wkmac
Well-Known Member
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]The two worst scourges of humanity in the twentieth century were socialism and fascism. Together, they wrecked much of the world economy because of their shared "fatal conceit" (friend.A. Hayek’s term) that government central planners were superior to private property and free markets. Fascist and socialist governments (not that there’s much difference between them) murdered over 100 million of their own citizens, as the sociologist R.J. Rummel has documented (See his book, Death by Government), and instigated wars that caused the deaths of millions more. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Economic fascism as practiced by Italy and Germany in the 1920s and ’30s allowed private property and private enterprise to exist, but only if it was strictly controlled and regimented by the state so that it would serve "the public interest" and not private interests. The philosophy of German fascism was expressed in the slogan Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz, which means "the common good comes before the private good." "The Aryan," Hitler wrote in Mein Kampf, "willingly subordinates his own ego to the community and, if the hour demands, even sacrifices it." This sounds a lot like John McCain’s campaign theme of "Country First" (before self-interest), doesn’t it?[/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]In the preface to the 1976 edition of his famous book, The Road to Serfdom, friend.A. Hayek wrote (p. xxiii) that when the book was first published in 1944, socialism meant "unambiguously the nationalization of the means of production and the central economic planning which made this necessary." But by the 1970s "socialism has come to mean chiefly the extensive redistribution of incomes through taxation and the institutions of the welfare state." Thus, ever since the 1930s the Democratic Party in America has been the party of socialism, with the Republican Party either providing little or no effective opposition or, as with the administration of President George W. Bush, serving as accomplices. The Bush administration vastly expanded the welfare state, while Obama intends to expand it much faster, especially if he succeeds in implementing health care socialism and imposing even more punitive levels of income taxation on the most productive citizens. [/FONT]
[FONT=Times New Roman, Times, serif]Incredibly, the two-party duopoly that has long ruled America has adopted both fascism and socialism as the defining characteristics of our economic system. Call it Fascialism. It is a recipe for national economic suicide.[/FONT]
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