Re: What did Manhattan District cost?
- From: Chris <cmanteuf@xxxxxxxxx>
- Date: Mon, 10 Aug 2009 09:03:50 -0700 (PDT)
On Aug 7, 10:44 pm, fairwa...@xxxxxxxxx (Derek Lyons) wrote:
Neither Nazi Germany nor the US had such an economy. Their workers
had to buy food, obtain clothing, housing, transportation, etc... To
do that, they needed cash money.
Which is easy enough to create, if you are a national government. It's
called inflation. Just keep on printing money. Since you make the
laws, you can force people within your borders to accept the money.
Now, you can't force people outside your borders to accept the money,
which is why Alan and I both focused so strongly on the necessity of
resources. If you need to buy something from someone who wants 'hard'
currency (in this time period, gold) then you have to have hard
currency, and you can't inflate your way into those resources. But
anything from within your borders is easy enough to obtain.
For example: Britain could get anything it wanted from the
Commonwealth, Colonies, or the UK itself because they would accept
Sterling, which the British could always make more of, but to buy
things from the US (during Cash&Carry, at least) took gold (or
dollars- if you had FDI you could liquidate into dollars[1]). Which
Britain exhausted by Spring '41, hence Lend Lease to keep letting them
obtain goods from the US.
As for the items you talk about, most of them weren't available. Food
in Germany was heavily rationed because the Germans simply didn't have
that much of it- they only had enough to feed the Germans by starving
everyone else in Europe (this is why the Germans who lived through the
period remember 1945-6-7 as so remarkably bad- the Nazi's had only
kept their standard of living up through 1944 by stealing food from
everywhere else in Europe). This was, in part, because Germany had a
terribly inefficient agricultural sector, roughly on par with Italy or
even the USSR in terms of labor productivity, and significantly worse
than the Anglosphere.
Housing likewise was strictly limited in Germany- there was only a
small amount of housing built during the war, and the CBO worked hard
to reduce the supply of it. As for transportation, well, it's not like
the average civilian in Germany had a car, and even if they did, they
certainly wouldn't have been able to find fuel for it. Cars were for
elites only. Street cars, trains, etc. were how private citizens got
around Germany, or by walking. And since the government controls
public transportation it was easy for them to adjust the prices
however they wanted.
But the German Government could do nothing to make more food
available, short of moving labor from munitions factories (or other
presumably useful occupations) into the agricultural sector, and
making more land available, etc. They could fiddle with the RM to
afford whatever weapons they wanted, but they simply couldn't get more
weapons and more agriculture and more housing etc. Not enough workers
and resources for them.
In the US there were very few resource shortages. There was no real
shortage of gasoline (the US domestic production was 60% of the
world's output in 1938). There was no real shortage of food. There was
a strong shortage of rubber, which led to gasoline rationing, to try
and limit tire use by the civilian economy, but it was neither as
harsh as any other powers rationing, nor near as effective ("A" stamps
were very widely distributed, far too widely to really cut down that
much on driving).
The US implemented rationing (and war bonds), for the most part,
however, to try and prevent inflation. By limiting how much food,
clothing, etc. you could buy, they hoped to stave off inflation and
prevent it from hurting the US (as the US spent money like water on
buying new weapon systems the workers making those weapons were
getting paid much better than before the war, so lots of people flush
with cash chasing a much smaller civil domestic sector could lead to
inflation).
[1]: IIRC, the British nationalized all private FDI at the beginning
of the war, and sold it off to the US (at generally bargain prices) in
order to last a bit longer before LL replaced C&C.
Chris Manteuffel
.
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- What did Manhattan District cost?
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- Re: What did Manhattan District cost?
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- Re: What did Manhattan District cost?
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- What did Manhattan District cost?
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