Fascism can't happen because government is too big and complicated...

So claims Tyler Cowen:

My argument is pretty simple: American fascism cannot happen anymore because the American government is so large and unwieldy. It is simply too hard for the fascists, or for that matter other radical groups, to seize control of. No matter who is elected, the fascists cannot control the bureaucracy, they cannot control all the branches of American government, they cannot control the judiciary, they cannot control semi-independent institutions such as the Federal Reserve, and they cannot control what is sometimes called “the deep state.” The net result is they simply can’t control enough of the modern state to steer it in a fascist direction.

So, for those with a curious interest in fascism - the actual idea of a corporate state directed my the national will rather than the left's bogeyman - this argument seems to say that we can't have fascism because the corporate state is too developed and complex. It's almost as if, having adopted the idea of government influencing everything (and the USA has a far smaller government than most of the developed world) that government becomes impossible to control and resistant to direction.

The result of this is that, not only is fascism not possible but neither is change deliverable through the established mechanisms of democracy. And, it seems to me, that the bureaucracy Cowen describes, adheres to an ideology somewhat akin to the Douglas Jay idea of the gentleman in Whitehall knowing best. With no effective democratic accountability (if fascists can't influence the multifarious heads of the government hydra there's little chance that others seeking change being able to exercise that influence), the state becomes the definer of 'national will' rather than the leader. The leaders, at least up until Trump, are essentially window dressing for the machine, a smiling illusion of a human face obscuring the beast beneath.

In an odd way, fascism can't succeed because we have the ideological corporate state that fascists wanted.

“You are afraid of it because it is stronger than you; you hate it because you are afraid of it; you love it because you cannot subdue it to your will. Only the unsubduable can be loved.” 

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Blue Labour Peer proposes Fascist style House of Lords

Mussolini believed in a corporate state where a large part of the democratic structures were elected through functional groups (workers, business sectors and so forth) - a bit like this from Maurice Glasman:

The Lords, in contrast, should represent vocational democracy. There should be people elected from each sector, whether that be electrical or academic, medical or administrative. Doctors should vote for a peer, as should nurses and cleaners. It would give an incentive to the organisation of carers, builders and gardeners, who would each select a representative from within their organisation.

Aside from being pretty impractical it acts to create blocs within parliament solely vested in sectoral interest - with the result being that, as Italians discovered, you have to have a licence to open a sweet shop or set up as a gardener. Or as Benito put it:

Fascism recognises the real needs which gave rise to socialism and trade-unionism, giving them due weight in the guild or corporative system in which divergent interests are coordinated and harmonised in the unity of the State.

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Why should I believe the left are protecting a liberal society they don't believe in?

I'm probably not alone in being slightly taken aback by the extent to which the election of Donald Trump as US President has brought forth agitation and protest, not just in the USA but elsewhere across the world. I've also been struck by the manner in which events such as Trump's election, the UK's vote to leave the EU, and a reinvigorated cultural right in universities have resulted in the radicalising of people who we previously characterised as 'soft left'.

It remains to be seen whether this radicalisation persists in the way that similar forces in the 1960s did in response to civil rights and the Vietnam war - Jeremy Corbyn's generation. What strikes me, however, about the current situation is the extent to which a youthful centre left has taken to the streets in response to their failure at the established game of democracy. Above all else this is the lesson we should take from Brexit and Trump - the established left has little to offer the public beyond that tired, familiar 'we know better' rhetoric wedded to a desire to close down debate, cut off argument and, using the left's word, demonise other opinions.

Yet the left remains astonishingly unaware of it's problems or of the extent to which it is trapped. Here's Nick Cohen presenting that unawareness as a considered position:

Compulsive liars shouldn’t frighten you. They can harm no one, if no one listens to them. Compulsive believers, on the other hand: they should terrify you. Believers are the liars’ enablers. Their votes give the demagogue his power. Their trust turns the charlatan into the president. Their credulity ensures that the propaganda of half-calculating and half-mad fanatics has the power to change the world.

How you see the believers determines how you fight them and seek to protect liberal society from its enemies.

