Lew Rockwell on the Fascist Threat

Lew Rockwell writes:

Everyone knows that the term fascist is a pejorative, often used to describe any political position a speaker doesn’t like. There isn’t anyone around who is willing to stand up and say: "I’m a fascist; I think fascism is a great social and economic system."

But I submit that if they were honest, the vast majority of politicians, intellectuals, and political activists would have to say just that.

Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police State as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive State the unlimited master of society.

This describes mainstream politics in America today. And not just in America. It’s true in Europe, too. It is so much part of the mainstream that it is hardly noticed any more.

It is true that fascism has no overarching theoretical apparatus. There is no grand theorist like Marx. That makes it no less real and distinct as a social, economic, and political system. Fascism also thrives as a distinct style of social and economic management. And it is as much or more of a threat to civilization than full-blown socialism.

This is because its traits are so much a part of life – and have been for so long – that they are nearly invisible to us.

If fascism is invisible to us, it is truly the silent killer. It fastens a huge, violent, lumbering State on the free market that drains its capital and productivity like a deadly parasite on a host. This is why the fascist State has been called The Vampire Economy. It sucks the economic life out of a nation and brings about a slow death of a once thriving economy.

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Gerald Celente on the Economy

“People are going to wait for the elections in November. They think they’re going to have some other change that they can believe in. It won’t happen. When the economic winter sets in, then you’re going to start seeing people protesting more and more. This is just the beginning.”

“This country’s gone from the greatest entrepreneurial empire to one that Mussolini would have called fascism, the merger of state and corporate powers.”

John Maynard Keynes, Defunct Economist

John Maynard Keynes, who rose to prominence in the 1930s, wrote, “The ideas of economists and political philosophers ... are more powerful than is commonly understood. Indeed the world is ruled by little else. Practical men ... are usually the slaves of some defunct economist. Madmen in authority ... are usually distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back.”

When Keynes burst on the scene, most economists were against government economic interventionism. Still, there was a growing influence of Marxist ideas, evidenced by the inroads of welfarism in Europe, especially in Great Britain and Germany. And favorable reports of “success” in Mussolini’s Italy and Stalin’s Russia influenced the political direction of the United States...

Keynes was a revolutionary who provided a rationale for intellectual and political leaders who were increasingly enamored with Marxist political objectives but somewhat constrained by conventional economic wisdom...

Keynes’s theories provided intellectual support for the economic policies of Franklin Roosevelt, which were welcomed by a public desperate for change in the dire circumstances following the crash in 1929. They provided cover for massive government spending, abandoning the gold standard, and political control of market functions — all contrary to the economic wisdom that had taken two centuries to develop and had led to unparalleled prosperity in the United States.

The great economists of the 20th century, Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, Milton Friedman, Henry Hazlitt, and Murray Rothbard, all clearly and thoroughly discredited Keynes. Hayek and Friedman both won Nobel Prizes in economics. In 1931 Hayek challenged Keynes in a famous series of debates, which focused on Keynes’s Treatise on Money. In the decades since, history has proven the correctness of Hayek’s views. Roosevelt’s New Deal was a failure and prolonged the Depression by about six years, as various research studies have shown. And though popular for several decades, Keynes eventually fell out of favor. Until now, when he is the “defunct economist” who provides the intellectual cover for Obama, just as he did for Roosevelt...

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General Motors, Wagoner, Obama, and Fascism

Dave Henderson writes:

He has already, in less than 100 days, moved the U.S. economy further towards fascism. Sean Hannity and other critics keep criticizing Obama for his socialist leanings. But the more accurate term for many of his measures, especially in the financial markets and the auto market, is fascism.

President Obama shouldn't get all the blame. Former President Bush took us a big step in that direction with his bailout. But when a President actually fires the president of a major company and decides to change the terms of that company's warranty on its products, that President has taken a major step.

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Obama on warranties:

It is my hope that the steps I am announcing today will go a long way towards answering many of the questions people may have about the future of GM and Chrysler. But just in case there are still nagging doubts, let me say it as plainly as I can -- if you buy a car from Chrysler or General Motors, you will be able to get your car serviced and repaired, just like always. Your warrantee will be safe.

In fact, it will be safer than it's ever been. Because starting today, the United States government will stand behind your warrantee.

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Current Crisis and the Future

During our current crisis we are not yet moving in a full blown socialist direction as traditionally understood. Instead, we are moving toward some sort of mixed ownership form, where resources are retained in some private hands, but also the public hand is deep in control. Such is the fate of our banking industry. ..

We are in trouble but it is a crisis of ideas that is most troubling. We are marching toward corporatist system as fast as the votes will take us. Who will say NO to this?...

Slippery slopes, unintended consequences, regime uncertainty, etc., these are the concepts you need to understand in order to make sense of our current economic problems. Bad economic ideas have produced bad economic policies which in turn has resulted in bad economic consequences. The "solution" is not to be found in more bad ideas and bad public policies even if promoted by an eloquent and charismatic political leader.

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Economic Fascism and the Bailout Economy

The whole structure of the national American political system has rested on the solvency of the largest American banks. These banks have all been called into question. They are now gutted. Do I see this as the end of freedom? No, I see it is the end of the fascist state. The monstrosity came close to going belly-up last October. It is on its last, tottering legs. It has lost the respect of the public...

The second event that I regard as almost comparable in importance to the collapse of the Soviet Union was the collapse of the American banking system that took place in September and October of 2008...

Anyone who does not understand the magnitude of what is taking place is an economic ignoramus...

Here is their intellectual problem: they do not believe in the free market. They cannot conceive of a social institution based on voluntarism that can break the backs of government planners and central bankers. They will believe anything but this. They think of themselves as defenders of the free market, but they do not grasp the power of the free market to enforce consumers' decisions...

It has been the Austrian School economists who have warned, decade after decade, that the increase in the federal debt would eventually threaten the solvency of the government and the stability of the dollar. Now that this is visibly coming true, we still do not hear from professional economists cries of warning regarding trillion-dollar annual federal deficits. They say nothing — except when they say it is a good idea, because it is necessary, because we have got to save the banks, because we have got to regulate the economy, and, most of all, because the unhampered free-market system really does not work.

This is what we are getting from people who have generally been known as free-market economists. They are lining up as cheerleaders as the banks go to the federal trough. The federal deficit soars into astronomical regions, and the monetary base soars just as fast, yet the academic economists are silent. This is not the silence of the lambs; this is a silence of unindicted co-conspirators...These people are apologists for the state...

The fascist state has always been an attempt to control private industry by means of inflation, taxation, and regulation. Fascism has always been a system of keeping the big boys alive and happy at the expense of the taxpayers. Of course, the faces change. The system was always one gigantic system of cartels, regulation, and fiat money...

The modern economic system is one gigantic interlocking system of promised bailouts, beginning with Social Security...

Always in the past, there has been a recovery after a recession. Always in the past, the bailouts have worked to cover up the underlying malinvested capital. Always in the past, the Federal Reserve has inflated, and the economy revived.

This economy will revive, but it will revive on a new basis. It is no longer possible for someone who understands Austrian School economics to look at this economy as anything remotely resembling a free-market economy.

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My thoughts: One of North's best essays. Unfortunately it could be a generation or two before we truly recover.