even many of the most onerous New Deal policies were relaxed or eliminated around that time, if they hadn’t been already.

If you look at this graph of US federal spending as a percentage of the nation’s GDP (a pretty good yardstick of the size of the gov’t’s footprint relative to the rest of the economy), you’ll see that while WWII led to the largest gov’t footprint relative to the nation’s economy, there also was the single biggest drop in that footprint in the immediate aftermath of the war.

https://www.researchgate.net/figure/US-Government-Spending-as-Percent-of-GDP-Government-Spending-in-US-from-FY-1903-to-FY_fig1_227415421
(of course, you’ll also notice that today’s “normal” is a federal gov’t ALMOST as big proportionally to the US economy as during the peak of WWII wartime economic fascism, which is a disquieting realization.)

[profcj@profcj.org]

Definitely some for the income tax; that was one of the political issues in which the Populists overlapped with the Progressives in the late-19th & early-20th century. As far as the inflation of the 20s, I wouldn’t lay the blame for that to any major extent on the Populists, other than that they had rhetorically supported inflationary currency in prior decades. But by the 1920s the Populists were fading very fast as a political force in most parts of the US. The inflation of the 20s can largely be blamed on the creation of the Fed (which the corporatist Progressives deserve more of the blame for) & the decisions made by Benjamin Strong when he was running the Fed during & after WWI. Don’t get me wrong, if the Populists had created & run the central bank in the early decades of the 20th century, they would’ve pursued some type of inflationary policies, but in practice they weren’t in charge of that stuff, so the blame needs to be directed to a much greater degree to the factions that actually made it happen (basically the more corporatist factions of the Progressives, many of whom were connected to the House of Morgan & other big corporate interests.)

[profcj@profcj.org]

There was always a split between the “worldwide revolution right now!” and the “Socialism in One Country” Bolsheviks. The former were epitomized (in the first couple decades of the USSR) by Trotsky, the latter by Stalin. The difference wasn’t over ultimate goals — both wanted worldwide communism as the ultimate goal — but over priorities & timeline. The former believed that Soviet socialism wouldn’t be safe as long as powerful non-communist governments existed in the world, so spreading communist revolution was an immediate priority; the latter group thought that communism needed to be fully instituted & perfected in the USSR first, before it would be prudent for the Soviet state to be the Johnny Appleseed of worldwide revolution. Of course, during & after WWII Stalin would become more aggressively expansionist, in his mind as a defensive measure — best defense is a good offense. But those 2 schools of thought continued throughout the existence of the Soviet Union. It’s like a darker communist version of the debates in the US between those who wanted the US to focus on perfecting itself first in order to serve as an example to the world, & the Wilsonian/Liberal Internationalist (& later Neocon) schools that thought the US needed to expand in an imperial fashion in order to perfect itself & to keep itself safe from perceived (largely imaginary, or at least greatly exaggerated) threats.

It is interesting to note that most of the USSR’s interventions throughout most of its history were in countries that were on or very near to its borders, while the US during the 20th century was often intervening in places much farther from its own imperial center. That might just be a function of the US’s (relatively) freer economy making it so much more capable of intervening further away than the Soviets, with their much, much less productive economy.

[profcj@profcj.org]

Another great book to read on this is The Politics of Heroin by Alfred McCoy, if you’ve not already read it.

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