Socialist or Fascist - Thomas Sowell - Townhall Conservative Columnists

Thomas Sowell makes a distinction that many conservative commentators miss when they accuse Obama of being a socialist or a communist.

It bothers me a little when conservatives call Barack Obama a "socialist." He certainly is an enemy of the free market, and wants politicians and bureaucrats to make the fundamental decisions about the economy. But that does not mean that he wants government ownership of the means of production, which has long been a standard definition of socialism.

What President Obama has been pushing for, and moving toward, is more insidious: government control of the economy, while leaving ownership in private hands. That way, politicians get to call the shots but, when their bright ideas lead to disaster, they can always blame those who own businesses in the private sector.

…

One of the reasons why both pro-Obama and anti-Obama observers may be reluctant to see him as fascist is that both tend to accept the prevailing notion that fascism is on the political right, while it is obvious that Obama is on the political left.

I agree with him on this. He also correctly identifies fascism to the political left, not the right as most people do. However he doesn’t specifically mention how some folks like libertarians lay out the axis of the political spectrum with collectivism on the left and individualism on the right. A fascistic dictatorship, even if it favors business, still is a form of collectivism. The following definition provided in Wikipedia clearly shows the collectivist nature of fascism in which the individual is subjugated to the needs of the nation.

Fascism is a radical authoritarian nationalist political ideology. Fascists seek rejuvenation of their nation based on commitment to an organic national community where its individuals are united together as one people in national identity by suprapersonal connections of ancestry, culture, and blood through a totalitarian single-party state that seeks the mass mobilization of a nation through discipline, indoctrination, physical training, and eugenics.

Getting back to Sowell’s piece he makes a couple of key points.

Politically, it is heads-I-win when things go right, and tails-you-lose when things go wrong. This is far preferable, from Obama's point of view, since it gives him a variety of scapegoats for all his failed policies, without having to use President Bush as a scapegoat all the time.

Government ownership of the means of production means that politicians also own the consequences of their policies, and have to face responsibility when those consequences are disastrous -- something that Barack Obama avoids like the plague.

Thus the Obama administration can arbitrarily force insurance companies to cover the children of their customers until the children are 26 years old. Obviously, this creates favorable publicity for President Obama. But if this and other government edicts cause insurance premiums to rise, then that is something that can be blamed on the "greed" of the insurance companies.

This might seem like an issue of semantics but I don’t believe it is. I hold that incorrectly identifying Obama’s political position harms the credibility of the person making this claim. A knowledgeable opponent would have cause to ignore the comment because it shows ignorance at worst or sloppy thinking at best. It also incorrectly pits the right as being purely pro-business regardless of its relationship to government (i.e., the right supports big business cronyism while the left is protecting us little folk who need the help of our enlightened politicians to fight for our rights against the juggernaut of big business and the rich.)

Over time the left has done a good job of usurping certain terms in our language. An example is their term “right wing dictatorship” which can be safely uttered and no one challenges it. If we accept this designation we’re faced with the choice of a dictatorship of the proletariat on the left fighting the dictatorship of the bourgeois on the right. The individual is conveniently ignored in this spectrum.

Mark Steyn: America's future could be all Greek to us

Mark Steyn: America's future could be all Greek to us

Posted using ShareThis

A government big enough to give you everything you want isn't big enough to get you to give any of it back. That's the point Greece is at. Its socialist government has been forced into supporting a package of austerity measures. The Greek people's response is: Nuts to that.

Steyn concludes by drawing these parallels with the situation in Greece with various states in the U.S.

Think of Greece as California: Every year an irresponsible and corrupt bureaucracy awards itself higher pay and better benefits paid for by an ever-shrinking wealth-generating class. And think of Germany as one of the less-profligate, still-just-about-functioning corners of America such as my own state of New Hampshire: Responsibility doesn't pay. You'll wind up bailing out, anyway. The problem is there are never enough of "the rich" to fund the entitlement state, because in the end it disincentivizes everything from wealth creation to self-reliance to the basic survival instinct, as represented by the fertility rate. In Greece, they've run out Greeks, so they'll stick it to the Germans, like French farmers do. In Germany, the Germans have only been able to afford to subsidize French farming because they stick Americans with their defense tab. And, in America, Obama, Pelosi and Reid are saying we need to paddle faster to catch up with the Greeks and Germans. What could go wrong?

Corporatism: The Wave of the Present

David Boaz of the Cato Institute penned an article titled “Bush and Obama Opt for Corporatism Over Freewheeling Capitalist Economy” for the Investor’s Business Daily December 17 edition. It starts with the following.

Is Barack Obama a socialist? Not really. Is George W. Bush a free marketer? Not hardly. In fact, right now they both seem to be pursuing policies that are neither socialist nor laissez-faire but rather corporatist.

The Bush administration has spent close to a trillion dollars to keep the managers of big companies in the driver's seat. Instead of a free-market policy of letting the market determine winners and losers, the administration says Bear Stearns, AIG, Citigroup and other big Wall Street firms are "too big to fail." They can take dramatic risks and the taxpayers will cover them.

…

Corporatism was seen as an alternative to both the egalitarianism of the French Revolution and the laissez-faire economics of Adam Smith, with the state working closely with the different elements of society, especially labor and business.

As the Nobel laureate Edmund Phelps wrote: "The fundamental corporatist idea was to retain the private income, private wealth and private ownership of firms that (were) so central to capitalism (and found in avant-garde examples of market socialism too) but to remove the brain of capitalism — to curtail and to modify the mechanism of experiments and discoveries undertaken by unorganized entrepreneurs and financiers on which capitalism relied. . . . Corporatism sought to interpose the interests of the whole society in a range of decisions affecting the directions taken in the business sector."

We've always had some elements of the corporate state in America — subsidies, tariffs, monopoly privileges, regulatory cartels — but we've prospered because of the freewheeling entrepreneurship and creative destruction that characterizes most of our economy.

I think the most interesting part of this excerpt is Phelps’ comment about corporatism wanting to “remove the brain of capitalism.” By this Phelps means that capitalism is able to provide the endless flow of goods and services because entrepreneurs, managers and employees apply their creative forces to answer the challenges of competing against other enterprises for the customer’s business. Corporatists believe that the wisdom of government bureaucrats can replace these undirected creative, messy forces while still providing the same results.

I’d describe the corporatist’s position somewhat differently than Boaz. The corporatist wants to replace the many minds working independently with one mind, theirs. To modify Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” description of the free market, the corporatist wants to replace the independently operating invisible minds of the free market with the one visible mind of the bureaucrat who omnisciently pulls the levers of the economy.

Phelps (who won a Nobel Prize in 2006) shows in his writings that the record of corporatism fails to supports the claims of its proponents. (See the Wikipedia entry and his own web site.)

A second part of the Phelps quote stands out: “Corporatism sought to interpose the interests of the whole society in a range of decisions affecting the directions taken in the business sector.” Therefore, corporatists believe not only that bureaucrats can steer the economy better than the undirected free market but also they have the moral imperative and the right to steer the economy to better serve our “true” interests.

I agree with Boaz that corporatism is neither socialism (in which “the people” own the means of production) nor capitalism but a hybrid in which they want to harvest the benefits of the free market while giving it a lobotomy. They want to reap the effect while severing the cause.