May 4, 2026: "One of the industries hardest hit by the spike in fuel prices caused by the Iran War is airlines. Jet fuel prices have doubled since the start of the war. Airlines have reacted to the fuel price increase by raising fares and baggage fees, as well as by cutting routes.
"Raising prices is not a good option for 'budget' airlines since their main appeal to consumers is their low prices. Increasing prices could cause these carriers to lose business. The financial strain from the increased fuel costs led discount airline Spirit to ask the Trump administration for a bailout. President Trump said a bailout would be conditioned on Spirit giving the government an ownership stake in the company. Spirit was unable to reach a deal with the government, so Spirit went out of business on Saturday. However, several other budget airlines are seeking a government bailout.
"Spirit has been struggling for years. In 2022, the airline sought to get on better financial footing by merging with fellow discount airline JetBlue. The merger may have allowed for more effective competition with the dominant carriers. However, the Justice Department successfully opposed the merger in court on the grounds it would lead to more concentration in the discount airlines market. This is one of many examples of how an aggressive approach to antitrust enforcement can harm businesses and consumers.
"Spirit is not the first business President Trump has considered having the government 'invest' in. For example, in exchange for government approval of Nippon Steel’s acquisition of US Steel, the government was given a 'golden share' allowing the government to overrule decisions made by the company that the government determines are against US 'national security.' Among the other companies the government has obtained an ownership interest in are several minerals mining companies and computer chip manufacturer Intel. If discount airlines receive bailouts in exchange for granting government ownership stakes in their businesses, other companies impacted by the spike in fuel prices may line up for the same deal.
"Having government own part of what is a nominally private company interferes with the efficient allocation of capital. It also means business decisions will be made to please government officials and bureaucrats instead of to meet the needs and wants of consumers. Government officials will also act based on what will boost returns in the government’s investments.
"Government ownership of all or part of private businesses is the epitome of economic fascism. Yet, there have not been protests from the so-called 'anti-fascist' progressives over President Trump arranging US government ownership stakes in private companies. This is probably because they are looking forward to a Democrat president expanding government’s investment in, and control of, private businesses.
"There has been little criticism of President Trump’s acquisition of ownership interests in private companies from Republican politicians or conservative writers and activists. Many of them, though, would have opposed President Obama or President Biden tooth and nail if either had the US government take an ownership interest in private companies.
"Contrary to what many seem to think, full or partial government ownership of private companies does not magically become less of a threat to liberty and prosperity when done by a Republican. Congress should pass a law forbidding any part of the federal government — including the Federal Reserve — from taking an ownership interest in any private business."
The extremist group Antifascist Action (Antifa)began as part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a Communist dictatorship in Germany, and worked to label all rival parties as “fascist.”
September 23, 2025 - "The extremist anarchist-communist group Antifa is in the headlines because President Donald Trump has announced that he will be designating it as a terrorist organization. The organization was initially part of the Soviet Union’s operations to bring about a communist dictatorship in Germany, and it worked to label all rival parties as 'fascist.'
"The organization can be traced to the 'united front' of the Soviet Union’s Communist International (Comintern) during the Third World Congress in Moscow in June 1921 and July 1921, according to the German booklet 80 Years of Anti-Fascist Action by Bernd Langer, published by the Association for the Promotion of Anti-Fascist Culture. Langer is a former member of Autonome Antifa, formerly one of Germany’s largest Antifa organizations....
"Moscow ... sought to unite the various communist and workers’ parties of Germany under a single ideological banner that it controlled. 'The "unified front" thus did not mean an equal cooperation between different organizations, but the dominance of the workers’ movement by the communists,' Langer wrote....
""Benito Mussolini, a Marxist and socialist who ... founded the fascist movement as his own political party ... took power through his 'March on Rome' in October 1922.... The KPD [Communist Party of Germany] decided to use the banner of anti-fascism to form a movement. However, Langer noted that to the KPD, the ideas of 'fascism' and 'anti-fascism' were 'undifferentiated,' and the term 'fascism' served merely as rhetoric.... Both the communist and fascist systems were based on collectivism and state-planned economies. Both also proposed systems wherein the individual was heavily controlled by a powerful state and both were responsible for large-scale atrocities and genocide.
