The New American Fascists

Paternalism and a misunderstanding of freedom are the foundation for the New American Fascism. This is how it's expressed in American politics for the last hundred years or so. Yes that's right, there's nothing new about the New American Fascism.

The New American Fascist, my Tutor, tells me that he's willing to spill a few martinis if it means he gets to erect a welfare state. I let him get away with referring to spilling a few martinis till tonight. David drinks single malt Scotch whiskey, not martinis, but then I recalled David is paying more than 40% in taxes this year, and next year or the year after his rate of taxation will be passing 50%. So, my dear Fascist Tutor...how can you call confiscating half of everything he produces and calling it merely spilling his martini? Remember, all he does to create all that wealth does nothing but benefit everybody in his community in the first place so he's being taxed for being a boon to everybody around him begin with.

Progressivism is a political and social term, a Moral Stance, that refers to ideologies and movements favoring or advocating "progress", "improvement", or "reform." And its the soul of the New American Fascism...the velvet Benevolent Intent glove, on the iron Power Over Other (POO) fist.

As an Moral system, Progressive-fascism is socialism with a "freedom loving" Liberal face painted on it. A happy face with a Hitlerian mustache. Since the beginning of the 20th century Progressive-fascism has been touted as the compassionate alternative to the "leave them swinging in the wind" (how my Tutor describes my Moral Stance) heartless boom-and-bust-prone capitalism, with its alleged class conflict, the wasteful competition of maximizing the economic experiments (which is the real value of free markets), and profit-oriented egoism (which is just the common sense, honest philosophic admission that everybody does everything they do to improve their world as *they* see the world profits...in other words, selfishly). The Child is not disciplined by the paternalism of Progressive Liberal Fascism, the Child elevated to distributed autocratic POO.

Today Progressivism is called "...rather Evolutionary, building on the existng architecture." when our Treasury Secretary advocates handing over control of our currency to the International Community...and what *is* that, except a club where dictatorships are treated as identically legitimate as democracies?

Thwarted repeatedly by the will of the people, and their native understanding of the common sense of the Constitution, thwarted to a degree still in the congress, thwarted to a degree still by the courts...the New Fascism moves the decision into the International Arena. Leaders of our government banking system, of our state department, of our supreme court are all for this process of DE-soverignizing the American people in their own country.

Socialism seeks totalitarian control of a society’s economic processes through direct state regulation of the means of production, fascism seeks that control indirectly, through domination of *nominally* private owners. Where socialism nationalizes property explicitly, fascism does so implicitly, by requiring owners to use their property in the “national interest”—that is, as the autocratic administration conceives it. Socialism abolishes all market relations outright, (all the millions of economic experiments that makes the boom-bust-cycle a relatively minor phenomena, in favor of permanently institutionalizing the few and mostly failing POO "Fixes" so we end up living in a Permanent Depression), fascism leaves the appearance of market relations while coercively regulating all economic activities. All this is as true now as it has been for a hundred years. The NRA, the FEDERAL RESERVE, the the Big Business Bail-out, you name it...same same.

Fascism cannot be distinguished from what the Liberal apologists meekly moniker "interventionism", or the "mixed economy." Interventionism seeks to guide the market process, but there is no bright line, no Principled Difference between the New American Fascism, and benign sounding "Interventionism." The Interventionist's Principles of minimum-wage and antitrust laws, regulate the free market in ways indistinguishable from Fascism.

Principled advocacy of the free market requires an understanding of the differences between genuine free enterprise and “state capitalism” which is also called "Corporatism."

Corporatism, implemented by the state — whether through direct handouts, corporate bailouts, eminent domain, licensing laws, antitrust regulations, or environmental edicts — inflicts great harm on the modern American economy. I'll leave aside the crippling moral damage it does to its beneficiaries/slaves.

We should recognize that state corporatism is a form of socialism, and it is nearly inevitable in a mixed economy that the introduction of more socialism will cartelize industry and consolidate wealth in the hands of the few.

New American Fascists, and other Leftists usually understand how wartime provides politically connected corporations with high profits and cushy contracts. What is neglected by the willful blindness of the POO addicted New Fascist Left, and its unconscious commitment to externalizing the costs of it's power lust, is that the history of the America's Welfare Statism and Regulatory Fasicm directly corresponds to the rise of state corporatism. It is no coincidence that the bail-out Trillions went *exclusively* to large corporations. This is nothing but Corporate Welfare on a scale no Leftist ever even imagined accusing Republicoid Bushite nominal capitalists of. All legitimnized by bald faced Fear Mongering ("never let a crisis go to waste") of a breadth and depth 911 couldn't and all the Reactionary Republicoids never imagined possible.

The classical liberals, typified by Thomas Jefferson early on, had their political outlet in the Democratic Party, which, for the most part, stood on the side of limited, constitutional government and individual rights. How far have the "illiberal big-L Liberals strayed?

By the end of the 19th century, the so-called robber barons came to dominate much of the industry in oil and railroads. They are misunderstood by nearly everyone, because they certainly were not a homogeneous group, because most of them were not champions of pure laissez-faire capitalism. Most notably, and most typically, the federal government empowered the railroad tycoons with eminent domain, forcibly taking privately owned land and giving it to the railroad companies. That was not the free market at work. There was a private transcontinental railroad, but you just try finding that out in any textbook sanctioned by any school running on tax money.

