Re: NAZIs are RIGHT Wingers


The Violence of Central Planning
by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.


> For today's generation, Hitler is the most hated man in history, and his
> regime the archetype of political evil. This view does not extend to his
> economic policies, however. Far from it. They are embraced by
> governments all around the world. The Glenview State Bank of Chicago,
> for example, recently praised Hitler's economics in its monthly
> newsletter. In doing so, the bank discovered the hazards of praising
> Keynesian policies in the wrong context.
>
> The issue of the newsletter (July 2003) is not online, but the content
> can be discerned via the letter of protest from the Anti-Defamation
> League. "Regardless of the economic arguments" the letter said,
> "Hitler's economic policies cannot be divorced from his great policies
> of virulent anti-Semitism, racism and genocide?. Analyzing his actions
> through any other lens severely misses the point."
>
>
>
> The same could be said about all forms of central planning. It is wrong
> to attempt to examine the economic policies of any leviathan state apart
> from the political violence that characterizes all central planning,
> whether in Germany, the Soviet Union, or the United States. The
> controversy highlights the ways in which the connection between
> violence and central planning is still not understood, not even by the
> ADL. The tendency of economists to admire Hitler's economic program is
> a case in point.
>
> In the 1930s, Hitler was widely viewed as just another protectionist
> central planner who recognized the supposed failure of the free market
> and the need for nationally guided economic development.
> Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that "Hitler
> found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining
> it."
>
> What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard,
> embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected
> industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs
> programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production
> decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls,
> instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national
> health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards,
> and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was
> essential to the regime's rejection of the market economy and its
> embrace of socialism in one country.
>
> Such programs remain widely praised today, even given their failures.
> They are features of every "capitalist" democracy. Keynes himself
> admired the Nazi economic program, writing in the foreword to the
> German edition to the General Theory: "[T]he theory of output as a
> whole, which is what the following book purports to provide, is much
> more easily adapted to the conditions of a totalitarian state, than is
> the theory of production and distribution of a given output produced
> under the conditions of free competition and a large measure of
> laissez-faire."
>
> Keynes's comment, which may shock many, did not come out of the blue.
> Hitler's economists rejected laissez-faire, and admired Keynes, even
> foreshadowing him in many ways. Similarly, the Keynesians admired
> Hitler (see George Garvy, "Keynes and the Economic Activists of
> Pre-Hitler Germany," The Journal of Political Economy, Volume 83, Issue
> 2, April 1975, pp. 391?405).
>
> Even as late as 1962, in a report written for President Kennedy, Paul
> Samuelson had implicit praise for Hitler: "History reminds us that even
> in the worst days of the great depression there was never a shortage of
> experts to warn against all curative public actions?. Had this counsel
> prevailed here, as it did in the pre-Hitler Germany, the existence of
> our form of government could be at stake. No modern government will
> make that mistake again."
>
> On one level, this is not surprising. Hitler instituted a New Deal for
> Germany, different from FDR and Mussolini only in the details. And it
> worked only on paper in the sense that the GDP figures from the era
> reflect a growth path. Unemployment stayed low because Hitler, though
> he intervened in labor markets, never attempted to boost wages beyond
> their market level. But underneath it all, grave distortions were
> taking place, just as they occur in any non-market economy. They may
> boost GDP in the short run (see how government spending boosted the US
> Q2 2003 growth rate from 0.7 to 2.4 percent), but they do not work in
> the long run.
>
> "To write of Hitler without the context of the millions of innocents
> brutally murdered and the tens of millions who died fighting against
> him is an insult to all of their memories," wrote the ADL in protest of
> the analysis published by the Glenview State Bank. Indeed it is.
>
> But being cavalier about the moral implications of economic policies is
> the stock-in-trade of the profession. When economists call for boosting
> "aggregate demand," they do not spell out what this really means. It
> means forcibly overriding the voluntary decisions of consumers and
> savers, violating their property rights and their freedom of
> association in order to realize the national government?s economic
> ambitions. Even if such programs worked in some technical economic
> sense, they should be rejected on grounds that they are incompatible
> with liberty.
>
> So it is with protectionism. It was the major ambition of Hitler's
> economic program to expand the borders of Germany to make autarky
> viable, which meant building huge protectionist barriers to imports.
> The goal was to make Germany a self-sufficient producer so that it did
> not have to risk foreign influence and would not have the fate of its
> economy bound up with the goings-on in other countries. It was a
> classic case of economically counterproductive xenophobia.
>
> And yet even in the US today, protectionist policies are making a
> tragic comeback. Under the Bush administration alone, a huge range of
> products from lumber to microchips are being protected from low-priced
> foreign competition. These policies are being combined with attempts to
> stimulate supply and demand through large-scale military expenditure,
> foreign-policy adventurism, welfare, deficits, and the promotion of
> nationalist fervor. Such policies can create the illusion of growing
> prosperity, but the reality is that they divert scarce resources away
> from productive employment.
>
> Perhaps the worst part of these policies is that they are inconceivable
> without a leviathan state, exactly as Keynes said. A government big
> enough and powerful enough to manipulate aggregate demand is big and
> powerful enough to violate people's civil liberties and attack their
> rights in every other way. Keynesian (or Hitlerian) policies unleash
> the sword of the state on the whole population. Central planning, even
> in its most petty variety, and freedom are incompatible.
>
> Ever since 9-11 and the authoritarian, militarist response, the
> political left has warned that Bush is the new Hitler, while the right
> decries this kind of rhetoric as irresponsible hyperbole. The truth is
> that the left, in making these claims, is more correct that it knows.
> Hitler, like FDR, left his mark on Germany and the world by smashing
> the taboos against central planning and making big government a
> seemingly permanent feature of western economies.
>
> David Raub, the author of the article for Glenview, was being naïve in
> thinking he could look at the facts as the mainstream sees them and
> come up with what he thought would be a conventional answer. The ADL is
> right in this case: central planning should never be praised. We must
> always consider its historical context and inevitable political results


--
hugo
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