"According to the 2016 annual report of Germany’s domestic intelligence service, the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution, from the viewpoint of the 'left-wing extremist,' the label of 'fascism' as pushed by Antifa often does not refer to actual fascism but is merely a label assigned to 'capitalism'.... This held true from the beginning, according to Langer. For the communists in Germany, 'anti-fascism' merely meant 'anti-capitalism'.... A description of Antifa on the Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution’s website notes that the organization still holds this same basic definition of capitalism as 'fascism'....
"Langer wrote that, historically, by labeling the anti-capitalist interests of the communist movement as 'anti-fascism,' the KPD was able to use this rhetoric to label all other political parties as fascist. 'According to this, the other parties opposed to the KPD were fascist, especially the [Social Democratic Party of Germany],' he wrote. Thus, in a move that today would be considered ironic, the group that the communist 'anti-fascists' most heavily targeted under their new label of 'fascism' was the social democrats....
"At this time, Hitler and his Nazi Party had begun to emerge on the world stage, and the Nazi Party employed a group similar to Antifaschistische Aktion in its use of political violence and intimidation, called the 'brownshirts.' Antifaschistische Aktion, meanwhile, began to attract some members who opposed the arrival of actual fascism in Germany and who did not subscribe to — or were potentially unaware of — the organization’s ties to the Soviet Union. However, the violence instigated by Antifaschistische Aktion largely had an opposite effect. The ongoing tactics of violence and intimidation of all rival systems under the Antifa movement, along with its violent ideology, drove many people toward fascism.
“'The Communists’ violent revolutionary rhetoric, promising the destruction of capitalism and the creation of a Soviet Germany, terrified the country’s middle class, who knew only too well what had happened to their counterparts in Russia after 1918,' Richard J. Evans wrote in The Third Reich in Power. 'Appalled at the failure of the government to solve the crisis, and frightened into desperation by the rise of the Communists, they began to leave the squabbling little factions of the conventional political right and gravitate towards the Nazis instead.'
"Langer noted that, from the beginning, the KPD was a member of the Comintern, and 'within a few years, it became a Stalinist party,' both ideologically and logistically. He wrote that it even became “financially dependent on the Moscow headquarters.' Leaders of the KPD, with Antifa as their on-the-ground movement for violence and intimidation of rival political parties, fell under the command of the Soviet apparatus. Many KPD leaders would later become leaders in the communist German Democratic Republic and its infamous Ministry for State Security, the Stasi.
"As Langer wrote, 'Anti-fascism is a strategy rather than an ideology.' It was brought into play in Germany in the 1920s, not as a legitimate movement against the fascism that would later arise in Germany, he wrote, but instead 'as an anti-capitalist concept of struggle.'”
A version of this article was first published on Aug. 18, 2017.
March 15, 2024 - "In the 1990s and for years into our century, it was common to ridicule the government for being technologically backwards. We were all gaining access to fabulous things, including webs, apps, search tools, and social media. But governments at all levels were stuck in the past using IBM mainframes and large floppy disks. We had a great time poking fun at them. I recall the days of thinking government would never catch up to the glories and might of the market itself. I wrote several books on it, full of techno-optimism.
"The new tech sector had a libertarian ethos about it. They didn’t care about the government and its bureaucrats. They didn’t have lobbyists in Washington. They were the new technologies of freedom and didn’t care much about the old analogue world of command and control. They would usher in a new age of people power.
"Here we sit a quarter-century later with documented evidence that the opposite happened. The private sector collects the data that the government buys and uses as a tool of control. What is shared and how many people see it is a matter of algorithms agreed upon by a combination of government agencies, university centers, various nonprofits, and the companies themselves. The whole thing has become an oppressive blob....
"Every major company that once stayed far away from Washington now owns a similar giant palace in or around D.C., and they collect tens of billions in government revenue. Government has now become a major customer, if not the main customer, of the services provided by the large social media and tech companies. They are advertisers but also massive purchasers of the main product too.