To understand what we mean by unawareness, we should ask two things: who are the liars and what we mean by liberal society. And when we've done this we will realise that it isn't the false bogeyman of a new fascism but the lies of the left about liberalism that are the problem. First though let's agree with Cohen about Trump and Brexit not being about Fascism:

The temptation to think it a new totalitarianism is too strong for many to resist. Despite readers reaching for Hannah Arendt and George Orwell, strictly speaking, the comparison with fascism and communism isn’t true. When I floated it with the great historian of Nazism, Sir Richard Evans, he almost sighed. It’s not just that there aren’t the death camps and torture chambers, he said. The street violence that brought fascists to power in Italy and Germany and the communists to power in Russia is absent today.

Dwell on that final sentence for a minute. And then consider what this might mean:

Fires that were deliberately set, one outside the campus Amazon outlet; Molotov cocktails that caused generator-powered spotlights to catch fire; commercial-grade fireworks thrown at police officers; barricades pushed into windows and skirmishes within the crowd were among the evening’s violent acts.

The masked agitators came to campus eastbound on Bancroft Way, and fire damage and other destruction to the Stiles Hall construction site, where a new residence hall is planned, was reported. The group entered campus and immediately began throwing rocks at officers. In an effort to avoid injuries to innocent members of the surrounding crowd who might have been caught in the middle, police officers exercised restraint and did not respond with force.

An organised group using street violence to secure a political end (in this case preventing someone from speaking). And we saw plenty more of this violence following the election of Donald Trump and after his inauguration. Is this not something akin to "street violence" that brought fascists and communists to power in Europe? And what about giving yourself permission to punch anyone who you and your friends decide is a Nazi?

The problem for the left is that it is at best targeting a pretty small group or, and this is more concerning, seeking to define anyone who challenges its definition of liberal society as 'alt-right', Fascist or Nazi. As Nick Cohen discovered from a peek at history there are no National Socialist marches, there aren't Fascist gangs forcing opponents to drink cod liver oil and there isn't a rising new politics that seeks to destroy that liberal society. The new fascism or whatever you want to call it is something summoned from the left's mind, they are fighting an illusion.

That lie of a new fascism brings us back to the first of our two questions: who are the liars? Nick Cohen is clear about this - Donald Trump, Brexit campaigners, conservative columnists and business leaders. The alt-right. But is he right? Or rather are there not a whole load of other liars out there? Liars like the ones who predicted inevitable economic doom following a vote to leave the EU. And the liars who continue to promote a thing called socialism despite it repeatedly cause suffering, sorrow and even death.

"The men the American people admire most extravagantly are the most daring liars; the men they detest most violently are those who try to tell them the truth."

You want to know what Trump's biggest lie is? It's the lie that he can bring those jobs back, can by stamping and shouting do what Canute showed couldn't be done, turn back the tide of the world. But when the newly radicalised centre left agree that Trump's protectionism is a lie, they compound it with another lie. The left pretends that somehow globalisation had no role in the steelworker losing his job, the textile worker losing her job, or the miners looking at reserves of energy untapped because of decisions made in Washington, Rome, London or Paris.

Instead the left talks about inequality when what the listener wants is a job. The left talks of rights when what those hearing this cant desire is a better roof over their head and clean water. And the left points at wealthy business people crying another lie: that somehow their lack of a job and their crappy house is down to those business people. "Vote for us and we'll sort it" the left said all those years and delivered nothing. So what remains for the voter: carrying on electing wealthy left wing politicians - Elizabeth Warren, Ed Miliband, Francois Hollande, Yanis Varoufakis, Hillary Clinton - and getting no change or buying a different lie from someone like Trump or Le Pen?

What makes all this worse is that the left then tell people who want a better job, a nicer house, a happier future for their children that it's about defending something called the liberal society. But what exactly is this liberal society we're defending? Is it getting people arrested for saying stuff on Twitter? Is it privileging group characteristics and in doing so creating a sort of equalities tops trumps? Or maybe it's telling folk that black people can't be racists and women can't be violent?

A liberal society isn't one that smashes and bullies to stop Milo Yiannopoulos speaking. A liberal society is one that listens politely to Milo, tells him he's a preening dickhead and then moves on, smiling. A liberal society doesn't stop people going to an event by blocking the streets, it's one that argues and engages with folk we disagree with. A liberal society is one that rejects the bullying of the mob even if it does get John Wilkes into parliament.

