|
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.
Let me just provide a recent example.
The Decline
The papers last week were filled with the first sets
of data from the 2010 US Census. The headline story concerned the huge
increase in the poverty rate. It is the largest increase in 20 years, and now
up to 15%.
But most people hear this and dismiss it, probably
for good reason. The poor in this country are not poor by any historical
standard. They have cell phones, cable TV, cars, lots of food, and plenty of
disposable income. What’s more, there is no such thing as a fixed class
called the poor. People come and go, depending on age and life circumstances.
Plus, in American politics, when you hear kvetching about the poor, everyone
knows what you’re supposed to do: hand the government your wallet.
Buried in the report is another fact that has much
more profound significance. It concerns median household income in real
terms.
What the data have revealed is devastating. Since
1999, median household income has fallen 7.1 percent. Since 1989, median
family income is largely flat. And since 1973 and the end of the gold
standard, it has hardly risen at all. The great wealth generating machine
that was once America is failing.
No longer can one generation expect to live a better
life than the previous one. The fascist economic model has killed what was
once called the American dream. And the truth is, of course, even worse than
the statistic reveals. You have to consider how many incomes exist within a
single household to make up the total income. After World War II, the
single-income family became the norm. Then the money was destroyed and
American savings were wiped out and the capital base of the economy was
devastated.
It was at this point that households began to
struggle to stay above water. The year 1985 was the turning point. This was
the year that it became more common than not for a household to have two
incomes rather than one. Mothers entered the workforce to keep family income
floating.
The intellectuals cheered this trend, as if it
represented liberation, shouting hosannas that all women everywhere are now
added to the tax rolls as valuable contributors to the State’s coffers.
The real cause is the rise of fiat money that depreciated the currency,
robbed savings, and shoved people into the workforce as taxpayers.
This story is not told in the data alone. You have
to look at the demographics to discover it.
This huge demographic shift essentially bought the
American household another 20 years of seeming prosperity, though it is hard to
call it that since there was no longer any choice about the matter. If you
wanted to keep living the dream, the household could no longer get by on a
single income.
But this huge shift was merely an escape hatch. It
bought 20 years of slight increases before the income trend flattened again.
Over the last decade we are back to falling. Today median family income is
only slightly above where it was when Nixon wrecked the dollar, put on price
and wage controls, created the EPA, and the whole apparatus of the parasitic
welfare-warfare State came to be entrenched and made universal.
Yes, this is fascism, and we are paying the price.
The dream is being destroyed.
The talk in Washington about reform, whether from
Democrats or Republicans, is like a bad joke. They talk of small changes,
small cuts, commissions they will establish, curbs they will make in ten
years. It is all white noise. None of this will fix the problem. Not even
close.
The problem is more fundamental. It is the quality
of the money. It is the very existence of 10,000 regulatory agencies. It is
the whole assumption that you have to pay the State for the privilege to
work. It is the presumption that the government must manage every aspect of
the capitalist economic order. In short, it is the total State that is the
problem, and the suffering and decline will continue so long as the total
State exists.
The Origins of Fascism
To be sure, the last time people worried about
fascism was during the Second World War. We were said to be fighting this
evil system abroad. The US defeated fascist governments but the philosophy of
governance that it represents was not defeated. Very quickly following that
war, another one began. This was the Cold War that pitted capitalism against
communism. Socialism in this case was considered to be a soft form of
communism, tolerable and even praiseworthy insofar as it was linked with
democracy, which is the system that legalizes and legitimizes an ongoing
pillaging of the population.
In the meantime, almost everyone has forgotten that
there are many other colors of socialism, not all of them obviously left
wing. Fascism is one of these colors.
There can be no question of its origins. It is tied
up with the history of post-World War I Italian politics. In 1922, Benito
Mussolini won a democratic election and established fascism as his
philosophy. Mussolini had been a member of the socialist party.