"Amazon, Microsoft, and Google are the biggest winners of government contracts, according to a report from Tussel. Amazon hosts the data of the National Security Agency with a $10 billion contract, and gets hundreds of millions from other governments. We do not know how much Google has received from the US government, but it is surely a substantial share of the $694 billion the federal government hands out in contracts. Microsoft also has a large share of government contracts. In 2023, the US Department of Defense awarded the Joint Warfighter Cloud Capability contract to Microsoft, Amazon, Google, and Oracle. The contract is worth up to $9 billion and provides the Department of Defense with cloud services. It’s just the beginning. The Pentagon is looking for a successor plan that will be bigger.
"Actually, we don’t even know the full extent of this but it is gargantuan. Yes, these companies provide the regular consumer services but a main and even decisive customer is government itself.... Today government is a main purchaser of tech services and is a top driver of the AI boom too. It’s one of the best-kept secrets in American public life, hardly talked about at all by mainstream media. Most people still think of tech companies as free-enterprise rebels. It’s not true.
"The same situation of course exists for pharmaceutical companies. This relationship dates even further back in time and is even tighter to the point that there is no real distinction between the interests of the FDA/CDC and large pharmaceutical companies. They are one and the same.
"In this framework, we might also tag the agricultural sector, which is dominated by cartels that have driven out family farms. It’s a government plan and massive subsidies that determine what is produced and in what quantity. It’s not because of consumers that your Coke is filled with a scary product called 'high fructose corn syrup,' why your candy bar and danish have the same, and why there is corn in your gas tank. This is entirely the product of government agencies and budgets.
"In free enterprise, the old rule is that the customer is always right. That’s a wonderful system sometimes called consumer sovereignty. Its advent in history, dating perhaps from the 16th century, represented a tremendous advance over the old guild system of feudalism and certainly a major step over ancient despotisms. It’s been the rallying cry of market-based economics ever since.
"What happens, however, when government itself becomes a main and even dominant customer? The ethos of private enterprise is thereby changed. No longer primarily interested in serving the general public, enterprise turns its attention to serving its powerful masters in the halls of the state, gradually weaving close relationships and forming a ruling class that becomes a conspiracy against the public.
"This used to go by the name 'crony capitalism' which perhaps describes some of the problems on a small scale. This is another level of reality that needs an entirely different name. That name is corporatism, a coinage from the 1930s and a synonym for fascism back before that became a curse word due to wartime alliances. Corporatism is a specific thing, not capitalism and not socialism but a system of private property ownership with cartelized industry that primarily serves the state.
"The old binaries of the public and private sector – widely assumed by every main ideological system – have become so blurred that they no longer make much sense. And yet we are ideologically and philosophically unprepared to deal with this new world with anything like intellectual insight. Not only that, it can be extremely difficult even to tell the good guys from the bad guys in the news stream.... That’s how mixed up everything has become. We’ve clearly traveled a long way from the 1990s!
"Some might observe that this has been a problem far back in time. Starting with the Spanish-American War, we’ve seen a merger of public and private as involving the munitions industry. This is true. Many Gilded Age fortunes were wholly legitimate and market-based enterprises but others were gathered from the nascent military-industrial complex that began to mature in the Great War and involved a vast range of industries from industry to transportation to communications. Of course in 1913, we saw the advent of a particularly egregious public-private partnership with the Federal Reserve, in which private banks merged into a unified front and agreed to service US government debt obligations in exchange for bailout guarantees. This monetary corporatism continues to vex us to this day, as does the military industrial complex.
"How is it different from the past? It’s different in degree and reach. The corporatist machine now manages the main products and services in our civilian life including the entire way we get information, how we work, how we bank, how we contact friends, and how we buy. It is the manager of the whole of our lives in every respect, and has become the driving force of product innovation and design. It has become a tool for surveillance in the most intimate aspects of our lives, including financial information and inclusive of listening devices we’ve willingly installed in our own homes....