My two questions perhaps aren't answered in full but it does seem that the left should consider whether it has a beam in its eye that results in that frightening degree of unawareness. Yes Trump and the alt-right are liars but so is the radical left. Now, as the soft left makes common cause with the anti-democrats of street anarchy and communism, we see that the left as a whole is tearing down the principles of liberal society because it fears an illusory monster will do that if they don't.

The left's biggest lie is that they now own the word liberal, that their state-directed dystopia is that liberal society we should defend. For me a liberal society is one that doesn't make ill smokers stand in the street because you don't like them. A liberal society is one that does tax people to change their behaviour. A liberal society is one that thinks politeness is important but doesn't lock people up for being rude, dumb or offensive. A liberal society is one that values enterprise and encourages it in everyone. A liberal society is a place where people can speak freely, do business, succeed and fail without that society's opprobrium. And a liberal society is, above all, one that doesn't place one set of people - experts, aristocrats or celebrities - above others.

We do not live in a liberal society. The left do not and never have believed in a liberal society. Why the hell should I believe that their marching to defend that liberal society against Trump, Brexit and other demons is anything other than a big, fat stinking lie?

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Why it's not OK to punch political opponents (even if they are Nazis)

It became a thing. A laugh and a joke - "I don't care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I'll laugh at every one." chortled one chap on Twitter. Others - respected journalists (is that an oxymoron these days?) included - justified punching Nazis with images of Second World War troops landing on Omaha beach, cleaning weapons and generally sticking it to those Nazis in that great war. Fortunately no-one's mentioned caster oil yet.

Problem with all this is that it valorises violence as a tool of political engagement. And to put it pretty bluntly, that's pretty much (at least in orthodox left wing definitions) the whole thing about Fascism. Despite Fascism and National Socialism being bastard children of social democracy, the "left" define them in terms of their fetish for violence - in language and out there on the streets. The "Far Right" is all about boots, flags, marches, banners and direct action something it shares with Trots, Black Bloc anarchists and other "Far Left" grouplets.

If you decide that it's fine to thump someone what you do is grant them the permission, in a manner of speaking, to thump you back. And don't come over all noble here - any circumstance in which violence is accepted represents a negation of democracy, of the idea that we are civilised enough to use discussion, consensus and the vote to resolve political dispute. Where does this end? We start off thumping real Nazis like Richard Spencer and then move to reporters from right of centre websites or people next to us on aeroplanes. Before we know it the people who like those right of centre websites are making common cause with Richard Spencer.

I'm reminded of Thurber's Very Proper Gander:

Not so very long ago there was a very fine gander. He was strong and smooth and beautiful and he spent most of his time singing to his wife and children. One day somebody who saw him strutting up and down in his yard and singing remarked, "There is a very proper gander." An old hen overheard this and told her husband about it that night in the roost. "They said something about propaganda," she said. "I have always suspected that," said the rooster, and he went around the barnyard next day telling everybody that the very fine gander was a dangerous bird, more than likely a hawk in gander's clothing. A small brown hen remembered a time when at a great distance she had seen the gander talking with some hawks in the forest. "They were up to no good," she said. A duck remembered that the gander had once told him he did not believe in anything. "He said to hell with the flag, too," said the duck. A guinea hen recalled that she had once seen somebody who looked very much like the gander throw something that looked a great deal like a bomb. Finally everybody snatched up sticks and stones and descended on the gander's house. He was strutting in his front yard, singing to his children and his wife. "There he is!" everybody cried. "Hawk-lover! Unbeliever! Flag-hater! Bomb-thrower!" So they set upon him and drove him out of the country.

The only winners from punching Nazis and Fascists are the Nazis and Fascists. And if you think punching people who you disagree with is just fine and dandy then you're part of the problem not part of the solution. If your mythology tells you - and left wing mythology does just this - that violence is central to Fascism and Nazi-ism then your punching that Nazi makes you one and the same as him.

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So how socialist was Fascism?