All the biggest and most important players within
the fascist movement came from the socialists. It was a threat to the
socialists because it was the most appealing political vehicle for the
real-world application of the socialist impulse. Socialists crossed over to
join the fascists en masse.
This is also why Mussolini himself enjoyed such good
press for more than ten years after his rule began. He was celebrated by the New
York Times in article after article. He was heralded in scholarly
collections as an exemplar of the type of leader we need in an age of the
planned society. Puff pieces on this blowhard were very common in US
journalism all through the late 1920s and the mid-1930s.
Remember that in this same period, the American left
went through a huge shift. In the teens and 1920s, the American left had a
very praiseworthy anti-corporatist impulse. The left generally opposed war,
the state-run penal system, alcohol prohibition, and all violations of civil
liberties. It was no friend of capitalism but neither was it a friend of the
corporate State of the sort that FDR forged during the New Deal.
In 1933 and 1934, the American left had to make a
choice. Would they embrace the corporatism and regimentation of the New Deal
or take a principled stand on their old liberal values? In other words, would
they accept fascism as a halfway house to their socialist utopia? A gigantic
battle ensued in this period, and there was a clear winner. The New Deal made
an offer the left could not refuse. And it was a small step to go from the
embrace of the fascistic planned economy to the celebration of the warfare
State that concluded the New Deal period.
This was merely a repeat of the same course of
events in Italy a decade earlier. In Italy too, the left realized that their
anti-capitalistic agenda could best be achieved within the framework of the
authoritarian, planning State. Of course our friend John Maynard Keynes
played a critical role in providing a pseudo-scientific rationale for joining
opposition to old-world laissez faire to a new appreciation of the planned
society. Recall that Keynes was not a socialist of the old school. As he
himself said in his introduction to the Nazi edition of his General Theory, national socialism was far more hospitable to his
ideas than a market economy.
Flynn Tells the Truth
The most definitive study on fascism written in
these years was As We Go Marching by John T. Flynn. Flynn was a journalist and
scholar of a liberal spirit who had written a number of best-selling books in
the 1920s. He could probably be put in the progressive camp in the 1920s. It
was the New Deal that changed him. His colleagues all followed FDR into
fascism, while Flynn himself kept the old faith. That meant that he fought
FDR every step of the way, and not only his domestic plans. Flynn was a
leader of the America First movement that saw FDR’s drive to war as
nothing but an extension of the New Deal, which it certainly was.
But because Flynn was part of what Murray Rothbard later dubbed the Old Right – Flynn came to
oppose both the welfare State and the warfare State – his name went
down the Orwellian memory hole after the war, during the heyday of CIA
conservatism.
As We Go Marching came out in 1944, just at the tail end of the war,
and right in the midst of wartime economic controls the world over. It is a
wonder that it ever got past the censors. It is a full-scale study of fascist
theory and practice, and Flynn saw precisely where fascism ends: in
militarism and war as the fulfillment of the stimulus-spending agenda. When
you run out of everything else to spend money on, you can always depend on
nationalist fervor to back more military spending.
In reviewing the history of the rise of fascism,
Flynn wrote:
"One of the most baffling phenomena of fascism
is the almost incredible collaboration between men of the extreme Right and
the extreme Left in its creation. The explanation lies at this point. Both
Right and Left joined in this urge for regulation. The motives, the
arguments, and the forms of expression were different but all drove in the
same direction. And this was that the economic system must be controlled in
its essential functions and this control must be exercised by the producing
groups."
Flynn writes that the right and the left disagreed on
precisely who fits the bill as the producer group. The left tends to
celebrate laborers as producers. The right tends to favor business owners as
producers. The political compromise – and it still goes on today
– was to cartelize both.
Government under fascism becomes the cartelization
device for both workers and the private owners of capital. Competition
between workers and between businesses is regarded as wasteful and pointless;
the political elites decide that the members of these groups need to get
together and cooperate under government supervision to build a mighty nation.