"It has become a main curator and censor of our news and social media presence and postings. It is in a position to say which companies and products succeed and which ones fail. It can kill apps in a flash if the well-placed person does not like what it is doing. It can order other apps to add or subtract to a blacklist based on political opinions. It can tell even the smallest company to comply or face death by lawfare. It can seize on any individual and make him a public enemy based entirely on an opinion or action that runs contrary to regime priorities....
"[T]his corporatism – in all its iterations including the regulatory state and the patent war chest that maintains and enforces monopoly – is the core source of all the current despotism. It obtained its first full trial run with the lockdowns of 2020, when tech companies and media joined in the ear-splitting propaganda campaigns to shelter in place, cancel holidays, and not visit grandma in the hospital and nursing home. It cheered as millions of small businesses were destroyed and big-box stores thrived as distributors of approved products, while vast swaths of the workforce were called nonessential and put on welfare.
"This was the corporatist state at work, with a large corporate sector wholly acquiescent to regime priority and a government fully dedicated to rewarding its industrial partners in every sector that went along with the political priority at the moment. The trigger for the construction of the vast machinery that rules our lives was far back in time and always begins the same way: with a seemingly inauspicious government contract.
"How well I recall those days in the 1990s when public schools first started to buy computers from Microsoft. Did alarm bells go off? Not for me. I had a typical attitude of any pro-business libertarian: whatever business wants to do, it should do. Surely it is up to the enterprise to sell to all willing buyers, even if that includes governments. In any case, how in the world would one prevent this? Government contracting with private business has been the norm from time immemorial. No harm done.
"And yet it turns out that vast harm was done. This was just the beginning of what became one of the world’s largest industries, far more powerful and decisive over industrial organization than old-fashioned producer-to-consumer markets. Adam Smith’s “butcher, baker, and brewery” have been crowded out by the very business conspiracies against which he gravely warned. These gigantic for-profit and public trading corporations became the operational foundation of the surveillance-driven corporatist complex.
"We are nowhere near coming to terms with the implications of this. It goes way beyond and fully transcends the old debates between capitalism and socialism. Indeed that is not what this is about. The focus on that might be theoretically interesting but it has little or no relevance to the current reality in which public and private have fully merged and intruded into every aspect of our lives, and with fully predictable results: economic decline for the many and riches for the few.
"This is also why neither the left nor the right, nor Democrats or Republicans, nor capitalists or socialists, seem to be speaking clearly to the moment in which we live. The dominating force on both the national and global scene today is techno-corporatism that intrudes itself into our food, our medicine, our media, our information flows, our homes, and all the way down to the hundreds of surveillance tools that we carry around in our pockets. I truly wish these companies were genuinely private, but they are not. They are de facto state actors. More precisely, they all work hand-in-glove and which is the hand and which is the glove is no longer clear.
"Coming to terms with this intellectually is the major challenge of our times. Dealing with it juridically and politically seems like a much more daunting task, to say the least. The problem is complicated by the drive to purge serious dissent at all levels of society. How did American capitalism become American corporatism? A little at a time and then all at once."
January 22, 2021 - "For several years now the World Economic Forum [WEF], host of the annual corporate celebrity bash known as the Davos Summit, has been a driving global force behind a move to overthrow market capitalism and profit-maximizing corporations and replace them with a new economic model called 'stakeholder capitalism'.... In the words of Klaus Schwab, the 82-year-old German economist who founded the WEF in 1973, the existing corporate enterprise model, the shareholder version that has dominated much of the world’s economic progress over the past century, needs to be replaced. 'We need a change of mindset, moving from short-term to long-term thinking, moving from shareholder capitalism to stakeholder responsibility. Environmental, social and good governance have to be a measured part of corporate and governmental accountability.'
"With the U.S. government now under Democratic Party control, a reformation of capitalism appears to be underway. 'It’s way past time we put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,' said Joe Biden when he outlined his platform last July.... An army of academics, consultants, executives and politicians is already on board the stakeholder movement....
