This editorial did not mention, of course, that a system in which the government does not nationalize the means of production, but assumes total control over the economy is fascism.
It is true that the welfare-statists are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property, that they want to “preserve” private property— with government control of its use and disposal. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism.
Here is another piece of evidence. This one is less crudely naive than the first and much more insidiously wrong. This is from a letter to The New York Times (November 1, 1964), written by an assistant professor of economics:
Viewed by almost every yardstick, the United States
today is more committed to private enterprise than probably any other industrial country and is not even remotely approaching a socialist system. As the term is understood by students of comparative economic systems and others who do not use it loosely, socialism is identified with extensive nationalization, a dominant public sector, a strong cooperative movement, egalitarian income distribution, a total welfare state and central planning.
In the United States not only has there been no nationalization, but Government concerns have been turned over to private enterprise….
Income distribution in this country is one of the most unequal among the developed nations, and tax cuts and tax loopholes have blunted the moderate progressivity of our tax structure. Thirty years after the New Deal, the United States has a very limited welfare state, compared with the comprehensive social security and public housing schemes in many European countries.
By no stretch of the imagination is the real issue in this campaign a choice between capitalism and socialism or between a free and a planned economy. The issue is about two differing concepts of the role of government within the framework of an essentially private enterprise system.
The role of government in a private enterprise system is that of a policeman who protects man’s individual rights (including property rights) by protecting men from physical force; in a free economy, the government does not control, regulate, coerce, or interfere with men’s economic activities.
I do not know the political views of the writer of that letter; he may be a “liberal” or he may be an alleged defender of capitalism. But if he is this last, then I must point out that such views as his—which are shared by many “conservatives”—are more damaging and derogatory to capitalism than the ideas of its avowed enemies.
Such “conservatives” regard capitalism as a system compatible with government controls, and thus help to spread the most dangerous misconceptions. While full, laissez-faire capitalism has not yet existed anywhere, while some (unnecessary) government controls were allowed to dilute and undercut the original American system (more through error than through theoretical intention)—such controls were minor impediments, the mixed economies of the nineteenth century were predominantly free, and it is this unprecedented freedom that brought about mankind’s unprecedented progress. The principles, the theory, and the actual practice of capital-
ism rest on a free, unregulated market, as the history of the last two centuries has amply demonstrated. No defender of capitalism can permit himself to ignore the exact meaning of the term “laissez-faire”—and of the term “mixed economy,” which clearly indicates the two opposite elements involved in the mixture: the element of economic freedom, which is capitalism, and the element of government controls, which is statism.
An insistent campaign has been going on for years to make us accept the Marxist view that all governments are tools of economic class interests and that capitalism is not a free economy, but a system of government controls serving some privileged class. The purpose of that campaign is to distort economics, rewrite history, and obliterate the existence and the possibility of a free country and an uncontrolled economy. Since a system of nominal private property ruled by government controls is not capitalism, but fascism, the only choice this obliteration would leave us is the choice between fascism and socialism (or communism)—which all the statists in the world, of all varieties, degrees, and denominations, are struggling frantically to make us believe. (The destruction of freedom is their common goal, after which they hope to fight one another for power.)
It is thus that the views of that professor and of many “conservatives” lend credence and support to the vicious leftist propaganda which equates capitalism with fascism.
But there is a bitter kind of justice in the logic of events. That propaganda is having an effect which may be advantageous to the communists, but which is the opposite of the effect intended by the “liberals,” the welfare-statists, the socialists, who share the guilt of spreading it: instead of smearing capitalism, that propaganda has succeeded in whitewashing and disguising fascism.
In this country, few people care to advocate, to defend, or even to understand capitalism; yet fewer still wish to give up its advantages. So if they are told that capitalism is compatible with controls, with the particular controls which further their particular interests—be it government handouts, or minimum wages, or price-supports, or subsidies, or antitrust laws, or censorship of dirty movies—they will go along with such programs, in the comforting belief that the results will be nothing worse than a “modified” capitalism. And thus a country which does abhor fascism is moving by imperceptible degrees—through ignorance, confusion, evasion, moral cowardice, and intellectual default—not toward socialism or any mawkish altruistic ideal, but toward a plain, brutal, predato-
ry, power-grubbing, de facta fascism.
No, we have not reached that stage. But we are certainly not “an essentially private enterprise system” any longer. At present, we are a disintegrating, unsound, precariously unstable mixed economy—a random, mongrel mixture of socialistic schemes, communistic influences, fascist controls, and shrinking remnants of capitalism still paying the costs of it all—the total of it rolling in the direction of a fascist state.
Consider our present Administration. I don’t think I’ll be accused of unfairness if I say that President Johnson is not a philosophical thinker. No, he is not a fascist, he is not a socialist, he is not a pro-capitalist. Ideologically, he is not anything in particular. Judging by his past record and by the consensus of bis own supporters, the concept of an ideology is not applicable in bis case. He is a politician—a very dangerous, yet very appropriate phenomenon in our present state. He is an almost fiction-like, archetypical embodiment of the perfect leader of a mixed economy: a man who enjoys power for power’s sake, who is expert at the game of manipulating pressure groups, of playing them all against one another, who loves the process of dispensing smiles, frowns, and favors, particularly sudden favors, and whose vision does not extend beyond the range of the next election.
Neither President Johnson nor any of today’s prominent groups would advocate the socialization of industry. Like his modern predecessors in office, Mr. Johnson knows that businessmen are the milch-cows of a mixed economy, and he does not want to destroy them, he wants them to prosper and to feed his welfare projects (which the next election requires), while they, the businessmen, are eating out of his hand, as they seem to be anxiously eager to do. The business lobby is certain to get its fair share of influence and of recognition— just like the labor lobby or the farm lobby or the lobby of any “major segment”—on bis own terms. He will be particularly adept at the task of creating and encouraging the type of businessmen whom I call “the aristocracy of pull.” This is not a socialistic pattern; it is the typical pattern of fascism.
The political, intellectual, and moral meaning of Mr. Johnson’s policy toward businessmen was summed up eloquently in an article in The New York Times of January 4, 1965:
Mr. Johnson is an out-and-out Keynesian in his assiduous wooing of the business community. Unlike President Roosevelt, who delighted in attacking businessmen until World War II forced him into a reluctant truce, and President Kennedy, who also incurred busi-
ness hostility, President Johnson has worked long and hard to get businessmen to join ranks in a national consensus for his programs.
This campaign may perturb many Keynesians, but it is pure Keynes. Indeed, Lord Keynes, who once was regarded as a dangerous and Machiavellian figure by American businessmen, made specific suggestions for improving relations between the President and the business community.
He set down his views in 1938 in a letter to President Roosevelt, who was running into renewed criticism from businessmen following the recession that took place the previous year. Lord Keynes, who always sought to transform capitalism in order to save it, recognized the importance of business confidence and tried to convince Mr. Roosevelt to repair the damage that had been done.
He advised the President that businessmen were not politicians and did not respond to the same treatment. They are, he wrote “much milder than politicians, at the same time allured and terrified by the glare of publicity, easily persuaded to be ‘patriots,* perplexed, bemused, indeed terrified, yet only too anxious to take a cheerful view, vain perhaps but very unsure of themselves, pathetically responsive to a kind word. . . .”