Versailles
Germany's reparations were reduced multiple times, then Hitler stopped paying them entirely in 1933. How did that cause a war that Hitler started 5 years later?
The "WWI caused WWII" line is German propaganda, which Keynes popularized after learning it from the German Treasury Ministry guy he admired at the Versailles conference. Failure to enforce Versailles led to WWII.
Mises was right, as usual, saying failure to enforce Versailles was the cause of WWII, and Keynes was wrong. But you "Rothbardians" agree w/ Keynes and memory-hole Mises on this.
https://twitter.com/timstarr2001/status/1580257927092264961
https://twitter.com/jakubadamw/status/1612109682608308224
The “Treaty of Versailles led to Hitler” narrative must be one of the most repeated and harmful falsehoods about the 20th century, and it leads people to draw utterly wrong conclusions about the present.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Kriegsmarine
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/NV_Ingenieurskantoor_voor_Scheepsbouw
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lipetsk_fighter-pilot_school
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Second_Happy_Time
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Treaty_of_Versailles
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Economic_Consequences_of_the_Peace
Keynes also believed that Germany would be unable to pay the more than 2 billion marks in reparations for the next 30 years, but Mantoux contends that German rearmament spending was seven times as much as that figure in each year between 1933 and 1939.[28] René Albrecht-Carrié in 1965 claimed that Weimar Germany, well before Hitler secretly began to rebuild the German military, could not keep up its reparations payments, which were renegotiated several times, and were later the subject of several reorganizational schemes such as the Dawes Plan and the Young Plan. He also argued that reparation payments and other requirements of the Treaty crippled the German economy, a view shared by the British, who proposed in 1922 the cancellation of all reparations and debts arising from the war – including Allied debts to the United States[notes 1] – a proposal which did not find favour in France or the US. However, the historian Sally Marks, writing in 2013, claimed that Germany had the financial capacity to pay reparations.[29] She also claimed that Germany paid minimal reparations after 1921 and that "it is hard to conceive that something that was not happening or that was occurring only minimally could have caused all that is often attributed to reparations, including the great inflation".[30]
https://mises.org/library/omnipotent-government-rise-total-state-and-total-war
- Daniel Foubert, “We are naive The laxity of geopolitical Keynesianism made us abandon the Versailles treaty & led to WW2. Today, the fragility of our international order is based on the same mistake 🇩🇪 preserved its Nazi elite & its imperial geostrategic culture 🧵 THREAD”, February 10, 2023 (thread) (pdf) [1]
"Rather than raise taxes to pay its bills, the state took out loans, sold bonds and printed more marks, whose value halved over the course of the war. Inflation would have been even higher had the government not instituted price controls.
"Those controls disappeared when the government collapsed in defeat in November 1918. Prices shot up accordingly, but the new democratic state continued the fiscal policy of the old authoritarian one. To fund the transition to a peacetime economy and welfare programs for ex-soldiers and impoverished civilians, the authorities continued to print money. In 1921 and 1922, policymakers even purposefully fanned inflation to show the former Allies that Germany was too weak to pay the reparations it owed.
"As Germany fell further and further behind in payments, France and Belgium decided to act. Early in 1923, their armies invaded the Ruhr Valley, a coal-rich industrial region of Germany, to extract resources as payment. Right away, the German government refused to cooperate. Authorities let the rail system shut down and the electricity go out. Coal production ceased in the middle of winter.
"Necessary for heat, transportation, industrial production and cooking, coal was crucial to the German economy and Germans’ basic survival. The scarcity of coal helped drive up prices, increasing the demand for currency. In response, the government took the last measures available to it and fired up the printing presses."
- https://www.smithsonianmag.com/history/how-hyperinflation-heralded-the-fall-of-german-democracy-180982204/