"Schwab claims to have invented the stakeholder concept as a replacement for the shareholder version of corporate purpose most often associated with Nobel economist Milton Friedman. But in fact Schwab’s stakeholderism ... has a long and messy history.... Ending shareholder capitalism by merging private enterprise with government power is not a new idea.... In the United States, the idea ... reached a peak of sorts in the 1970s when Ralph Nader ... proposed a U.S. federal charter of major U.S. corporations 'whereby a government gives the corporate entity existence and that entity, in return, agrees to serve the public interest'.... Nader’s call for a U.S. government 'federal charter' for corporations was revived in 2018 by Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren. She proposed an Accountable Capitalism Act that would force American corporations with more than $1 billion in annual revenue to obtain a federal charter.... Corporate directors would be obligated to consider the interests of all corporate stakeholders, 'including employees, customers, shareholders, and the communities in which the company operates'....
"University of Calgary economist Randall Morck, editor of A History of Corporate Governance Around the World, sets the origins of legalized stakeholderism in Germany and the passage of the National Socialist government’s Shareholder Law of 1937. The law, writes Morck, 'freed corporate managers and directors of their specific fiduciary duty to shareholders and substituted a general duty to all stakeholders.' A paper in the 1938 issue of The American Economic Review described the new German corporate model as an application of the leading ideas of the German government at the time. The objectives of the law included 'protection of the interests of the public, employee and company by granting the state broad powers of intervention.' All forms of economic activity must observe the principle of 'public welfare before individual gain.' Beyond Germany, during the early years of the 20th century, many theorists and corporate executives embraced stakeholderism....
"The current effort to 'put an end to the era of shareholder capitalism,' as Biden said, aims to undo the free-market foundations of shareholder capitalism.... 'We must move on from neoliberalism in the post-COVID era,' says Schwab. We need to abandon the 'sacred cows,' such as 'free-market fundamentalism,' ...'start to build institutional platforms for public-private co-operation.' In his new book ... Schwab lists the four key power sectors that would sit at the corporate governance table: governments, civil society, corporations, and such international organizations as the United Nations. In that model, shareholders are likely to end up standing in line behind stakeholders — and stateholders.
"Shareholders are already taking a back seat. Corporate managers today fund the arts, finance political parties, give to charities, declare their climate-change activism and set up multimillion-dollar foundations that sponsor radical environmentalism. Supporters of the stakeholder movement include major institutional investors, accounting organizations, agencies and giant consultancies seeking to cash in on the corporate need for advice.... Canada’s top government-based pension plans, from the Canada Pension Plan Investment Board to the Ontario Teachers’ Pension Plan — the country’s largest shareholders — are now backing the stakeholder movement....
"Overhanging the stakeholder juggernaut is the total absence of any method to measure the performance of stakeholder governance. Randall Morck at the University of Calgary argues that loading multiple social and political responsibilities ... on to corporate executives and boards would likely lead to gross distortions in corporate decision-making at the expense of shareholders. 'Presented with a multitude of objectives, the decision-maker ends up focusing on none. Thus, with no way to keep score, stakeholder theory leaves top corporate managers unaccountable for their actions'....
"Two Harvard law professors — Lucian Bebchuk and Roberto Tallarita — recently described what they refer to as 'The Illusory Promise of Stakeholder Governance.' Stakeholderism, they conclude, 'would insulate corporate leaders from shareholder pressures and make them less accountable.” Even more bluntly, Bebchuk and Tallarita argue that the rise in support for stakeholderism among corporate leaders and their advisors 'is motivated, at least in part, by a desire to obtain insulation from hedge fund activists and institutional investors. In other words, they seek to advance managerialism by putting it in stakeholder’s clothing.' The result would be detrimental to shareholders and the economy. It would also, they add, undermine the achievement of stakeholder objectives. 'For those interested in addressing corporate externalities and protecting corporate stakeholders, embracing stakeholderism would be counterproductive.'
"Scholarship on the purpose of corporations dates back centuries, but the current prevalence of 'stakeholder capitalism' theory in law, economics and politics is an affront to fundamental principles. How can they call it 'capitalism' when the result would be the destruction of capitalism as we know it? Call it what it is: Stateholderism. That seems to be the plan."
August 28, 2017 - "After the murder of Heather Heyer in Charlottesville, many people are asking themselves what they should do if Nazis rally in their city. Should they put their bodies on the line in counter demonstrations? Some say yes. History says no. Take it from me: I study the original Nazis....
