Waste of War and Waste of Peace

One particularly contentious debate that reared its head regularly throughout the Great War was how much it was all costing. War is, and always has been, an expensive business. The armed forces have to be paid for somehow; the continual demand for artillery and armaments has to be funded. The greater and longer the war, the greater the demand for men and machinery and the more expensive it all gets. When I say expensive, I’m talking billions, even a hundred years ago. A staggering amount of money for any country to raise.

In 1915, Sir Leo Chiozza Money, MP and parliamentary private secretary to Prime Minister David Lloyd George, tackled fears of burgeoning national debt and extravagant wartime spending by arguing that war expenditure was, by and large, merely a transformation of pre-war national expenditure.

In peacetime, the argument goes, only about one-sixth of the National Income was invested in national infrastructure and, therefore, represented permanent value to the country. The rest of National Income was being spent on ‘current consumption’ such as necessaries, comforts and luxuries. Generally speaking, regardless of social class, people spent whatever little money they had spare after necessity on entertainment, amusement and luxuries and it was this kind of expenditure that was hit hardest during the war.