Those who believed in a strong central government, typified early on by Alexander Hamilton, found their political home first in the Federalist Party, then in the Whig Party, and then in the Republican Party, the last of which openly embraced the doctrine of big government throughout the 19th century. For about a hundred years the Jeffersonian tradition was mostly associated with the cause of the common man, whereas big government was often associated with monopoly privileges and big business. Hamilton and his philosophical progeny fought perennially for central banking, high tariffs, and subsidies to corporations to build “internal improvements.” Hamilton’s first major successor, Henry Clay, called this governmental corporate program the “American System.”

The Progressive/Fascist Era

The Left has often hailed the Progressive Era as a time when, for the first time, Hamiltonian means -- big government -- were used to achieve Jeffersonian ends -- the dignity and respect of the common man. In fact, the Progressive Era was a time in which the two-headed beast of state-corporatism/socialism received major steroid injections.

Corporate interests pushed through the most significant Progressive-Era government reforms in order to guarantee profits, which they had been losing to smaller businesses that had emerged in the relatively free market of the early 20th century. Government expanded to promote, not curb, the interests of big business. State-capitalists in every industry -- from meatpacking to coal, from railroads to insurance -- embraced the bloating regulatory-state-fascism for their own gain -- to push competitors out of the market and give government legitimacy to their companies

State financed textbooks regurgitate the conventional history characterizing the Progressive Party’s Teddy Roosevelt in 1912 as a response to the backwards laissez-faire William Howard Taft administration. Iin reality the party was favored by large businesses with whom Teddy Roosevelt had strong ties and whom Taft had pissed off by failing to empower and institutionalize through regulatory-state-fascism.

Perhaps no government "reform" has been more deliberately mischaracterized as anti-business populism than the Federal Reserve, which was sold to the American people in 1913 as an agency to regulate greedy and irresponsible bankers. As many have shown, the Federal Reserve established a banking oligopoly, guaranteed bailouts for the big bankers, created new barriers to entry for smaller bankers, and was in fact designed by people representing some of the most powerful banking interests in the world, including the National City Bank of New York; Kuhn, Loeb & Company; J.P Morgan Company; and the First National Bank of New York. That's how regulatory-state-fascism always works it, offering regulatory fixes who's need was created by the last set of regulatory fixes. That's exactly how the Fed was sold to America..right after the last depression that was solved in the typical boom-bust-cycle fashion, in a number of months...not years.

We needed this fictional history to become institutionalized by our public schools, before FDR would be able to turn the Typical boom-bust-cycle depression into the Great Depression. Just like Bush and Obama governments, we were sold a series of regulatory fixes this time painted with the name "de-regulation" that have added to our QUADRILLION dollar debt, by jacking up the rate of debt increase by 300% or 400% per year.

The New-New-Deal..or what I call the New American Fascism is working along the same lines as it's model.

Both Franklin Roosevelt’s admirers and his detractors often think of his New Deal legacy as generally socialistic. Like the Progressive Era, the New Deal is deliberately mischaracterized and misrepresented in the state funded Academy, and then of course widely misunderstood by the public: it did indeed attack the free market, but did so at the behest of corporate interests.

The New American Fascism is right in front of our eyes.

In our time, corporate interests cheer on big government programs, ironically the same ones championed by those who consider themselves anti-corporate. In the late 1990s, the now-defunct Enron was one of the largest lobbying influences behind the international Kyoto Treaty, which would have forced the world to comply with a ghastly web of new regulations and would have meant large energy contracts for Enron. The antitrust breakup of Microsoft was a de facto bail-out to competitors such as Netscape.

The Bush Era's farm subsidies were Corporate Welfare for the biggest agricultural corporations, and it's protectionist trade policies are Corporate Welfare for politically favored businesses. The recent expansion of Medicare has been both the greatest augmentation of the American welfare state in decades and a bail-out to large pharmaceutical corporations. When Obama's universal health care comes to America, the corporations will no longer have to satisfy customers, only the politicians.

In conclussion...

To convince the New Fascist and otherwise Leftist skeptic of the benefits of the free market, it is vital to defend the legitimate systems of profit and private property. But before you can begin to do that you have to explain this, what is to them wildly counter-intuitive concept, that America doesn’t have a free-market economy, and the ills associated with free markets are actually the result of regulatory-state-capitalism, or if you prefer this term "socialist corporatism", but I prefer mine..the New American Fascism.

That we can plainly see thisexpansion of government regulations, lately deliberately misnamed "deregulation", often done in the name of combating corporate excesses, is loudly supported most enthusiastically by corporate interests *should* make it all the easier to explain economic liberty to those who have become disenchanted with the current system and misattribute the problems to the free market.

Even with my personal history of service, I find it much much harder than that to convince people I do not wish to leave poor people "hanging in the wind." I hope this essay helps flip their "voucher switch" =P ...and keeps their power-lusting mitts form taking half of everything I produce, and calling it just a spilt martini.