It is hard for us to imagine today how such an entrepreneurial spirit could co-exist with war mobilization, but one did. One reason, of course, was the opportunity to profit, though the wartime tax on excess profits prevented the kind of windfalls made during World War I. More fundamentally, a spirit developed within each business enterprise to produce better than its competitors to serve the country… For instance, Henry Kaiser’s shipyards were able to get the production time for Liberty Ships down from 365 days to 92, 62, and, finally, to one day… When Henry Kaiser built his big shipyard in California, the government paid for a twenty-four-hour child care center.
… Roosevelt resisted and delayed most of the decisions that concentrated government power. For example, in the spring of 1942, when there was a rudimentary system of wage and price control, Harold Smith, his budget director, declared it was time for comprehensive controls. But the president was worried that it was adding up to an overly regimented economy, and he rejected the proposal.
In sum, one almost totally forgotten lesson of the war is that deep government involvement doesn’t have to mean a command economy. Despite the mobilization, large segments of the economy were unaffected by the controls. No one was told where to move or work. Production for the government was still freely entered into by producers and government in a contractual arrangement.
Those were some excerpts from a nice article, “The Way We Won: America’s Economic Breakthrough During World War II.” I think leaders today would be much more inclined to move to a command economy if mobilization ever did happen. There is an illusion of omniscient control through technology, and also a waning belief in a market economy especially among the younger generation. If anything could make America’s military weak, it would be a rejection of liberal principles and the market economy. Here’s another interesting part:
Roosevelt successfully resisted that idea throughout the war, on the theory that, somehow, the momentum of democracy would be sufficient: If the jobs were out there, people would put their mattresses on top of their cars and go to where the jobs were. He had this extraordinary vision of the highways filled with people going south, going west. In one fireside chat, he advised people to get maps. And the Hammond company in New York sold out their entire stock of 2,000 maps in a single morning.
Are Americans more complacent today? Would people move to where the jobs are during war mobilization? Did they after the financial crisis? Perhaps the pandemic and teleworking has led to a greater willingness to move.
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