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Here's a clue:

By 1938, after Italy, for all intents and purposes, had emerged from the effects of the international depression, the entitites under the control of the IRI proceeded to produce 67 percent of Italy's ferrous minerals, 77 percent of cast iron, and 45 percent of its steel. About 80 percent of all shipbuilding undertaken on thepeninsula was done under the auspices of Finmare - and Finmeccanica was producing 40 percent of all machine products. The major part of all infrastructure development was the product of the efforts of similar parastate entities. In effect, by the end of the 1930s, the economy of Fascist Italy was the most extensively state controlled in all of Europe - with the exception of the Soviet Union. (from A. James Gregor's 'Mussolini's Intellectuals")

When Mussolini said he was a socialist and that he believed in state control and state direction, these weren't idle words meant to cover up his capitalist streak. Il Duce really did believe in such a state - indeed in one where the economy was organised through "national confederations of syndical organisations" rather than through the market. There is nothing right-wing - if by right-wing you mean conservative or (in the traditional rather than American sense) liberal - about Fascism. It is just another bastard child of socialism.

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"You're not entitled to your opinion": Plato, proto-fascism and the cult of the expert

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You're not entitled to your opinion insists philosophy lecturer, Patrick Stokes:

The problem with “I’m entitled to my opinion” is that, all too often, it’s used to shelter beliefs that should have been abandoned. It becomes shorthand for “I can say or think whatever I like” – and by extension, continuing to argue is somehow disrespectful. And this attitude feeds, I suggest, into the false equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse.

Let's get the first thing out of the way. You may be entitled to your opinion but that doesn't stop it being a stupid opinion. And Stokes is right when he observes that students in his class have to argue for their opinion (it is, after all, a philosophy class) The problem is that, as is common in this argument about the value of opinion, Stokes then invokes Plato to substantiate his opinion on who else is allowed to have an opinion. This invocation is backed up with a particularly egregious example of bad opinions being given too much credence.

My problem with this isn't that (using Stokes' example) arguing against vaccination programmes has much validity but rather the wider difficulty in deciding who is or is not an expert. In the case Stokes cites, the distinction is easy but this is seldom the case when it comes to argument. Let's take economics and the example of Paul Krugman. Now Krugman is a Nobel Prize-winning economist, the very acme of the expert, he is - in Stokes' view - entirely entitled to his opinion. Yet what we get as a result is statements made purely on the basis that 'I am an expert ergo my opinion is valid, you are not an expert ergo your opinion is not valid'.

I wrote about an occasion of Krugman's approach to being an expert a year or so ago:

When confronted with the moral argument that debt means having something now rather than later - meaning of course that we, given the likely timescale for debt repayment, are taking that from future generations - Krugman chooses instead to talk about the lack of graduate job prospects. Rather than addressing the real issue raised - government debt as deferred taxation, Krugman chooses to talk about a relatively minor labour demand issue.

And then when Angela Leadsom raises supply side considerations - how to help the economy create jobs - Krugman lapses into accusations that Ms Leadsom and others are ideologically motivated and using the current crisis to shrink the size of the state. At no point in this does Krugman respond to or consider whether there are any supply side constraints. He waffles vaguely that there's no evidence of supply side constraint (in the US) and states baldly that the whole problem is a matter of demand. More seriously - from the point of debate - he accuses others of insincerity and exploitation without evidence.

What we see here is a 'cult of the expert'. Krugman is right because he is an expert not because, as an expert, he has set out his opinion and refuted (with reason) the arguments from others that challenge that opinion. This is the core ideal of Plato's politics - that society would be better if its management wasn't left to the ignorance of everyman but determined by ruling philosophers. This proto-fascism is the prime cancer in European thought since it seeks to deny the ignorant agency while at the same time deciding ignorance on the basis of an ideology - "I am an expert and you are not".

The argument that Stokes puts forward - "equivalence between experts and non-experts that is an increasingly pernicious feature of our public discourse" - might have some validity if experts were limited by their expertise. We have no issue with a scientist making clear that ceteris paribus vaccines are safe and providing scientific evidence to support that opinion. Indeed decision-makers would be foolish to disregard such an opinion unless there was a substantial and evidenced challenge to it.

The problem is that relatively few things within public discourse are as clear as the example that Stokes is using. This means we either have competing experts or else a situation where there is no valid expert opinion. And we still face the problem as to who defines the expert - here's a good example.

A few days ago two academics, Sara Kalkhoran and Stanton Glantz, published a 'systematic review and meta-analysis' of ecigs and smoking cessation concluding that ecigs reduced rates of smoking cessation. Now these are experts (I think we can state, for the sake of our argument, that an academic publishing research is de jure an expert) so, using Stokes argument, we should be giving credence to their opinion. Indeed the World Health Organisation has done just that - using Glantz's research and comment as a core element in its published advice to policy-makers on ecigs.