The fascists have always been obsessed with the idea
of national greatness. To them, this does not consist in a nation of people
who are growing more prosperous, living ever better and longer lives. No,
national greatness occurs when the State embarks on building huge monuments,
undertaking nationwide transportation systems, carving Mount Rushmore, or
digging the Panama Canal.
In other words, national greatness is not the same thing
as your greatness or your family’s greatness or your company’s or
profession’s greatness. On the contrary. You have to be taxed, your
money’s value has to be depreciated, your privacy invaded, and your well being diminished in order to achieve it. In this
view, the government has to make us great.
Tragically, such a program has a far greater chance
of political success than old-fashioned socialism. Fascism doesn’t
nationalize private property as socialism does. That means that the economy
doesn’t collapse right away. Nor does fascism push to equalize incomes.
There is no talk of the abolition of marriage or the nationalization of
children.
Religion is not abolished but used as a tool of
political manipulation. The fascist State was far more politically astute in
this respect than communism. It wove together religion and statism into one package, encouraging a worship of God
provided that the State operates as the intermediary.
Under fascism, society as we know it is left intact,
though everything is lorded over by a mighty State apparatus. Whereas
traditional socialist teaching fostered a globalist perspective, fascism was
explicitly nationalist. It embraced and exalted the idea of the nation-state.
As for the bourgeoisie, fascism doesn’t seek
their expropriation. Instead, the middle class gets what it wants in the form
of social insurance, medical benefits, and heavy doses of national pride.
It is for all these reasons that fascism takes on a
right-wing cast. It doesn’t attack fundamental bourgeois values. It
draws on them to garner support for a democratically backed all-round
national regimentation of economic control, censorship, cartelization,
political intolerance, geographic expansion, executive control, the police
State, and militarism.
For my part, I have no problem referring to the
fascist program as a right-wing theory, even if it does fulfill aspects of
the left-wing dream. The crucial matter here concerns its appeal to the
public and to the demographic groups that are normally drawn to right-wing
politics.
If you think about it, right-wing statism is of a different color, cast, and tone from
left-wing statism. Each is designed to appeal to a
different set of voters with different interests and values.
These divisions, however, are not strict, and
we’ve already seen how a left-wing socialist program can adapt itself
and become a right-wing fascist program with very little substantive change
other than its marketing program.
The Eight Marks of Fascist Policy
John T. Flynn, like other members of the Old Right,
was disgusted by the irony that what he saw, most everyone else chose to
ignore. In the fight against authoritarian regimes abroad, he noted, the US
had adopted those forms of government at home, complete with price controls,
rationing, censorship, executive dictatorship, and even concentration camps
for whole groups considered to be unreliable in their loyalties to the State.
After reviewing this long history, Flynn proceeds to
sum up with a list of eight points he considers to be the main marks of the
fascist State.
As I present them, I will also offer comments on the
modern American central State.
Point 1. The government is totalitarian because it
acknowledges no restraint upon its powers.
This is a very telling mark. It suggests that the US
political system can be described as totalitarian. This is a shocking remark
that most people would reject. But they can reject this characterization so
long as they happen not to be directly ensnared in the State’s web. If
they become so, they will quickly discover that there are indeed no limits to
what the State can do. This can happen boarding a flight, driving around in
your home town, or having your business run afoul of some government agency.
In the end, you must obey or be caged like an animal or killed. In this way,
no matter how much you may believe that you are free, all of us today are but
one step away from Guantanamo.
As recently as the 1990s, I can recall that there
were moments when Clinton seemed to suggest that there were some things that
his administration could not do. Today I’m not so sure that I can
recall any government official pleading the constraints of law or the
constraints of reality to what can and cannot be done. No aspect of life is
untouched by government intervention, and often it takes forms we do not
readily see. All of health care is regulated, but so is every bit of our
food, transportation, clothing, household products, and even private
relationships.
Mussolini himself put his principle this way:
"All within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the
State." He also said: "The keystone of the Fascist doctrine is its
conception of the State, of its essence, its functions, and its aims. For
Fascism the State is absolute, individuals and groups relative."
