> What do governments do historically during sieges and plagues?
Collapse? Militarise?
Trying to think of examples in what one would recognise as the modern era, outside of the obvious wholesale destruction of WW2. It looks like the war itself was bad for small business in the US: https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...
> The total number of business enterprises in operation in the United States has declined from a peak of nearly 3.4 million in 1941 to the present [1945] low point of perhaps 2.8 million. Certain persons have seen in this decline an alarming tendency toward concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations, accompanied by a continuous freezing out of small enterprises.
Collapse? Militarise?
Trying to think of examples in what one would recognise as the modern era, outside of the obvious wholesale destruction of WW2. It looks like the war itself was bad for small business in the US: https://library.cqpress.com/cqresearcher/document.php?id=cqr...
> The total number of business enterprises in operation in the United States has declined from a peak of nearly 3.4 million in 1941 to the present [1945] low point of perhaps 2.8 million. Certain persons have seen in this decline an alarming tendency toward concentration of economic power in the hands of large corporations, accompanied by a continuous freezing out of small enterprises.