The problem is this:

"The problems with the authors’ interpretation of the two papers mentioned above are as follows: The first study (Adkson et al) is not longitudinal as has been reported here – e-cigarette use was measured at follow up, the same time as quit status was ascertained. The second study (Hitchman et al) included smokers who were using e-cigarettes at baseline and therefore included smokers who may have tried to use e-cigarettes to quit and failed, and excluded smokers who successfully used e-cigarettes to quit. The authors of this meta-analysis had been previously informed by the authors of the Adkison paper that they were misreporting the findings.”

Such a damning response doesn't, of course, stop the 'public discourse, from presenting Glantz's work without challenge or question. Were Glantz simply an ideological advocate in the manner of Meryl Dorey (Stokes' anti-vaxxer) then he could be dismissed in the same manner. However Glantz is a tenured academic as well as an ideological advocate - his expertise remains even when other researchers present effective challenge. The same - which is why Stokes' position is wrong - applies to Paul Krugman. Without the possibility of some little boy pointing out the emperors lack of clothes, we have the prospect of rule by an ever less accountable 'intellectual' clique conforming to the central Platonic error - that society can be managed by clever men.

Since we're arguing here about the distinction between 'the man in Whitehall knows best' and 'trust the people', it makes sense to enquire which of these two positions manages society best. And there's lots of evidence - some scientific, some historical and some based in reason - arguing both sides. Indeed there are many supporters for the 'philosopher king' model of rule by experts despite the evidence from Soviet Russia, from Germany and, more recently from Cuba or Venezuela that such a model will always (you can't think of everything) result in sub-optimal outcomes. Including some sub-optimal outcomes that result in millions dying painful and premature deaths.

Today this cult of the expert more and more governs our decision-making:

Right across government we see decision-making that should be done by people accountable to the public being done by the unelected - local enterprise partnerships, schools forums, probation boards, a veritable host of the unelected and unaccountable. This is post-democracy - consultation, partnership and the 'professional' have replaced the tried and tested process of electing people to make decisions on our behalf. We have decided that democracy - elections, MPs, councillors and so forth - are a bit of a pain. Or rather we haven't decided, the system has gradually sidelined politicians - the people's representatives - to the stage where the only way for us to effect any change is for us to join in the game, to play at post-democracy.

Democracy isn't modern and it runs counter to our cult of the expert, our obsession with that unreachable ideal of 'evidence-based policy'. So the powerful have emasculated democracy and replaced it with a pretty spectacle, a place of sound and fury. Great fun, as observers of parliament know, but ultimately pointless. The decisions are made somewhere else.

And so long as men like Patrick Stokes, for noble reasons and using egregious examples like Meryl Dorey, promte that cult of the expert to students will will continue to undermine liberty in the cause of better government, to take a few more baby steps towards the Platonic ideal of a fascist autocracy where all-knowing philosophers order society in the interests of a supine unquestioning (for questioning the expert is a sin) mass of the population.

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Are we allowed to call Corbyn's economic programme Fascist? For that what it looks like.

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We start here with the observable premise that 'Corbynomics' is not an approach founded in Soviet Communism - there is nothing in the programme that proposes the collectiviastion of industry, the management of the economy through non-market means or a focus on production as a proxy for economic growth (even to the point of that production becoming value-destroying rather than value-creating).

Instead the programme of 'Corbynomics' focuses on state-determined priorities, the rejection of 'excess profit' and the use of a sovereign currency to allow the increase in the money supply (or printing money as some describe it). In its essentials the approach takes the view that those who 'have' should make larger sacrifices in the wider interests of society - that austerity should be targeted at the rich.

A central element of all this - sitting alongside the printing of money - is the idea that money only exists so that governments, the state, can collect taxes. In this worldview the only money we are entitled to is that which government permits us to have after it has taken the taxes needed to undertake the work of the state (or, if you subscribe to the MMT fallacy, to prevent the production of money creating inflation).

Here's Richard Murphy, self-described creator of 'Corbynomics':

I would suggest that we don’t as such pay taxes. The funds that they represent are, I suggest, in fact the property of the state. After all, if we give the state the power to define what we can own, how we can own it and what we can do with it – and we do – then I would argue that we also give the state the right to say that some part of what we earn or own is actually its rightful property and that we have no choice but pay that tax owed as the quid pro quo of the benefit we enjoy from living in community.

