"Peace! Bah. There's no money in it." ...Uncle Sam

"My job doesn't make me a war monger, does it?"... Joe Everybody

The stacatto series of Money Panics of the nineteen thirties AKA, the Great Depression, which sounds a bit classier than Panic! Panic! Panic!, ended December 7, 1941 by Japanese airmen shouting Tora!Tora!Tora!, and, presto, War began decades of prosperity for us all.

We have done other things in the ensuing decades to make money, but we always fall back on old reliable Casus Belli . Make some money. Have a war. Make some more. Have another war. It's what we do because it works.

We sold some cars; used to sell a lot more until those other former war-mongers oops, Japan and Germany got into the act and ruined it. We made lots of airplanes, mostly war planes of course. Plus big machines and little machines of all kinds. Well, we actually gave that up years ago. Sent that work to the farm team, AKA the rest of the world, to manufacture, along with the needle trade, electronics, computers, wow! damn near everything when you think about it.

Not the ordnance, oh no, we still make most all of the stuff that goes boom. Let the farm-team buy that stuff from us, thank you very much. That's about all we have to sell these days, anyway.

There is one problem, however. All our war stuff and the boom-boom action that accompanies it, costs money. Runs at a loss. So we finally have had an old fashioned Money Panic! lately. Don't anybody call it that, though. Call it recession (will that be one dip or two, like ice cream) or retrenchment, 'depression lite', anything but Money Panic! But then, why-oh-why won't the banks lend out money anymore? Oh, so that's what happens when bankers hit the Panic button.

Yeah,yeah, but it's the fat-cats who are the war profiteers, not us. Well, the billionaires are not on the production line turning out fighters jets, or grenades or drone consoles, etc, etc. Somebody else is making a buck from the war machine, no es verdad? "Hey Man, only doing my job, man.", a million voices ring out, kinda miffed.

Our culture is as homely and normal seeming as apple pie and mother's milk to us, yet the US is the biggest war profiteer since the old Romans and we don't even realize it anymore. Just something we do (have always done?), in the lifetime of most of us, Yes. The sheer genius of the whole deal is ...we do it now with borrowed money. How's that for hubris! And delusion.