Enabling the Great War

"Today, while the earth shakes beneath the heels of marching troops, while a great portion of the world trembles before the threats of acquisitive power-mad men, we of America have little time to remember an astounding era in our own recent history. An era which will grow more and more incredible with each passing generation until someday people will say it never could have happened at all. April 1918: almost a million American young men are engaged in a struggle which, they have been told, will make the world safe for democracy."
--Narrator opening lines (The Roaring Twenties)

David Stockman considers how WWI changed the world, and how different (better) things would be today had the Great War not occured.

WWI set in motion various arcs that would plague the world. Totalitarianism, the Great Depression, permanent warfare and welfare states, Keynesianism, bankrupt monetary and fiscal policies, chronic national debt.

However, it is doubtful that many of these consequences would have materialized had it not been for two policies that enabled the United States to enter the conflict with great strength in 1917. Those policies were both enacted in 1913, a year before the outbreak of war in northern France.

The Federal Reserve Act and the Sixteenth Amendment gave the federal government access to vast quantities of resources. Without such access, the US could not have funded the war effort.

Shut down the Fed and repeal the Sixteenth Amendment, and you'll keep vast quantities of resources away from the federal government.

Keep vast quantities of resources away from the federal government, and you'll keep the peace.