What have we got to lose?
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Will we still ‘Donald Sutherland’ people who fail to reply in the form of a question?
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Nothing. 'Twould be cool to have one on every street corner. Next to the taco truck. For dessert.
Also, I think those were muffins with frosting, not cupcakes. Probably bran with raisins. Blech!
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This is wrong as well… Norway socks the oil money away into global equities, so as not to flood the economy with cheap money. They also impose high tarrifs to incentivize domestic producers, so they don’t just end up importing everything and have no jobs.
They are one of the only small countries with large oil reserves for which oil has not massively fucked their economy/people.
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It’s interesting that Keynes considered the most important achievement of Breton-Woods to be establishment of the right of governments to restrict capital movements and the U.S. Treasury now regards free capital mobility as a ‘fundamental right’.
As to the term I liked Gore Vidal’s description of neoliberalism:
“free enterprise for the poor and socialism for the rich” where “the rich have been increasingly protected from the market forces while the poor have been more and more exposed to them”.
Yeah I’m assuming the symbol in the graph is meant to represent fascism in general (yet another loaded term with a plurality of definitions).
That the graph also represents capitalism on a decentralized extreme implies it’s probably speaks to ideological narratives rather than the economic realities!
I guess most “democratic” states still seem heavily centralized to me - at least in the sense that rules and regulations are set by a small centralized minority, tend to favor those who make them, and are administered through networks of force and coercion.
Despite all the rhetoric about democratic ideals any reasonable alternatives to current financial and economic methodologies are rarely up for political discussion let alone democratic participation!
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Our chains?
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But we don’t have an unrestrained free market baloney system, not that I think a true free market system could actually work. We have monopolist, cartel based system of corporatism. It’s worse than you say, because we’ve dumbed down any discussion of our economic system as one that must maintain a free market system while winnowing away most aspects of a free market system and then championing any results that we do get as a miracle of free markets. It’s quite delusional and sick.
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I think it was Walter Benjamin who pointed out that fascism wasn’t a political ideology but rather an aesthetic containing contradictory elements. Militarism, nationalism, racism, a worship of a mystical, imaginary past were key but the actual details of economics were not. The German Nazis were profoundly corrupt and inefficient : their air force failed against the British their tanks against the Soviets…
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Isn’t that a big part of the Anabaptist family of religions?
Notably the Amish and Mennonites using somewhat common public resources. But Hutterites almost completely eliminating any private ownership.
Um, nope, nothing Godly here…
Posted by a fellow Boinger the other day, excellent essay by Umberto Eco:
https://www.nybooks.com/articles/1995/06/22/ur-fascism/
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I hadn’t read that but a shorter one where he has his Ur fascism characteristics laid out. I think Benjamin inspired that.
I must admit I don’t know most of the fascists references in places like the Balkans. But then, most Russians apparently don’t know about their invasion of Czechoslovakia…
Is that from his same book of essays where he lays out how to determine what is or isn’t porn? Travels with a Salmon, I think?
This graph is too forced to be useful, I think.
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Much like Trump’s “a Hillary win means a taco truck on every corner” statement I’m failing to see the downside here.
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[Standard Jones Disclaimer when defending Nazis applies: Nazis, I hate those guys.]
That the Luftwaffe didn’t succeed in the Battle of Britain and Nazis eventually lost to the Russians doesn’t help your argument that the Nazis were profoundly corrupt and inefficient. One can equally point to them having subsumed almost the entire European continent, having practically rebuilt a country from scratch in 20 years. Technologically, they had many innovations the West (and East) couldnt touch: eg, V1/V2 rockets, jet engines. If they hadn’t waged war as soon as they had, they would have become a vastly powerful (and horrible) nation (and not simply because of the inevitable acquisition of nuclear weapons),
Are you really going to say that Stalin’s communism was more efficient than Hitler’s corporatism-fascism? There are plenty of reasons why the USSR outproduced Germany: they had greater natural resources (in particular, iron ore), greater population, factories far from the battlefield. Also, I’m not claiming Germany was “admirably efficient”. I just dont understand where this “laughably inefficient” claim is coming from.
This “nazis had a few good ideas” really needs to die in a fire, as it’s just ahistorical.
So, you just popped in to remind us that the Nazi regime was evil? Thanks for this timely reminder. Next time read the disclaimer.
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I’m beginning to think you’re right.
Like others have pointed out the conflation of economic and political ideologies is confounding.
I’m still hanging on to the possibility there’s something illuminating in a division between anarchism and communism along a centralization axis but the more I learn the more specious the whole thing appears!
I get your point that I’m cherry picking but I chose those two examples specifically because they exemplified two elements of Nazi economics. Germany was a mighty industrial nation with the largest company in the world and far leading technology in some areas and a deep tradition in others. They also annexed great industrial areas in central Europe before the war and expanded into the largest economy in Europe through conquest rather than innovation.
The Luftwaffe failed because they were led by drug addicted I competents: Hitler’s cronies. This was to exemplify the corruption and inefficiency. Their biggest failure agsinst the Soviet Union was they failed to win the tank battle at Kursk (more important than Stalin grad) and thus access to Kazakh oil fields. They did this because they couldn’t manufacture enough tanks. The soviet communist system made more and equally good tanks. Many, many more.
Sure Germany had other problems but communism out and better manufactured Nazism and I don’t see a lot of people claiming they were admirably efficient.
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Um… no. Not so much:
Many of “their” projects were well in the works prior to the nazi period. The german economy was already rebounding prior to hitler, for another thing. They never made trains run on time, and they prioritized the murder of Jews over literally everything else they were doing.
This “nazis had a few good ideas” really needs to die in a fire, as it’s just ahistorical.
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