Whack-a-Mole

No modern myth dies harder than the familiar claim – today repeated in the Los Angeles Times by one Joan Mortenson – that "It was the massive spending of World War II that finally ended the Depression."

Between 1941 and 1945 Uncle Sam drew into his military 16 million persons – that was 22 percent of the pre-war labor force.  With so many workers then militarized, mostly through conscription, there's no evidence that wartime spending restored the labor market to health.  And while real GDP...