80 years ago today

80 years ago today, economist Richard Ebelinng's father took this photo of Japan's World War II surrender. 

Digging it out to post, it prompted him to remember these lines by Ludwig Von Mises on modern war, its harm, and its causes:

Aggressive nationalism is the necessary derivation of the policies of interventionism and national planning. While laissez-faire eliminates the causes of international conflict, government intervention with business and socialism creates conflicts for which no peaceful solution can be found . . . 

The market economy, subject to the sovereignty of the individual consumers, turns out products that make the individual’s life more agreeable. It caters to the individual’s demand for more comfort. 

It is this that made capitalism despicable in the eyes of the apostles of violence. They worshipped the ‘hero,’ the destroyer and killer, and despised the bourgeois and his ‘peddler mentality’ (Werner Sombart). Now mankind is reaping the fruits which ripened from the seeds sown by these men . . . 

Modern war is merciless, it does not spare pregnant women or infant; it is indiscriminate killing and destroying. It does not respect the rights of neutrals. Millions are killed, enslaved, or expelled from the dwelling places in which their ancestors lived for centuries . . . 

This has little to do with the atomic bomb. The root of the evil is not the construction of new, more dreadful weapons. It is the spirit of conquest . . . 

Modern civilisation is the product of the philosophy of laissez-faire. It cannot be preserved under the ideology of government omnipotence . . . To defeat the aggressors is not enough to make peace durable. The main thing is to discard the ideology that generates war. [Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics (1949) pp 819-820]