Meltdown by Thomas E Woods Jr

I just finished reading meltdown. Great book, easy read! It gives a clear and concise explanation of our current economic crisis, and what caused it!
My favorite part of the book is as follows:"If spending on munitions really makes a country wealthy, the United States and Japan should do the following: Each should seek to build the most spectacular naval fleet in history, an enormous armada of gigantic, powerful, technologically advanced ships. The two fleets should meet in the Pacific. Naturally, since they would want to avoid the loss of life that accompanies war. all naval personnel would be evacuated from the ships. At this point the U.S. and Japan would sink each other's fleets. Then they could celebrate how much richer they had made themselves by devoting labor, steel, and countless other inputs to the production of things that would wind up at the bottom of the ocean."
I think we can take the point further and state that war does not bring prosperity, as real war is so much more destructive and involves the loss of human life and the creative potential of that life that can never be replaced as well as infrasructure and personal property that took years to acquire.
My next favorite is where he quotes Adam Smith (one of my personal favorites), on the diffference between consumptive expenditutre and productive expenditure. "A thousand ploughman consume fully as much corn and cloth in the course of a year as a regiment of soldiers. But the difference between the kinds of consumption is immense. The labor of the ploughman has, during the year, served to call into existence a quantity of property, which not only repays the corn and cloth which he has consumed, but repays it with a profit. The soldier on the other hand produces nothing. What he has consumed is gone, and in its place is left absolutely vacant. The country is the poorer for his consumption, to the full amount of what he has consumed. It is not the poorer, but the richer for what the ploughman has consumed, because during the time he was consuming it, he has reproduced what does more than replace it."
Obviously the soldier is just one type of consumptive expenditure, all government and those who work for the same would fall into this category.