I submit to you that this is the prevailing ideology
in the United States today. This nation conceived in liberty has been
kidnapped by the fascist State.
Point 2. Government is a de facto dictatorship based
on the leadership principle.
I wouldn’t say that we truly have a
dictatorship of one man in this country, but we do have a form of
dictatorship of one sector of government over the entire country. The
executive branch has spread so dramatically over the last century that it has
become a joke to speak of checks and balances. What the kids learn in civics
class has nothing to do with reality.
The executive State is the State as we know it, all flowing
from the White House down. The role of the courts is to enforce the will of
the executive. The role of the legislature is to ratify the policy of the
executive.
Further, this executive is not really about the
person who seems to be in charge. The president is only the veneer, and the
elections are only the tribal rituals we undergo to confer some legitimacy on
the institution. In reality, the nation State lives and thrives outside any
"democratic mandate." Here we find the power to regulate all aspects
of life and the wicked power to create the money necessary to fund this
executive rule.
As for the leadership principle, there is no greater
lie in American public life than the propaganda we hear every four years
about how the new president/messiah is going to usher in the great
dispensation of peace, equality, liberty, and global human happiness. The
idea here is that the whole of society is really shaped and controlled by a
single will – a point that requires a leap of faith so vast that you
have to disregard everything you know about reality to believe it.
And yet people do. The hope for a messiah reached a
fevered pitch with Obama’s election. The civic religion was in
full-scale worship mode – of the greatest human who ever lived or ever
shall live. It was a despicable display.
Another lie that the American people believe is that
presidential elections bring about regime change. This is sheer nonsense. The
Obama State is the Bush State; the Bush State was the Clinton State; the
Clinton State was the Bush State; the Bush State was the Reagan State. We can
trace this back and back in time and see overlapping appointments,
bureaucrats, technicians, diplomats, Fed officials, financial elites, and so
on. Rotation in office occurs not because of elections but because of
mortality.
Point 3. Government administers a capitalist system
with an immense bureaucracy.
The reality of bureaucratic administration has been
with us at least since the New Deal, which was modeled on the planning
bureaucracy that lived in World War I. The planned economy – whether in
Mussolini’s time or ours – requires bureaucracy. Bureaucracy is
the heart, lungs, and veins of the planning State. And yet to regulate an
economy as thoroughly as this one is today is to kill prosperity with a
billion tiny cuts.
This doesn’t necessarily mean economic
contraction, at least right away. But it definitely means killing off growth
that would have otherwise occurred in a free market.
So where is our growth? Where is the peace dividend
that was supposed to come after the end of the Cold War? Where are the fruits
of the amazing gains in efficiency that technology has afforded? It has been
eaten by the bureaucracy that manages our every move on this earth. The
voracious and insatiable monster here is called the Federal Code that calls
on thousands of agencies to exercise the police power to prevent us from
living free lives.
It is as Basiat said: The
real cost of the State is the prosperity we do not see, the jobs that
don’t exist, the technologies to which we do not have access, the
businesses that do not come into existence, and the bright future that is
stolen from us. The State has looted us just as surely as a robber who enters
our home at night and steals all that we love.
Point 4. Producers are organized into cartels in the
way of syndicalism.
Syndicalist is not usually how we think of how our
current economic structure. But remember that syndicalism means economic
control by the producers. Capitalism is different. It places by virtue of market
structures all control in the hands of the consumers. The only question for syndicalists, then, is which producers are going to enjoy
political privilege. It might be the workers but it can also be the largest
corporations.
In the case of the US, in the last three years,
we’ve seen giant banks, pharmaceutical firms, insurers, car companies,
Wall Street banks and brokerage houses, and quasi-private mortgage companies
enjoying vast privileges at our expense. They have all joined with the State
in living a parasitical existence at our expense.
This is also an expression of the syndicalist idea,
and it has cost the US economy untold trillions and sustained an economic
depression by preventing the post-boom adjustment that markets would
otherwise dictate. The government has tightened its syndicalist grip in the
name of stimulus.
