It can take years or decades for a bad economy to recover if
government throws enough obstacles in the way, like high taxes,
costly regulations and class warfare against “millionaires and
billionaires.” But a turnaround can begin within hours when
government gets out of the way. That’s what happened in West
Germany. The Nazis had established a regime with totalitarian
control of the economy, and for four years after World War II
the Allied occupation authorities continued to enforce Nazi
economic regulations. “When I got out of the airport bus in
Frankfurt,” recalled the American journalist William Henry
Chamberlin, “A crowd of barefooted boys clamored for a chance to
carry my bags to the hotel, where they expected compensation not
in paper marks, virtually worthless at the time, but in the
universal substitute currency – cigarettes. Such scenes
suggested some poverty-stricken Asiatic country, not Western
Europe.” Ludwig Erhard, an economist who had participated in the
anti-Nazi underground, repeatedly urged