War is a very good negative example of the fact that the economy is not zero-sum. Think if all this work - as well as that of the other side - and inventiveness were going towards productive pursuits, rather than blowing up other people and their things. Most everyone would be far better off.
"Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies, in the final sense, a theft from those who hunger and are not fed, those who are cold and are not clothed.
"This world in arms is not spending money alone. It is spending the sweat of its laborers, the genius of its scientists, the hopes of its children. The cost of one modern heavy bomber is this: a modern brick school in more than 30 cities. It is two electric power plants, each serving a town of 60,000 population. It is two fine, fully equipped hospitals. It is some fifty miles of concrete pavement. We pay for a single fighter with a half-million bushels of wheat. We pay for a single destroyer with new homes that could have housed more than 8,000 people. . . . This is not a way of life at all, in any true sense. Under the cloud of threatening war, it is humanity hanging from a cross of iron."
In this instance, the alternative is brutal oppression. They're better off rebelling than not.
ETA: Of course it'd be better if both sides went about things peacefully and democratically. To parent's point (now better understood hence ETA), the situation is the consequence of governmental leadership viewing socioeconomy as "zero-sum", and the oppressed taking extreme & desperate steps to eliminate the "zero-sum" restriction.
Most likely. Note that I also said "the other side". If both sides went about things peacefully and democratically, they'd all be better off on average.
