Our failed, teacher’s union-led, largely socialist “education system” has left Americans wholly ignorant of some simple truths of economics (no surprise there):
Marxism actually comes in three flavors, all leading to tyranny, and suppressed liberty for non-elites.
1) Democratic Socialism is the “training” phase, like a “drug dealer” giving away “free samples,” knowing you will be back for more, thereby moving society inexorably toward one of the more tyrannical forms of Marxism.
2) Communism becomes so reliant on the foolish conceit of horribly incompetent government central planners (imagine a business run by AOC and Pete Buttigieg), it loses the ability to feed itself, and collapses, always, and everywhere. Workers ending in commune “prisons,” elites living in lavish excess, until it all comes crashing down.
3) Fascism (increasingly in the U.S. & CCP today) is the most dangerous, because it was designed to address the principal failures of Communism. It is Marxist Socialism with a “funding source,” and central planning shared with big business management “expertise.” The collaboration of a few government-protected, monopolistic big corporations, and grifting big government, joined at the hip, for their mutual empowerment and enrichment, and your enslavement. The masses are “appeased” with socialist subsistence.
The Italian word root, “Fascista,” refers to a small bundle of sticks being stronger than any one stick. Giovanni Gentile envisioned a small number of selected Big Companies, “bundled” with big government agencies. The axe head attached to their “Fascista” bundle logo, symbolizes the tyranny of the state employed in service this bundle to enforce the will of the elites.
The uninformed “working definition” of “fascism,” in most common use after eighty years of indoctrination from the Left, is something like “right-wing capitalist tyranny.” This is most unfortunate because it causes us to be blind to what fascism actually is and how to prevent its rise, and because the left has used it to smear both the political right, and capitalism.
We keep hearing trends toward actual fascism labeled variously as “crony capitalism,” “corporatist capitalism,” “neo-feudalism,” and a dozen other foolish labels, even among opinion leaders we might be aligned with, on the Right, because the Left and our education system began to bury the economic truth almost a century ago.
Fascism shows the false “facade” of a market economy, but with large monopolistic corporations, suppressed small and medium businesses, and increasingly, all major decisions made by corporate and government “central planners,” not markets. Fascism is no kind of Capitalism, because at the market-driving level of big corporations and big government, it lacks any real competing “market” forces responding to supply and demand.
The principal “advantage” of Fascism over Communism, is to add some practical business expertise to its big government central planning. It has the management expertise to grow, without completely starving its workforce, who nevertheless are still crushed by its tyranny − denied the liberty and opportunity of actual market-controlled Capitalism, with a thriving core of small and medium businesses, the “incubational” genius of true Capitalism.
We have also been taught that Fascism is an ideology of the “extreme right,” which is a lie created by the Left after WWII, to protect their precious “Marxism” from being smeared with the evils of the NAZI holocaust. This absurdity has led recently to the further myth of “horseshoe extremism,” the notion that the extreme right and extreme left wrap around and meet, like a horseshoe – complete nonsense as we will see. Fascism and Communism are close cousins, like Suni and Shia Islam, they hate one another, but they hate everyone else more. Both Fascism and Communism are Marxist ideologies of the Left.
The correct way to understand the Right versus the Left, is on the axis of “liberty.” The Left puts their conception of the “collective-good of the group” over the “individual,” while the Right goes to great lengths to maximize competing individual rights, best exemplified in our Constitution and Bill of Rights, things with which no Leftist government will ever concern itself. If one wished to identify an “extreme right,” it is not Fascism, it would be libertarians devolving into anarchy, no government beyond the “self,” unlimited individual liberty, “might makes right.”
Our U.S., Constitutional, Democratic Republic is a very sophisticated maximization of individual rights, while following the Biblical mandate to neither allow the powerful to suppress the rights of the week, nor empowering the weak to demonize and destroy the strong; all men are to be treated equally under the law; famously “a nation of laws and not men,” in the words of John Adams. It should be noted that we are a Constitutional “Democratic” Republic. Our founders abhorred “pure democracy,” which they correctly understood to be “mob rule,” but the “representatives” in our republic are not intended to be inherited, purchased, or taken through power, all of which are possible forms of a republic. We are a “Democratic Republic,” because “We the People” are able to vote democratically to both nominate, and elect our representatives.
