The View From 1776

President Obama’s economic programs bear close resemblance to the 1920s Fascist State Corporatism of Benito Mussolini. 

The Federal government has nationalized banks and automobile companies, firing executives, deciding what products will be manufactured and where, and commanding banks to lend money to poor credit risks.  Cap-and-trade “green” legislation will force a massive increase in energy prices for the industrialized nation between the heavily liberal-progressive-socialist East and West Coasts, along with the loss of many thousands of manufacturing jobs.  Ever more detailed regulation of our daily lives is being imposed across many sectors of the economy.

After imposition of the President’s procrustean global warming policies, government will become the major generator of new jobs.  This is what Friedrich von Hayek called The Road to Serfdom.

The essence of President Obama’s political and economic program was summarized in a book published just before the start of Franklin Roosevelt’s 1932 presidential campaign.  That book, Mr. Stuart Chase’s A New Deal, also was the source of name that FDR’s campaign gurus adopted for his campaign and the new administration.  It is not accidental that President Obama’s advisors called his administration a new New Deal.

Mr. Chase offered a liberal-progressive-socialist analysis for the cause of the Depression and described the centralized planning and management liberals believed was required of the Federal government.  President Obama and his liberal-progressive-socialist brain trust have adopted those ideas.

Mr. Chase wrote:

…the cycle is a direct product of that specialization which appeared with the industrial revolution.  It is a product of laissez-faire, and the neglect to inquire what an economic system is for…There never has been control from the top, and that is the only point from which the cycle may be steadied…I suspect it is the end of the economic system as we have known it – and suffered with it – in the past…a new deal is in order.

What remedies did Mr. Chase propose? 

The drive of collectivism leads toward control from the top. … At bottom the conception of economic planning is science supervising a people’s housekeeping. … And so the final idea of a National Planning Board emerges; …a group which knows the past, can give capable advice as to the present, and sees into the future, especially the technological future. …The real work, the real thought, the real action must come from the technicians: that class most able, most clear-headed of all in American life, hitherto only half utilized in technical detail and in college class rooms. …This is a long-swing project we are starting, longer than the secular trend; longer than the industrial revolution itself.  Errors will be made; methods will be tried out and discarded; but the principle of control from the top must go on.

It is also instructive to note the New Deal thesis about the relationship of the individual to the state, as described by Mr. Chase:

The state is the embodiment of the whole community, and its rule of action, in theory at least, ‘the public interest.’ If your corporation is busily dynamiting the public interest, the state has the right to close you up. …To tell an American that he cannot invest his money in this project, or even to suggest that it is thrown away in that, is a bold and unheard-of step to the left; …But how else can the obsolescence rate be steadied, excess capacity and overproduction kept within bounds of market requirements, thoroughly vicious and wasteful enterprises be checked, the non-speculative investor be protected? …One of the most interesting tasks of the Planning Board will be an attempt to draw the line between those economic areas where competition is still useful and those where it has outlived its usefulness, and either is already supplanted or should be supplanted by some form of collectivism. …The balancing and regulating of man hours will, like minimum wages, operate to weed out parasitic enterprises, establishments so inefficient that they can make their margin only by driving workers through a ten or twelve hour day. …This is the program of the third road.  It is not an attempt to bolster up capitalism, it is frankly aimed at the destruction of capitalism, specifically in its most evil sense of ruthless expansion.  The redistribution of national income, the sequestration of excess profits, the control of new investments, are all designed to that end. …And woe to Supreme Courts, antiquated rights of property, checks and balances and democratic dogmas which stand in its path.

Compare this to Benito Mussolini’s statement in The Political and Social Doctrine of Fascism (1933),

The Fascist State has drawn into itself even the economic activities of the nation, and, through the corporative social and educational institutions created by it, its influence reaches every aspect of the national life and includes, framed in their respective organizations, all the political, economic and spiritual forces of the nation.