"Charlottesville was right out of the Nazi playbook. In the 1920s, the Nazi Party was just one political party among many.... It was in 1927, while still on the political fringes, that the Nazi Party scheduled a rally in a decidedly hostile location – the Berlin district of Wedding. Wedding was so left-of-center that the neighborhood had the nickname “Red Wedding,” red being the color of the Communist Party....
"The people of Wedding were determined to fight back against fascism in their neighborhood. On the day of the rally, hundreds of Nazis descended on Wedding. Hundreds of their opponents showed up too, organized by the local Communist Party. The anti-fascists tried to disrupt the rally, heckling the speakers. Nazi thugs retaliated. There was a massive brawl. Almost 100 people were injured.
"I imagine the people of Wedding felt they ... had courageously sent a message: Fascism was not welcome. But historians believe events like the rally in Wedding helped the Nazis build a dictatorship. Yes, the brawl got them media attention. But what was far, far more important was how it fed an escalating spiral of street violence. That violence helped the fascists enormously....
"We know now that many Germans supported the fascists because they were terrified of leftist violence in the streets. Germans opened their morning newspapers and saw reports of clashes like the one in Wedding. It looked like a bloody tide of civil war was rising in their cities. Voters and opposition politicians alike came to believe the government needed special police powers to stop violent leftists. Dictatorship grew attractive. The fact that the Nazis themselves were fomenting the violence didn’t seem to matter.
"One of Hitler’s biggest steps to dictatorial power was to gain emergency police powers, which he claimed he needed to suppress leftist violence....
"Today, right extremists are going around the country staging rallies just like the one in 1927 in Wedding. According to the civil rights advocacy organization the Southern Poverty Law Center, they pick places where they know antifascists are present, like university campuses. They come spoiling for a physical confrontation. Then they and their allies spin it to their advantage....
"There’s an additional wrinkle: the Antifa. When Nazis and white supremacists rally, the Antifa are likely to show up, too. 'Antifa' is short for anti-fascists, though the name by no means includes everyone who opposes fascism. The Antifa is a relatively small movement of the far left, with ties to anarchism. It arose in Europe’s punk scene in the 1980s to fight neo-Nazism. The Antifa says that because Nazism and white supremacy are violent, we must use any means necessary to stop them. This includes physical means.... The Antifa's tactics often backfire, just like those of Germany’s communist opposition to Nazism did in the 1920s....
"The cause Heather Heyer died for is best defended by avoiding the physical confrontation that the people who are responsible for her death want."
August 4, 2017 - "The paleo-libertarian seed that Ron Paul, Murray Rothbard, and Lew Rockwell planted in the 1990s has come to bear some really ugly fruit in the last couple of years as elements of the alt-right have made appearances in various libertarian organizations and venues. Back in February, alt-right hero Richard Spencer stirred up a fuss at the International Students for Liberty Conference in DC after being invited to hang out by a group of students calling themselves the “Hoppe Caucus.” Hans-Hermann Hoppe, long associated with the Ludwig von Mises Institute as well as a panoply of racists and anti-Semites, is perhaps the most popular gateway drug for the alt-right incursion into libertarianism.
"And within the last couple of weeks, Jeff Deist, president of the Mises Institute delivered a talk to students at Mises University entitled “For a New Libertarian.” In that talk, he knocks down an extended strawman of what he thinks constitutes the libertarianism he wants them to reject – what many might call “left-libertarianism'.... Most controversially, Deist, after continuing to argue that family, faith, and the like are the cultural glue that humans need and that libertarians should focus on, decided to end with:
In other words, blood and soil and God and nation still matter to people. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance.
"For those who know something about the history of the 20th century, the invocation of 'blood and soil' as something that libertarians should recognize as a valid concern and should appeal to should be chilling. That phrase, which has a history going back at least to the 19th century, was central to the Nazi movement and was at the core of their justification for eliminating those people who did not have connections to the German homeland. It remains a watchword of the nastiest elements on the right, as a quick visit to bloodandsoil.org will demonstrate....
