Posts Tagged ‘smedley butler’
Smedley D Butler: WWI $16 Trillion in Profits
on Saturday, July 18, 2015Smedley D Butler Money Quotation saying World War One earned business trillions and made many business owners wealthy and some billionaires. Smedley D Butler said:
“It has been estimated by statisticians and economists that the war (WWI) yielded $16 Trillion in Profits. That is how the 21,000 Billionaires and millionaires got that way. This $16 Trillion in Profits is not to be sneezed at. It is quite a tidy sum” — Smedley D Butler
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In this quote, Smedley D Butler is criticizing the vast profits generated from World War 1. He notes that economists and statisticians estimated $16 trillion was made in profits from the war. Butler suggests this is how so many people became billionaires and millionaires.
His point is that while $16 trillion is an enormous amount of money, it was primarily generated through the immense human costs and destruction of war rather than productive economic activity. Butler seems to disapprove of or find fault with the war profiteering that enriched so few while so many suffered from the conflict.
The quote casts the war profits in a negative light and implies the wealth accumulation they brought was unearned or unfairly gained from capitalizing on worldwide violence and carnage.
Birthday: July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940
Smedley D. Butler: War is a Profitable Racket
on Friday, July 17, 2015Smedley D. Butler Money Quotation saying clearly that where money is to be made in war, business will seek that profit regardless of losses in lives. Smedley D. Butler said:
“War is a Racket. It always has been. It is possibly the oldest, easily the most profitable, surely the most vicious. It is the only one international in scope. It is the only one in which the profits are reckoned in dollars and the losses in lives” — Smedley D. Butler
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In this quote, Smedley D. Butler is very critically assessing the true nature and motivations behind war. His interpretation is that war has essentially always been a “racket” or a means of profiteering and making money rather than a necessary act of self-defense or conflict resolution.
Butler argues that war is possibly the oldest and surely the most lucrative business or “racket” that exists, but that its costs are paid in human lives and suffering rather than dollars.
His view is that war is unique in how its profits are tallied financially while its losses are counted only in lives lost, with no accounting of the human cost. Overall, Butler presents war as being driven first and foremost by profit motives rather than higher purposes, in his strong condemnation of its exploitative nature.
Birthday: July 30, 1881 – June 21, 1940