Wealth & Money Quote by Ludwig von Mises

Mises goes for the gut of a seductive myth: the idea that war is good for business. His sentence is built like a trap. He grants just enough to sound fair-minded ("at least not directly") and then tightens the logic into something almost embarrassingly simple: you cannot get richer by smashing your own stuff. It’s less a quip than a demolition of a popular alibi.

The intent is polemical in the best Austrian-school way: strip the romance and pageantry off wartime mobilization and force the reader to distinguish between money changing hands and actual wealth. War can make GDP figures jump, factories hum, and payrolls swell, but those are signals of activity, not proof of net gain. Mises is calling out a category error: mistaking the spectacle of production for the substance of prosperity. Destruction doesn’t disappear in the accounting; it just gets politically laundered as "stimulus."

The subtext is also moral, though he keeps it in the background. If war can be sold as an economic policy, then its human costs become easier to rationalize as "necessary". Mises refuses that rhetorical escape hatch. His framing echoes the "broken window" critique popularized by Bastiat: rebuilding after ruin may employ people, but it diverts labor and capital from creating new value. Context matters here: writing in the shadow of total war and expanding state control, Mises is warning that wartime booms often mask forced scarcity, rationing, and postponed living standards - prosperity deferred, not created.