I've also given a lot of thought to the amazing post-war recovery of Europe and Asia, and I have my own theories about it.

The word rebuilt its industry quickly because we sold them enormous amounts of the latest, up-to-date equipment and services and we provided them the financing to be able to buy it from us. A lot of US industrial firms and banks profited mightily from this booming market and guaranteed income (for example, people who made steel mills). In essence, it was a capital transfer from the US taxpayer directly to certain sectors of our industrial economy. It was a subsidy, plain and simple, financed with borrowed money. It prevented the anticipated and dreaded post-war recession and unemployment that never materialized. We sold them the technology and infrastructure they would use to compete so successfully with us decades later. There were good reasons to do this, not only humanitarian ones, but also national security, to keep the Soviets at bay and poor (we didn't invite them to the party).

In the meantime, our own industries, with plenty of business and markets, were able to go like gangbusters without having to bother modernizing their own infrastructure or cut costs by improving efficiency or worker benefits. This came back to bite them hard in just a few years. We were in debt from the war, but we were also the only game in town, so we essentially were able to get away with printing greenbacks (both government debt and consumer debt) and putting the free world and our consumer economy back on their feet. No one really could afford to question the soundness of the dollar. Everyone else was broke.

By the time the 60's rolled around we were in decline and our former allies and enemies on the ascendant, and the economy slowly but surely started to show the strain. The rest, as they say, is history. The post war period was a colossal bootstrap operation that essentially created something from nothing, with just enough inflation to keep the debt down to manageable levels (the longer we delayed paying it off, the smaller it got, but we had to aquire even more debt to keep the beast going). The colossal national debt we have today is due to a great extent to this period, it is where the price we paid for all this prosperity was hidden, but we and the rest of the world, at least got something to show for it.

It was a triumph of a managed economy. The Washington financial people who masterminded all this (it certainly didn't happen by accident) knew exactly what they were doing. The free market, left to its own devices, would never have been able to pull it off. That's why the post-WWI economy collapsed into depression after just a decade. But we learned a lot from the Depression and we didn't make the same mistakes a second time.

The question is, the bill is still there, and it's getting bigger still. Will that bill ever become due?