There is another related principle here which our mostly Marxist schools have tactically refused to teach properly, the quote that “all men are created equal.” The Left likes to use this to argue for equality of “outcomes,” that if some are poor and others are wealthy, then the society is broken and the outcomes must be equalized by government. The correct understanding of this is that our Creator created us with equal “moral value and weight” in His eyes, that the law should not favor one over another. No one ever believed that all men are born with equal intelligence, equal ambition, equal strength, or equal health, but merely that we all are created to be of “equal value” in God’s eyes, and equally entitled to pursue our individual will, and reap the rewards or consequences of our choices. It is shocking today how few, even in the U.S., can articulate this.
One often hears it protested that, “the U.S. is not a Democracy, we are a Republic,” which is a confused misunderstanding. “Democracy” comes from two Greek roots – “demos,” meaning “the people,” or “the common people,” as in “We the People,” and “Kratos” (or “cracy”), meaning to rule, power, or strength. Pure, or simple “democracy” therefore means direct “rule by the people.” Our founders protected us from this tyranny of pure democratic “mob-rule” in our “democracy,” and indeed never even used the word “democracy” in our documents, by buffering the potential excesses of democracy with democratically elected “representatives,” who are in turn constrained by our Constitution. The “people” do not directly “govern,” but “democratically” elect “representatives,” who then are then expected to exercise their governing power to broadly follow the will of the people, while adhering to the constraints of our Constitution, and hopefully their best judgement. So, while we are a form of democracy, we are not a “pure,” or “simple” democracy.
Returning to economics; in true, authentic Capitalism, the economic lifeblood of individual liberty, entrepreneurs must first become “servants,” they must “serve” the marketplace before being rewarded with any profit. An entrepreneur in Capitalism risks their capital in the hope they can create a product or service in which the marketplace will find enough value, that the entrepreneur can earn some profit, which especially in the beginning, they must largely reinvest into their business. The entrepreneur “subjects” their desire for success to the judgement of the marketplace of consumers, the people. The sole arbiter of their success is the free-will choices of the marketplace of consumers.
Government’s only role in true capitalism should be to create a “level playing field,” enforcing such standards of moral and ethical justice as are broadly agreed to by the society. It must justly arbitrate disputes between parties without favoritism, protect a stable monetary system, and leave to the competing market forces of “supply and demand” to judge the fair exchange of value.
In complete contrast with Capitalism, “Fascism” was developed in Italy by Giovanni Gentile (30 May 1875 – 15 April 1944), to be an “evolved” form of Marxism, attempting to cure the gross incompetence of government central-planning, by enlisting selected big business experts. Far from its opposite, Gentile saw Fascism as a perfected form of Marxism.
After the NAZI Holocaust of WWII, Marxists found it embarrassing for “Fascism” to be identified as Marxist, so they crafted and propagandized the myth that Fascism was the opposite of Marxist Communism, and largely succeeded in associating it with tyrannical Capitalism, and Nationalism. The Communists labeling themselves “ANTIFA” (anti-fascist) was all part of this propaganda. Many have observed that the tactics and morality of ANTIFA more nearly resemble the extreme tyranny of the worst Fascists of NAZI Germany, than any true capitalism, which they routinely label as Fascist.
Marxist elites in the West tried to tell us that Fascism was “racist nationalism,” attaching the unrelated racist evils of Hitler’s NAZI-ism, to Giovanni Gentile’s Fascism. As for “nationalism,” which is just another word for “patriotism,” it is like “loyalty.” In order to judge whether loyalty is good or evil, one must first ask “what” one is loyal to. Loyalty to a criminal rape gang is great evil, while loyalty to the God who created me, is arguably the highest possible moral good. It is the same with “nationalism.” If one is a CCP Communist nationalist, they will support great evil, while if one is a U.S.A. “nationalist” loyal to our constitutional government, one will be a respecter of the moral good of individual liberty.
NAZI Germany was indeed economically Fascist – big government, and monopolistic big business in partnership. Most “Fascists” are not genocidal racists like the NAZIs, but just addicted to power and wealth for themselves, the Elites.
In this “fascist” collusion between select “big businesses” and “big government,” neither is fond of small and medium sized businesses. These are the greatest competitive threat and disruption to big business, and they are very difficult for big government central planners to measure and account for, and their individual economic contributions are too small to be useful to “grifting” politicians. So big business colludes with big government to create oppressive regulatory and tax regimes in order to suppress small and medium businesses; obstacles that big business can just hire more lawyers and accountants to navigate. At best, Fascism ignores the needs of small business for justice, fiscal and monetary stability, and a legal “level playing field.” At worst, it seeks to crush them for being a nuisance to central planners, and dangerous competition for the favored-few big businesses.