Point 5. Economic planning is based on the principle
of autarky.
Autarky is the name given to the idea of economic self-sufficiency.
Mostly this refers to the economic self-determination of the nation-state.
The nation-state must be geographically huge in order to support rapid
economic growth for a large and growing population.
This was and is the basis for fascist expansionism.
Without expansion, the State dies. This is also the idea behind the strange
combination of protectionist pressure today combined with militarism. It is
driven in part by the need to control resources.
Look at the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Libya. We
would be supremely naive to believe that these wars were not motivated in
part by the producer interests of the oil industry. It is true of the
American empire generally, which supports dollar hegemony.
It is the reason for the planned North American
Union.
The goal is national self-sufficiency rather than a
world of peaceful trade. Consider, too, the protectionist impulses of the
Republican ticket. There is not one single Republican, apart from Ron Paul,
who authentically supports free trade in the classical definition.
From ancient Rome to modern-day America, imperialism
is a form of statism that the bourgeoisie love. It
is for this reason that Bush’s post-09/11 push for the global empire
has been sold as patriotism and love of country rather than for what it is: a
looting of liberty and property to benefit the political elites.
6. Government sustains economic life through
spending and borrowing.
This point requires no elaboration because it is no
longer hidden. There was stimulus 1 and stimulus 2, both of which are so
discredited that stimulus 3 will have to adopt a new name. Let’s call
it the American Jobs Act.
With a prime-time speech, Obama argued in favor of
this program with some of the most asinine economic analysis I’ve ever
heard. He mused about how is it that people are unemployed at a time when
schools, bridges, and infrastructure need repairing. He ordered that supply
and demand come together to match up needed work with jobs.
Hello? The schools, bridges, and infrastructure that
Obama refers to are all built and maintained by the State. That’s why
they are falling apart. And people don’t have jobs because the State
has made it too expensive to hire them. It’s not complicated. To sit
around and dream of other scenarios is no different from wishing that water
flowed uphill or that rocks would float in the air. It amounts to a denial of
reality.
Still, Obama went on, invoking the old fascistic
longing for national greatness. "Building a world-class transportation
system," he said, "is part of what made us an economic
superpower." Then he asked: "We’re going to sit back and
watch China build newer airports and faster railroads?"
Well, the answer to that question is yes. And you
know what? It doesn’t hurt a single American for a person in China to
travel on a faster railroad than we do. To claim otherwise is an incitement
to nationalist hysteria.
As for the rest of this program, Obama promised yet
another long list of spending projects. Let’s just mention the reality:
No government in the history of the world has spent as much, borrowed as
much, and created as much fake money as the US. If the US doesn’t
qualify as a fascist State in this sense, no government ever has.
None of this would be possible but for the role of the
Federal Reserve, the great lender to the world. This institution is
absolutely critical to US fiscal policy. There is no way that the national
debt could increase at a rate of $4 billion per day without this institution.
Under a gold standard, all of this maniacal spending
would come to an end. And if US debt were priced on the market with a default
premium, we would be looking at a rating far less than A+.
Point 7. Militarism is a mainstay of government
spending.
Have you ever noticed that the military budget is
never seriously discussed in policy debates? The US spends more than most of
the rest of the world combined.
And yet to hear our leaders talk, the US is just a
tiny commercial republic that wants peace but is constantly under threat from
the world. They would have us believe that we all stand naked and vulnerable.
The whole thing is a ghastly lie. The US is a global military empire and the
main threat to peace around the world today.
To visualize US military spending as compared with
other countries is truly shocking. One bar chart you can easily look up shows
the US trillion-dollar-plus military budget as a skyscraper surrounded by
tiny huts. As for the next highest spender, China spends 1/10th as much as
the US.
Where is the debate about this policy? Where is the
discussion? It is not going on. It is just assumed by both parties that it is
essential for the US way of life that the US be the most deadly country on
the planet, threatening everyone with nuclear extinction unless they obey. This
should be considered a fiscal and moral outrage by every civilized person.
