“business and government to join hands as “partners.””
Gee, sounds like fascism.
Pat Buchanan signed-on a little too quickly for my taste.
Mussolin’s corporate state, which is what Roosevelt’s Braintrust wanted to impose onf the USA. Fortunately, Roosevelt had no ruling economic principles and simply went from left to right as politics demanded.
That’s been done, too. It’s called Fascism.
The “Third Way” is nothing but Potemkin Village socialism. Big collective corporations are protected, small business is extinguished and herded into the big collectives. The big collectives have a facade of private ownership but are really operated by government regulation. Economic policy is worked out by central planning. They are not permitted to fail, nor can they cut jobs. Their policy. The collectives become inefficient, but government subsidies and tariffs “maintain” their status quo. The employees can’t get ahead and on the other hand, they can’t get fired either. So they have no incentive to work hard, and just show up to get their meager paycheck and go home to their drab gray apartment blocks.
No wonder it failed in the USSR/CIS. And it will fail here, too.
Here is the truth of the matter form Ludwig Von Mises Institute:
In 1944, Ludwig von Mises published one of his least-known masterworks: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Drawing on his prewar experience in Vienna, watching the rise of the national socialists in Germany (the Nazis), who would eventually take over his own homeland, he set out to draw parallels between the Russian and German experience with socialism.
It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They both sported the same ideological pedigree of socialism. “The German and Russian systems of socialism have in common the fact that the government has full control of the means of production. It decides what shall be produced and how. It allots to each individual a share of consumer’s goods for his consumption.”
The difference between the systems, wrote Mises, is that the German pattern “maintains private ownership of the means of production and keeps the appearance of ordinary prices, wages, and markets.” But in fact the government directs production decisions, curbs entrepreneurship and the labor market, and determines wages and interest rates by central authority. “Market exchange,” says Mises, “is only a sham.”
Mises’s account is confirmed by a remarkable book that appeared in 1939, published by Vanguard Press in New York City (and unfortunately out of print today). It is The Vampire Economy: Doing Business Under Fascism by Guenter Reimann, then a 35-year old German writer. Through contacts with German business owners, Reimann documented how the “monster machine” of the Nazis crushed the autonomy of the private sector through onerous regulations, harsh inspections, and the threat of confiscatory fines for petty offenses.
“Industrialists were visited by state auditors who had strict orders to examine the balance sheets and all bookkeeping entries of the company or individual businessman for the preceding two, three or more years until some error or false entry was found,” explains Reimann. “The slightest formal mistake was punished with tremendous penalties. A fine of millions of marks was imposed for a single bookkeeping error.”
Reimann quotes from a businessman’s letter: “You have no idea how far state control goes and how much power the Nazi representatives have over our work. The worst of it is that they are so ignorant. These Nazi radicals think of nothing except ‘distributing the wealth.’ Some businessmen have even started studying Marxist theories, so that they will have a better understanding of the present economic system.
“While state representatives are busily engaged in investigating and interfering, our agents and salesmen are handicapped because they never know whether or not a sale at a higher price will mean denunciation as a ‘profiteer’ or ‘saboteur,’ followed by a prison sentence. You cannot imagine how taxation has increased. Yet everyone is afraid to complain. Everywhere there is a growing undercurrent of bitterness. Everyone has his doubts about the system, unless he is very young, very stupid, or is bound to it by the privileges he enjoys.
“There are terrible times coming. If only I had succeeded in smuggling out $10,000 or even $5,000, I would leave Germany with my family. Business friends of mine are convinced that it will be the turn of the ‘white Jews’ (which means us, Aryan businessmen) after the Jews have been expropriated. The difference between this and the Russian system is much less than you think, despite the fact that we are still independent businessmen.”
As Mises says, “independent” only in a decorous sense. Under fascism, explains this businessman, the capitalist “must be servile to the representatives of the state” and “must not insist on rights, and must not behave as if his private property rights were still sacred.” It’s the businessman, characteristically independent, who is “most likely to get into trouble with the Gestapo for having grumbled incautiously.”
“Of all businessmen, the small shopkeeper is the one most under control and most at the mercy of the party,” recounts Reimann. “The party man, whose good will he must have, does not live in faraway Berlin; he lives right next door or right around the corner. This local Hitler gets a report every day on what is discussed in Herr Schultz’s bakery and Herr Schmidt’s butcher shop. He would regard these men as ‘enemies of the state’ if they complained too much. That would mean, at the very least, the cutting of their quota of scarce and hence highly desirable goods, and it might mean the loss of their business licenses. Small shopkeepers and artisans are not to grumble.”
“Officials, trained only to obey orders, have neither the desire, the equipment, nor the vision to modify rules to suit individual situations,” Reimann explains. “The state bureaucrats, therefore, apply these laws rigidly and mechanically, without regard for the vital interests of essential parts of the national economy. Their only incentive to modify the letter of the law is in bribes from businessmen, who for their part use bribery as their only means of obtaining relief from a rigidity which they find crippling.”
Says another businessman: “Each business move has become very complicated and is full of legal traps which the average businessman cannot determine because there are so many new decrees. All of us in business are constantly in fear of being penalized for the violation of some decree or law.”