The essential idea here is that the government is better equipped than individuals or markets to make the right choices in the interests of the community. And this is pretty much an idea that was first developed and actioned in Italy. In rejecting 'Bolshevism' and accepting profit as a 'necessary incentive', the Italians developed an economic strategy that was centred on the idea of directing private enterprise rather than taking it over:

...private enterprise in the sphere of production is the most effective and useful instrument in the interest of the nation. In view of the fact that private organisation of production is a function of national concern, the organiser of the enterprise is responsible to the State for the direction given to production. (Benito Mussolini, The Doctrine of Fascism 1935)

With this in mind the Italian state not only created huge corporate conglomerates with horrendously complicated governance but engaged in a series of grand campaigns focused on security of supply in food, in basic industry and in finance. The result of this is familiar in that joke about Mussolini getting the trains to run on time (he didn't) and in wonderful but pointless achievements such as draining the Pontine Marshes.

So looking at 'Corbynomics' we see the same appeal - that the state is greater than the sum of its parts, that only courageous leaders can direct investment so as to deliver economic, social and environmental betterment in equal part, and that the interests of business is subservient to the state's objectives. Or, as Mussolini aptly summarised:

All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.

Because the state already, at root, owns everything there is no need to bother with such things as nationalisation. Instead the state uses instruments already available to it - taxes and the production of money - to direct business and industry in the direction that the state's leaders have determined. In doing this the state, rather than adopting the crude ownership model of classic socialism, chooses instead to take 'strategic stakes' in industry via a National Investment Bank and to adopt via this route the power to appoint to boards of directors.

The problem is that this sort of approach becomes ever more centralised in those courageous leaders of the state, increasingly exposed to corruption and so sclerotic as to act as a drag on the economy:

“...a never‑ending stream of officials passed through Mussolini’s office each day to receive his orders, though he had no means of checking that his orders were carried out. Officials generally pretended to obey and took no action at all. His chief preoccupation was to make sure newspapers reported that he had given orders on every conceivable topic including sports. There was a jungle of overlapping bureaucracies where Mussolini’s orders were constantly being lost or purposely mislaid. Any fascist party official could issue an order purporting to come from Mussolini, as its authenticity was hard to check. By trying to control everything, he ended up controlling very little.”

Now people have observed that modern technology makes totalitarianism easier. But, under 'Corbynomics' - with state-directed investment and high corporate taxes constraining private investment - we still see a situation where investment decisions are made by non-risk-taking experts rather than by risk-taking entrepreneurs. We have to trust that those experts will make the 'right' or 'best' decision, even though they do not have all the information and are not truly accountable for that decision. This problem is compounded because the progenitors of 'Corbynomics' insist that its objectives encompass social and environmental factors as equal 'partners' with considerations of economic betterment.

The ideas of 'Corbynomics' are not a direct parallel with the core doctrines of Fascism (at least as set out by Mussolini and philosophers like Gentile). However, they hail from the same birthplace, from the idea of a brave and activist state. Indeed, if we are to search out the closest equivalent to Richard Murphy's 'Courageous State' and the ideas that sit in the heart of 'Corbynomics', the best place to look is at Mussolini's renewed dictatorship after 1925. This was the triumph of Il Duce's activist government - praised by Sidney & Beatrice Webb, lauded by H G Wells and G B Shaw, endorsed by FDR, and approved of by Winston Churchill.  But I guess we're not allowed to call it Fascism?

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Quote of the day - Keynes and Fascism

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Seems J M Keynes had a fan:

“Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud.”

So said Benito Mussolini.

h/t Perry de Haviland 

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“A book is a loaded gun.” So ban them or burn them.

 

One of the first targets of Adolf Hitler and his Nazi organization were books. This began in 1933, shortly after Hitler seized power in Germany. He ordered leaders of the regime to confiscate and destroy any literature deemed subversive to the National Socialist agenda. The elimination of these documents was carried out in a ceremonial fashion. Public book burnings were held for all the citizens to view. These demonstrations were held in both Germany and Austria. All works authored by Jewish, communist, pacifist, socialist, anarchist and classic liberals were fair game.