This isn’t only about the armed services, the
military contractors, the CIA death squads. It is also about how police at
all levels have taken on military-like postures. This goes for the local
police, State police, and even the crossing guards in our communities. The
commissar mentality, the trigger-happy thuggishness,
has become the norm throughout the whole of society.
If you want to witness outrages, it is not hard. Try
coming into this country from Canada or Mexico. See the bullet-proof-vest
wearing, heavily armed, jackbooted thugs running dogs up and down car lanes,
searching people randomly, harassing innocents, asking rude and intrusive
questions.
You get the strong impression that you are entering
a police State. That impression would be correct.
Yet for the man on the street, the answer to all
social problems seems to be more jails, longer terms, more enforcement, more
arbitrary power, more crackdowns, more capital punishments, more authority. Where does all of this end? And will the
end come before we realize what has happened to our once-free country?
Point 8. Military spending has imperialist aims.
Ronald Reagan used to claim that his military
buildup was essential to keeping the peace. The history of US foreign policy
just since the 1980s has shown that this is wrong. We’ve had one war
after another, wars waged by the US against non-compliant countries, and the
creation of even more client states and colonies.
US military strength has not led to peace, but the
opposite. It has caused most people in the world to regard the US as a
threat, and it has led to unconscionable wars on many countries. Wars of
aggression were defined at Nuremberg as crimes against humanity.
Obama was supposed to end this. He never promised to
do so. But his supporters all believed that he would. Instead, he has done
the opposite. He has increased troop levels, entrenched wars, and started new
ones. In reality, he has presided over a warfare State just as vicious as any
in history. The difference this time is that the left is no longer
criticizing the US role in the world. In that sense, Obama is the best thing
to ever happen to the warmongers and the military-industrial complex.
As for the right in this country, it once opposed
this kind of military fascism. But all that changed after the beginning of
the Cold War. The right was led into a terrible ideological shift, well
documented in Murray Rothbard’s neglected
masterpiece The Betrayal of the American Right. In the name of stopping communism, the right came
to follow ex-CIA agent Bill Buckley’s endorsement of a totalitarian
bureaucracy at home to fight wars all over the world.
At the end of the Cold War, there was a brief
reprise when the right in this country remembered its roots in
non-interventionism. But this did not last long. George Bush the First
rekindled the militarist spirit with the first war on Iraq, and there has
been no fundamental questioning of the American empire ever since. Even
today, Republicans – except, again, Ron Paul – elicit their
biggest applause by whipping up audiences about foreign threats, while never
mentioning that the real threat to American well-being exists in the Beltway.
The Future
I can think of no greater priority today than a
serious and effective antifascist alliance. In many ways, one is already
forming. It is not a formal alliance. It is made up of those who protest the
Fed, those who refuse to go along with mainstream fascist politics, those who
seek decentralization, those who demand lower taxes and free trade, those who
seek the right to associate with anyone they want and buy and sell on terms
of their own choosing, those who insist they can educate their children on
their own, the investors and savers who make economic growth possible, those
who do not want to be felt up at airports, and those who have become
expatriates.
It is also made of the millions of independent
entrepreneurs who are discovering that the number one threat to their ability
to serve others through the commercial marketplace is the institution that
claims to be our biggest benefactor: the government.
How many people fall into this category? It is more
than we know. The movement is intellectual. It is political. It is cultural.
It is technological. They come from all classes, races, countries, and professions.
This is no longer a national movement. It is truly global.
We can no longer predict whether members consider
themselves to be left wing, right wing, independent, libertarian, anarchist,
or something else. It includes those as diverse as home-schooling parents in
the suburbs as well as parents in urban areas whose children are among the
2.3 million people who languish in jail for no good reason in a country with
the largest prison population in the world.