Business owners, explains another entrepreneur, cannot exist without a “collaborator,” i.e., a “lawyer” with good contacts in the Nazi bureaucracy, one who “knows exactly how far you can circumvent the law.” Nazi officials, explains Reimann, “obtain money for themselves by merely taking it from capitalists who have funds available with which to purchase influence and protection,” paying for their protection “as did the helpless peasants of feudal days.”
“It has gotten to the point where I cannot talk even in my own factory,” laments a factory owner. “Accidentally, one of the workers overheard me grumbling about some new bureaucratic regulation and he immediately denounced me to the party and the Labor Front office.”
Reports another factory owner: “The greater part of the week I don’t see my factory at all. All this time I spend in visiting dozens of government commissions and offices in order to get raw materials I need. Then there are various tax problems to settle and I must have continual conferences and negotiations with the Price Commission. It sometimes seems as if I do nothing but that, and everywhere I go there are more leaders, party secretaries, and commissars to see.”
In this totalitarian paradigm, a businessman, declares a Nazi decree, “practices his functions primarily as a representative of the State, only secondarily for his own sake.” Complain, warns a Nazi directive, and “we shall take away the freedom still left you.”
In 1933, six years before Reimann’s book, Victor Klemperer, a Jewish academic in Dresden, made the following entry in his diary on February 21: “It is a disgrace that gets worse with every day that passes. And there’s not a sound from anyone. Everyone’s keeping his head down.”
It is impossible to escape the parallels between Guenter Reimann’s account of doing business under the Nazis and the “compassionate,” “responsible,” and regulated “capitalism” of today’s U.S. economy today. At least the German government was frank enough to give the right name to its system of economic control.
While the US government, using the US taxpayer, bails out billions to the scheming Money-is-God crowd of Bear Stearns, AIG, CitiBank, etc., it simultaneously, and surreptitiuosly, allows twenty million parasitic illegals into the Nation, who draw on all the taxpayer paid safety net services in place, hospital, schools, school lunches, to the call of helping "business."
Thus the honest (naive), law abiding, and working taxpayer, who struggles to maintain his competitiveness, i.e. night school, job changes, risk investment, second job, etc. in a brutal competitive world, is sacrificed to the scheming (and international) denizens of finance, and the invading hordes of bicamerals from the South.
And George Bush and the US Congress, the stupidest, most power hungry jerks in the Nation, call this "Management?" At the Suntrade Institute we do not think that is management, when the managers sacrifice the legitimate workers to the corrupt and parasitic.
This is the Third Way, and is the "way" of the Council on Foreign Relations. Exactly like Mikhail Gorbachev, these are the elitist people, who play with their ideas of controlling the masses, but who are themselves isolated from the consequences.
When one finally sees it one truly knows what sinister (the Left) means. My favorite is John D."Jay" Rockefeller IV. What have he, or "they" ever done at all? Have they written any code? Have they designed any bridges? Have they synthesized any pharmaceuticals? Have they invented any alternative vehicles? Have they taught any engineering courses? Have they given their own time in any slum? Have they driven a metro bus?
It is not surprising that Mikhail Gorbachev champions such a top-down manipulated "economy," raised through the experience of Communism, but if he comes to Virginia, We'll see if we can get him a position in the local salvage and recyling yard, at a fair wage. It might provide a little perspective on the "way" of economics.
Mikhail, please contact the Suntrade Institute, if interested.
I think a better third way would be to recognize that neither the economy, nor the government, is sustainable, and that both must considerably contract, until “quality” and “durability” catches up with “quantity” and “expendability”.
It makes a lot of sense out West, where cities sprang up in just a few decades, yet buildings were close to biodegradable and not expected to last more than a decade or two. Art, architecture and design equally transitory. The only buildings built to last a hundred years were built a hundred years ago.
As far as the government goes, it means a return to constitutional government, an end to the more than half the government that is little more than largesse and overreaching to the point of overarching. And just because it is technically possible for government to do, does not mean it is desirable in any way.
Economically, it means an end to easy credit, with people, corporations and government returning to the idea of only purchasing what can be afforded, saving for the future and our posterity, and rewards based on performance, not extravagance.
Many of the excesses we know today will end, like enormous, diploma mill universities putting students deeply in debt for dubious degrees of little bearing to their future employment. Public education itself will need to be radically improved, so that at a fraction of the cost, it will provide a multiple of proficiency. Children will learn by computer, because it is better and faster.
American agribusiness, one of our great national strengths, will also provide much of our energy with algae biodiesel, ending the grievous drain on our capital to pay for imported fuel. Otherwise, small but more numerous nuclear power plants will provide energy to a less vulnerable electrical grid.
Importantly, all of this will be done with the idea of providing more and better to our society; not the crippled philosophy that sees a future of only despair, shortage, and higher prices.
It was a Commie love-fest...the principle is that everything is structured like Fannie Mae/Freddie Mac...subject to do-gooder Liberal government policies and backstopped by taxpayer dollars...
And when the hundreds of millions are taken by senior management and board members when the whole gig goes tits up, the taxpayer re-funds the entire project again.
Like Bermuda grass, it slowly takes over the yard by choking the roots....roots being business and entrepreneurship.
If you go too far right, you reach the Front Door of Fascism. If you go too far left, you reach the back door of Fascism.
Most people recognize the Front door. Most people don’t recognize the Backdoor, until they’ve been inside the house for awhile.
bttt
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