World War II and / or The New Deal ended the Great Depression

While I will concede that America saw essentially none of the destruction visited upon Japan, Germany, England or Poland there was still a tremendous amount of wealth destroyed. You must consider the opportunity costs involved with all of this war spending. Every munitions truck or airplane being created represents resources which could have been directed towards peace time uses, building factories or consumption goods for consumers to enjoy. Tanks, bombs and fighter craft have very limited uses except for by the military so once the war is over they are essentially wasted. It is not my intention to argue for or against America's entrance into the war but rather to examine the economic consequences of such. Ludwig von Mises argued that "War prosperity is like the prosperity that an earthquake or a plague brings". The war was a period of capital consumption; capital accumulation is critical to prolonged economic growth. During the war consumers suffered without many consumer goods, precisely because so many resources were diverted towards the war effort. Since a depression is a contraction standards of living, and the war efforts caused consumers to have less to consume, it is clear that the Great Depression could not have ended during the war. Why then do historians, high school teachers, and economists like Paul Krugman argue that WWII ended the great depression? The answer lies in the methodology of economic statistics particularly that of the Gross Domestic Product. GDP is defined as consumptive expenditure, income expenditure, government expenditure and net exports. This statistic ranks government spending as equal to private sector spending. As if paying a bureaucrat to sit in an office and push paper around was productive! Ultimately the view is the erroneous assumption that what drives the economy is not the production of wealth but it's consumption. This figure doesn't measure the production process itself. It also measures unproductive spending the same as that which satisfies consumer demand. For example if the government began construction of a pyramid this would look, through the lens of GDP, like the economy was taking off! But in reality it would be a huge waste of money. You cannot simply divorce the economy from the interactions of the individuals that constitute it. The economy is not an abstract fiction it is the efforts of various individuals to satisfy their needs. One reason why there was so much employment was the draft. The draft is slavery. You are forcing someone, against their will, to be a part of an organization. Clearly those who had to be forced under penalty of law to serve in the military did no want to. We must also consider as an additional cost to those individuals the wages they had to forgo by being a part of the military at a low price compared with the higher price they would be able to command on the market for their services. There is a strong argument to be made that the costs of WWII were worth it, that anything was justified in stopping the Nazis and their dreams of global domination but there is absolutely no argument at all that WWII ended the great depression or that war in general is good for the economy. It was only after WWII ended and the dismantling of the regulatory framework that had been developed during the New Deal and WWII that recovery really began in earnest. In short, it was not the war that helped get America back on it's feet, but rediscovery of the market.