And what does this movement want? Nothing more or
less than sweet liberty. It does not ask that the liberty be granted or
given. It only asks for the liberty that is promised by life itself and would
otherwise exist were it not for the leviathan State that robs us, badgers us,
jails us, kills us.
This movement is not departing. We are daily
surrounded by evidence that it is right and true. Every day, it is more and
more obvious that the State contributes absolutely nothing to our well-being,
but massively subtracts from it.
Back in the 1930s, and even up through the 1980s,
the partisans of the State were overflowing with ideas. They had theories and
agendas that had many intellectual backers. They were thrilled and excited
about the world they would create. They would end business cycles, bring
about social advance, build the middle class, cure disease, bring about
universal security, and much more. Fascism believed in itself.
This is no longer true. Fascism has no new ideas, no
big projects, and not even its partisans really believe it can accomplish
what it sets out to do. The world created by the private sector is so much
more useful and beautiful than anything the State has done that the fascists
have themselves become demoralized and aware that their agenda has no real intellectual
foundation.
It is ever more widely known that statism does not and cannot work. Statism
is the great lie. Statism gives us the exact
opposite of its promise. It promised security, prosperity, and peace; it has
given us fear, poverty, war, and death. If we want a future, it is one that
we have to build ourselves. The fascist State will not give it to us; on the
contrary, it stands in the way.
It also seems to me that the old-time romance of the
classical liberals with the idea of the limited State is gone. It is far more
likely today that young people embrace an idea that fifty years ago was
thought to be the unthinkable thought: the idea that society is best off
without any State at all.
I would mark the rise of anarcho-capitalist
theory as the most dramatic intellectual shift in my adult lifetime. Gone is
that view of the State as the night watchman that would only guard essential
rights, adjudicate disputes, and protect liberty.
This view is woefully naive. The night watchman is
the guy with the guns, the legal right to use aggression, the guy who
controls all comings and goings, the guy who is perched on top and sees all
things. Who is watching him? Who is limiting his power? No one,
and this is precisely why he is the very source of society’s greatest
ills. No constitution, no election, no social contract will check his power.
Indeed, the night watchman has acquired total power.
It is he who would be the total State, which Flynn describes as a government
that "possesses the power to enact any law or take any measure that
seems proper to it." So long as a government, he says, "is clothed
with the power to do anything without any limitation on its powers, it is
totalitarian. It has total power."
It is no longer a point that we can ignore. The
night watchman must be removed and his powers distributed within and among
the whole population, and they should be governed by the same forces that
bring us all the blessings the material world affords us.
In the end, this is the choice we face: the total
State or total freedom. Which will we choose? If we choose the State, we will
continue to sink further and further and eventually lose all that we treasure
as a civilization. If we choose freedom, we can harness that remarkable power
of human cooperation that will enable us to continue to make a better world.
In the fight against fascism, there is no reason to
be despairing but rather to continue to fight with every bit of confidence
that the future belongs to us and not them.
Their world is falling apart. Ours is just being
built.
Their world is based on bankrupt ideologies. Ours is
rooted in the truth about freedom and reality.
Their world can only look back to the glory days.
Ours looks forward to the future we are building for ourselves.
Their world is rooted in the corpse of the
nation-state. Our world draws on the energies and creativity of all peoples
in the world, united in the great and noble project of creating a prospering
civilization through peaceful human cooperation.
It’s true that they have the biggest guns. But
big guns have not assured permanent victory in Iraq or Afghanistan, or any
other place on the planet.
We possess the only weapon that is truly immortal:
the right idea. It is this
that will lead to victory.
As Mises said: "In
the long run even the most despotic governments with all their brutality and
cruelty are no match for ideas. Eventually the ideology that has won the
support of the majority will prevail and cut the ground from under the
tyrant's feet. Then the oppressed many will rise in rebellion and overthrow
their masters."
Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr
LewRockwell.com
This talk was delivered at the Doug Casey
conference, "When Money Dies," in Phoenix on October 1, 2011.
Article originally published at www.lewrockwell.com
here
|