"Perhaps Deist didn’t know all of that. If so, one would expect a decent person to immediately apologize for using that phrase that way in that context. To my knowledge, no such apology has appeared. On the assumption that he is not, in fact, a Nazi, the explanation left standing is that he and his defenders have no problem using rhetoric that will attract those sympathetic to Nazi-like views about nativism and Jews. It’s that lack of concern about engaging in that sort of rhetoric, if not a positive willingness to do so, that is so troubling here, and it is eating away at the liberal roots of libertarianism.....
As I pointed out with the Paul newsletters, all of this appeal to nativism, racism, and anti-Semitism and the like is in deep conflict with libertarianism’s liberalism. It’s particularly in conflict with the liberal cosmopolitanism of someone like Mises. And the use of Nazi language is especially galling as it was the very 'blood and soil' crowd who drove the Jewish Mises out of Vienna....
"Our history is one of liberal tolerance, universalism, and cosmopolitanism, putting the freedom and harmony of all people ahead of the supposed interests of any parochial sub-group, and especially ones defined by the artificial boundaries of nation-states and their subsets. Libertarians ignore this at the risk of irrelevance."
Alt.right author James Miller believes that "Fascism has an undeserved bad reputation." In his view: "Regardless of this reputation, Fascism is a very sensible economic and social ideology." He goes on to offer the following definition:
Fascism is an economic system in which a nation’s government plays a central role in monitoring all banking, trade, production, and labor activity which takes place within the nation. Such monitoring is done for the sole purpose of safeguarding and advancing the nation and its people. Under Fascism, the government will not approve of any business activity unless that business has a positive impact on the nation as a whole and the people of the nation — this is the axiom which determines everything under Fascism.[1]
Interestingly, this definition of fascism (which looks correct) also looks like a correct definition of progressivism, the economic philosophy of the Roosevelts, Woodrow Wilson, and every Democratic president since (save perhaps Truman and Clinton), and some Republican presidents as well (Gerald Ford, G.H.W. Bush).
Like socialism, fascism and progressivism are variants of statism: the belief that state control of society and the economy is necessary to bring about and maintain a good society. But while socialists try to achieve that control directly, through government ownership and increased government spending, progressives and fascists try to achieve it indirectly through regulation, oversight, and management of nominally private businesses and workers.
As the historical record shows, the fascist regimes of Germany and Italy, and the progressive regime of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, were composed of mutual admirers, who followed a similar politico-economic agenda. As David Gordon of the Mises Institue has documented:
The Nazi Party newspaper, the Völkischer Beobachter, "stressed 'Roosevelt's adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,' praising the president's style of leadership as being compatible with Hitler's own dictatorial Führerprinzip" (p. 190).
Nor was Hitler himself lacking in praise for his American counterpart. He "told American ambassador William Dodd that he was 'in accord with the President in the view that the virtue of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline should dominate the entire people. These moral demands which the President places before every individual citizen of the United States are also the quintessence of the German state philosophy, which finds its expression in the slogan "The Public Weal Transcends the Interest of the Individual"'" (pp. 19-20)....
Mussolini, who did not allow his work as dictator to interrupt his prolific journalism, wrote a glowing review of Roosevelt's Looking Forward. He found "reminiscent of fascism … the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices"(pp. 23-24)....
Roosevelt never had much use for Hitler, but Mussolini was another matter. "'I don't mind telling you in confidence,' FDR remarked to a White House correspondent, 'that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman'" (p. 31). Rexford Tugwell, a leading adviser to the president, had difficulty containing his enthusiasm for Mussolini's program to modernize Italy: "It's the cleanest … most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious" (p. 32)[2]
Because (unlike socialism), fascism and progressivism do not directly challenge a country's economic status quo, they can appeal to the conservative as well as the totalitarian biases that I have argued exist in modern political societies.[3] However, like socialism, fascism and progressivism imply a radical restructuring of society, with state power vastly increased at the expense of individual rights and liberties.