What we often see today is “big business” that often grows “cancerously big,” precisely because of the grifting favors, and legal protections of big government. This is not to say that all big businesses are in a fascist collusion with big government, but the temptations to do so are very great.
China began as Communist under Mao, starving and murdering millions. Deng Xiao Ping took China into Fascism, with U.S. aid. Famously saying (paraphrasing), “I realized I could either distribute poverty and starvation, or I could distribute wealth.” The CCP today controls all big business, while wisely tolerating some small business for the tourists in the cities, while still retaining vestiges of ordinary Communism in rural agricultural areas. As result this vast nation increasingly has to import food to feed its own people.
America began as classically free-market Capitalist, with maximized constitutional liberty. Then America began going Socialist about 100 years ago under presidents Wilson and FDR, emerging today as increasingly Fascist, with big businesses “buying,” and “colluding” with big government politicians.
We often puzzle over why our constitutionally “representative” government fails to “represent” our interests; it is of course primarily because they get wealthy “representing” instead, the interests of big business (Big Ag, Big Pharma, Big Tech, and Big Military-Industrial, etc. − think of mRNA “fake-vaccines,” AI data centers, forever wars, etc.). Most of us know this at some level, and have been taught it is a failure of Capitalism, but it is rather the beginning stages of allowing our Socialist “baby-steps,” to evolve into Fascism.
Big business and big government can remain Capitalist, without necessarily slipping into the collusions of Fascism, but the power and wealth temptations of Fascist collusion tend to overcome men’s better natures, and must always be scrutinized carefully by those who love the liberty that only Capitalism offers.
The proper role of our Constitutional, Democratic, Republican Government, necessary to prevent the rise of Fascism, is to establish and rigorously monitor an economic system of equal justice under law, with fiscal and monetary stability, no special political favors to preferred business, and no financial incentives flowing from business to government, for political favors.
Politicians must remain absolutely impartial in their legislative, executive, and judicial duties. Every time they give a special “tax treatment” for example, to a preferred big business, they push that big business ahead of its smaller business competitors, not infrequently even destroying these smaller competitors. In so doing they ignore the inconvenient truth that in the aggregate, small and medium sized businesses contribute more economically to a healthy capitalist economy, both as to absolute economic volume and growth, but especially as to “new innovation,” than do the largest businesses.
There is another basic “Econ 101” lesson these people miss, crucial to the “income inequality” debate. Great individual wealth, if acquired under actual capitalism, does not come at the expense of the lower, or middle-income persons, and controlling vast sums of money does not hurt the economy or hold anyone else back. Quite the contrary, a person who makes hundreds of millions of dollars a year creates many of the best jobs in the economy. They create jobs for fine craftsmen, artists, the best cabinet makers, the best car makers, the best chefs, the best custom home builders. They invest their money in stocks which create liquidity to help other entrepreneurs launch and grow other companies and create more jobs. They invest in municipal bonds which help fund roads and bridges and schools and needed infrastructure. They are far less likely to buy goods made in third world countries, and they hire many high-end service providers.
There is actually very little that a wealthy person does with their money, if earned in a well-run capitalist economy, that is not better for everyone else in the economy, than an equivalent amount of money controlled by poor, and middle-income people. Very wealthy people are also very often huge philanthropists for the arts, building hospitals, colleges, museums, etc., often anonymously, asking no recognition for their largesse.
Leftist progressives, Marxists, and socialists have a simple-minded childish envy-based view of the economy as a fixed pie, “if you have a larger piece, it leaves less for everyone else.” But in a healthy capitalist economy, wealthy people grow the pie larger, and they grow it larger better than anyone else. One cannot do great good for others until one gets beyond meeting their own bare needs for mere existence. This is the fundamental brilliance of capitalism, which at its base depends on “service” to others.
The income inequality political issue is borne of ignorance, and envy, and has absolutely no economic substance to it whatever, so long as that wealth is acquired under actual capitalism. The problem comes when fascist monopolistic control, political graft, and protectionism are the mechanisms for wealth accumulation, so it is not the “wealth accumulation” that is a problem, but the inherent cheating and fraud of Fascism, when that is behind the wealth.
