Rand, Ayn – Capitalism

He was confident that Mr. Roosevelt could tame them and make them do his bidding, provided he followed some simple Keynesian rules.

“You could do anything you liked with them,” the letter continued, “if you would treat them (even the big ones), not as wolves and tigers, but as domestic animals by nature, even though they have been badly brought up and not trained as you would wish.”

President Roosevelt ignored his advice. So, apparently, did President Kennedy. But President Johnson seems to have got the message…. By kind words and frequent pats on the head, he had had the business community eating out of his hand.

Mr. Johnson appears to agree with Lord Keynes’s view that there is little to be gained by carrying on a feud with businessmen. As he put it, “If you work them into the surly, obstinate, terrified mood of which domestic animals, wrongly handled, are capable, the nation’s burden will not get carried to market; and in the end, public opinion will veer their way.”

The view of businessmen as “domestic animals” who carry “the nation’s burden” and who must be “trained” by the President “to do his bidding” is certainly not a view compati-

ble with capitalism. It is not a view applicable to socialism, since there are no businessmen in a socialist state. It is a view that expresses the economic essence of fascism, of the relationship between business and government in a fascist state.

No matter what the verbal camouflage, such is the actual meaning of any variant of “transformed” (or “modified” or “modernized” or “humanized”) capitalism. In all such doctrines, the “humanization” consists of turning some members of society (the most productive ones) into beasts of burden.

The formula by which the sacrificial animals are to be fooled and tamed is being repeated today with growing insistence and frequency: businessmen, it is said, must regard the government, not as an enemy, but as a “partner.” The notion of a “partnership” between a private group and public officials, between business and government, between production and force, is a linguistic corruption (an “anti-concept”) typical of a fascist ideology—an ideology that regards force as the basic element and ultimate arbiter in all human relationships.

“Partnership” is an indecent euphemism for “government control.” There can be no partnership between armed bureaucrats and defenseless private citizens who have no choice but to obey. What chance would you have against a “partner” whose arbitrary word is law, who may give you a hearing (if your pressure group is big enough), but who will play favorites and bargain your interests away, who will always have the last word and the legal “right” to enforce it on you at the point of a gun, holding your property, your work, your future, your life in his power? Is that the meaning of “partnership”?3

But there are men who may find such a prospect attractive; they exist among businessmen as among every other group or profession: the men who dread the competition of a free market and would welcome an armed “partner” to extort special advantages over their abler competitors; men who seek to rise, not by merit but by pull, men who are willing and eager to live not by right, but by favor. Among businessmen, this type of mentality was responsible for the passage of the antitrust laws and is still supporting them today.

» Ayn Rand, The Fascist New Frontier, New York: Nathaniel Branden Institute, 1963, p. 8.

A substantial number of Republican businessmen switched to the side of Mr. Johnson in the last election. Here are some interesting observations on this subject, from a survey by The New York Times (September 16, 1964):

Interviews in five cities in the industrial Northeast and Midwest disclose striking differences in political outlook between officials of large corporations and men who operate smaller businesses. . . . The business executives who expect to cast the first Democratic Presidential vote of their lives are nearly all affiliated with large companies. . . . There is more support for President Johnson among business executives who are in their 40’s and 50’s than there is among either older or younger businessmen. . . . Many businessmen in their 40’s and 50’s say they find relatively little shifting toward support of Mr. Johnson on the part of younger business executives. Interviews with those in their 30’s confirm this. . . . The younger executives themselves speak with pride of their generation as the one that interrupted and reversed the trend toward more liberalism in younger persons. … It is on the issue of Government deficits that the division of opinion between small and large businessmen emerges most dramatically. Officials of giant corporations have a far greater tendency to accept the idea that budget deficits are sometimes necessary and even desirable. The typical small businessman, however, reserves a very special scorn for deficit spending….

This gives us an indication of who are the vested interests in a mixed economy—and what such an economy does to the beginners or the young.

An essential aspect of the socialistically inclined mentality is the desire to obliterate the difference between the earned and the unearned, and, therefore, to permit no differentiation between such businessmen as Hank Rearden and Orren Boyle. To a concrete-bound, range-of-the-moment, primitive socialist mentality—a mentality that clamors for a “redistribution of wealth” without any concern for the origin of wealth—the enemy is all those who are rich, regardless of the source of their riches. Such mentalities, those aging, graying “liberals,” who had been the “idealists” of the 30’s, are clinging desperately to the illusion that we are moving toward some sort of socialist state inimical to the rich and beneficial to the poor—while frantically evading the spectacle of what kind of rich are being destroyed and what kind are flourish-

ing under the system they, the “liberals,” have established. The grim joke is on them: their alleged “ideals” have paved the way, not toward socialism, but toward fascism. The collector of their efforts is not the helplessly, brainlessly virtuous “little man” of their flat-footed imagination and shopworn fiction, but the worst type of predatory rich, the rich-by-force, the rich-by-political-privilege, the type who has no chance under capitalism, but who is always there to cash in on every collectivist “noble experiment.”

It is the creators of wealth, the Hank Reardens, who are destroyed under any form of statism—socialist, communist, or fascist; it is the parasites, the Orren Boyles, who are the privileged “elite” and the profiteers of statism, particularly of fascism. (The special profiteers of socialism are the James Taggarts; of communism—the Floyd Ferrises.) The same is true of their psychological counterparts among the poor and among the men of all the economic levels in-between.

The particular form of economic organization, which is becoming more and more apparent in this country, as an outgrowth of the power of pressure groups, is one of the worst variants of statism: guild socialism. Guild socialism robs the talented young of their future—by freezing men into professional castes under rigid rules. It represents an open embodiment of the basic motive of most statists, though they usually prefer not to confess it: the entrenchment and protection of mediocrity from abler competitors, the shackling of the men of superior ability down to the mean average of their professions. That theory is not too popular among socialists (though it has its advocates)—but the most famous instance of its large-scale practice was Fascist Italy.

In the 1930’s, a few perceptive men said that Roosevelt’s New Deal was a form of guild socialism and that it was closer to Mussolini’s system than to any other. They were ignored. Today, the evidence is unmistakable.

It was also said that if fascism ever came to the United States, it would come disguised as socialism. In this connection, I recommend that you read or re-read Sinclair Lewis’ // Can’t Happen Here—with special reference to the character, style, and ideology of Berzelius Windrip, the fascist leader.

Now let me mention, and answer, some of the standard objections by which today’s “liberals” attempt to camouflage (to differentiate from fascism) the nature of the system they are supporting.

“Fascism requires one-party rule.” What will the notion of “Government by Consensus” amount to in practice?

“Fascism’s goal is the conquest of the world.” What is the goal of those global-minded, bipartisan champions of the United Nations? And, if they reach it, what positions do they expect to acquire in the power-structure of “One World”?

“Fascism preaches racism.” Not necessarily. Hitler’s Germany did; Mussolini’s Italy did not

“Fascism is opposed to the welfare state.” Check your premises and your history books. The father and originator of the welfare state, the man who put into practice the notion of buying the loyalty of some groups with money extorted from others, was Bismarck—the political ancestor of Hitler. Let me remind you that the full title of the Nazi Party was: the National Socialist Workers Party of Germany.

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