This ideological symmetry can lead to tactical symmetries: for instance, historical fascism relied on tactics of political violence copied from those on the radical left (the anarchists and Bolsheviks).[4] Progressives, on the other hand, initially rejected those methods; one fundamental difference between progressives and fascists. That was because radical leftism and fascism were populist, bottom-up movements, while progressivism began as a thoroughly top-down, establishment movement. However, the mass-based, bottom-up progressivism that began in North America in the 1960s has increasingly also adopted political violence tactics from the radical left, further blurring the difference between the fascist and progressive ideologies.
[2] David Gordon, "Three New Deals: Why the Nazis and Fascists Loved FDR" (review of Wolfgang Schivelbusch, Three New Deals: Reflections on Roosevelt's America, Mussolini's Italy, and Hitler's Germany, 1933-1939. Metropolitan Books, 2006). Mises Daily, September 22, 2006, Ludwig von Mises Institute. https://mises.org/library/three-new-deals-why-nazis-and-fascists-loved-fdr
July 17, 2015 - "Just a few weeks ago, Donald Trump was a crank and joke.... This week, he leads the polls among the pack of Republican aspirants to the office of president of the United States. While all the other candidates are following the rules, playing the media, saying the right things, obeying the civic conventions, Trump is taking the opposite approach. He doesn’t care. He says whatever. Thousands gather at his rallies to thrill to the moment.... Suddenly he is serious, if only for a time, and hence it is time to take his political worldview seriously....
"So, what does Trump actually believe?... Of course, race baiting is essential to the ideology, and there was plenty of that. When a Hispanic man asked a question, Trump interrupted him and asked if he had been sent by the Mexican government. He took it a step further, dividing blacks from Hispanics by inviting a black man to the microphone to tell how his own son was killed by an illegal immigrant.
"Because Trump is the only one who speaks this way, he can count on support from the darkest elements of American life. He doesn’t need to actually advocate racial homogeneity, call for whites-only signs to be hung at immigration control or push for expulsion or extermination of undesirables. Because such views are verboten, he has the field alone, and he can count on the support of those who think that way by making the right noises.
"Trump also tosses little bones to the religious right, enough to allow them to believe that he represents their interests. Yes, it’s implausible and hilarious. At the speech I heard, he pointed out that he is a Presbyterian, and thus he is personally affected every time ISIS beheads a Christian.
"But as much as racial and religious resentment is part of his rhetorical apparatus, it is not his core. His core is about business, his own business and his acumen thereof....
"He speaks of the United States as if it were one thing, one single firm. A business. 'We' are in competition with 'them,' as if the country was IBM competing against Samsung, Apple or Dell. 'We' are not 300 million people pursuing unique dreams and ideas, with special tastes or interests, cooperating with people around the world to build prosperity. 'We' are doing one thing, and that is being part of one business....
"Trade theory developed over hundreds of years plays no role in his thinking at all. To him, America is a homogenous unit, no different from his own business enterprise. With his run for president, he is really making a takeover bid, not just for another company to own but for an entire country to manage from the top down, under his proven and brilliant record of business negotiation and acquisition....
"What’s distinct about Trumpism, and the tradition of thought it represents, is that it is not leftist in its cultural and political outlook (see how he is praised for rejecting 'political correctness'), and yet it is still totalitarian in the sense that it seeks total control of society and economy and demands no limits on state power.
"Whereas the left has long attacked bourgeois institutions like family, church and property, fascism has made its peace with all three. It (very wisely) seeks political strategies that call on the organic matter of the social structure and inspire masses of people to rally around the nation as a personified ideal in history, under the leadership of a great and highly accomplished man....
"This is how strongmen take over countries. They say some true things, boldly, and conjure up visions of national greatness under their leadership. They’ve got the flags, the music, the hype, the hysteria, the resources, and they work to extract that thing in many people that seeks heroes and momentous struggles in which they can prove their greatness....
"This is a dark history, and I seriously doubt that Trump himself is aware of it. Instead, he just makes it up as he goes along, speaking from his gut... This penchant has always served him well. It cannot serve a whole nation well. Indeed, the very prospect is terrifying and not just for the immigrant groups and foreign peoples he has chosen to scapegoat for all the country’s problems. It’s a disaster in waiting for everyone."
