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Comment by openasocket | Hacker News Reader

I haven’t finished the article yet, so I’m not sure if this is brought up. But I’m always amazed by how much government control there was in mobilizing the US economy for WW2. Factories were converted to producing war goods overnight. From Pearl Harbor to Japans surrender, the US produced less than 200 commercial cars! The amount of centralized government control during this period was astounding. It makes you wonder if that would be possible in the US today. Not just would the American people tolerate this kind of drastic change, but whether the modern economy and supply chains could support these kinds of sudden, drastic re-directs

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One thing about these sorts of gov run industry things is that when it works it almost always coincides with great national urgency where you get total civilian/private industry buy in.

Everyone points to NASA in the 60s as a perfect example of gov production but like all newly formed bureaucracies they are largely the sum of the people they recently absorbed into it. NASA mined all the universities and nerds from private industry who brought their work patterns, leadership, and attitudes to the organization.

But as these orgs age it’s the classic Iron Rule story of managers taking over and accountants ruining things etc etc.

Maybe we need to move away from monolithic mega gov orgs and create new ones to solve new problems each generation instead of being catch alls that do nothing well and never face any risk of being replaced. There needs to be ways to breed new life and kill off the natural development of bad management and crippling rulemaking.

I wonder anyone has a suggestion for a book on the NACA -> NASA change era

> There needs to be ways to breed new life and kill off the natural development of bad management and crippling rulemaking.

corpos are functionally immortal and it's the cancerous mass, not the germ line that survives.

If you are interested in how this all worked there is a book called 'Destructive Creation'. Here is an interview with the author:

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=gdbjVMxdnpQ

This is actually the best 1-volume book on U.S. WW2 mobilization.

Yes, they would tolerate it. Both because of the Government's monopoly on violence, and because citizens always rally to support a war when under direct attack. The latter effect was popularized by Randolph Bourne in an essay https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Randolph_Bourne

> the phrase "war is the health of the state" that laments the success of governments in arrogating authority and resources during conflicts.

The problem the US might have in full war mobilization today would be due to cronyism. Remember all of the exceptions to Covid lockdowns for "essential" employees? Some of that is of course necessary but I suspect it would be very widespread if it happened today. This would stoke resentment from people/companies not so privileged.

I worked in an automotive plant opened in 1954. (I worked there from 200x to 201x). I was specifically told that the support columns were set a certain distance apart from each other in case it needed to be re-tooled for wing production, and that was a condition of the financing or deal or something with the govt.

Any of that could be a misunderstanding or an urban legend though.

It wasn't so much centralized control as just spending gobs and gobs of money. If the federal government just started handing out money to produce consumable goods and machinery today, you can bet every company in the world would be all over that.

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