It does seem that we have learnt nothing. Here - in the latest example of Labour's selective memory about free speech - is a proposal to ban Hitler's turgid racist tome, Mein Kampf:

“Of course Amazon – and indeed any other bookseller – is doing nothing wrong in selling the book. However, I think that there is a compelling case for a national debate on whether there should be limits on the freedom of expression,” writes Docherty to Javid.

Of course Docherty is very careful to tiptoe around making a specific proposal to ban Mein Kampf but the very fact that he can countenance such a ban (or a limited ban where only a few specially licensed academics can view Adolf's incoherent racist ramblings) reveals just how much of a problem the left has with the idea of free speech.

The question for Docherty is where the line is drawn. Do we draw it, as he suggests around the idea of 'hatred' and if so what do we mean by hatred? Do we consider the consequences of a given writing - in which case Das Kapital is just as much a candidate for Docherty's Ban with its fomenting hatred of enterprise, initiative and free choice. And what are we do do about religious books like the Koran or Bible with their incitement to kill infidels, execute gays, stone adulterers and slice chunks off burglars? Do we ban them too?

What should worry us most isn't merely the fact of a Labour MP calling for books to be banned but the concluding rational that Docherty puts up:

Docherty said that the reality today is that if “someone puts the contents of Mein Kampf on to a blog, the police would knock on their door …

This is maybe true. And if it is, it is a damning observation of our supposedly free society. It scares me just how close we are to banning books simply because they promote ideas we find discomforting, disturbing or contrary to the current 'truth' and 'wisdom'. We need books - all of them, good and bad:

“There was always a minority afraid of something, and a great majority afraid of the dark, afraid of the future, afraid of the past, afraid of the present, afraid of themselves and shadows of themselves” 

So wrote Ray Bradbury in his passionate defence of the book, Fahrenheit 451. Docherty and the other banners or burners are scared, fearful the good men will be corrupted by words on the page. That we won't see through to the evil or some ideas - whether from Trotsky or Hitler, Guevara or Goebbels. Docherty and all the anti-free speech left are wrong. We are stronger, better and more decent than that - and we deserve the right to know evil for what it is.

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Poking, sneering, moralising and despising - the defining character of Fabianism

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Let's get one thing out of the way. I'm not sure I agree with limiting child benefit to two children but there does need to be a debate about said benefit and whether it is the best way to support children and especially children who live in what we've defined as poverty. After all a significant chunk of child benefit is paid to mothers who have no need for it (again this isn't to say the benefit isn't welcome but that no-one will lack for basics by its absence).

So I understand Iain Duncan Smith's point:

The work and pensions secretary hinted the move was being examined by his party despite previously being vetoed by Downing Street over fears it could alienate parents.

Asked about the idea on the BBC’s Sunday Politics programme, Duncan Smith said it could also “help behavioural change” in what appeared to be a suggestion that it could discourage people struggling with their finances from having more children.

Leaving aside that the Guardian is putting words into IDS's mouth, this idea probably has significant support amongst the population.  There is a widespread view (that I don't share) that having more than two children is somehow irresponsible and that child benefit provides either a reward or an incentive for such foolishness.

However, to describe what IDS has said as 'eugenics' is stretching the point well past breaking point. Yet - in a typical piece of bravado nonsense - this is what Polly Toynbee does:

Some themes deep in the heart of Toryism just never go away. Up they pop, over and over. Control the lower orders, stop them breeding, check their spending, castigate their lifestyles. Poking, sneering, moralising and despising is hardwired within Tory DNA.

The problem with this is that these days most of the proposals for controlling the lower orders come from the left-wing establishment, from the sort of people Polly approves of.

It was a Labour government that introduced the Anti-Social Behaviour Order as a way to criminalise things that aren't criminal. It is use to enforce a sterile environment that, in effect, permits the police supported by the magistracy to arrest anyone for any reason.

It is great figures from the left - H G Wells, J M Keynes and, most recently, Jonathan Porritt and David Attenborough who have been advocates of enforced population control, of eugenics. It is the people that Polly has dinner with who enthused about communist China's one child policy and socialist India's bribes for vasectomies.

It is the left with their moralising about debt and lending that wants to check the spending of the working class. It left-wing writers like Naomi Klein who put about the patronising lie that ordinary people are manipulated by corporations into something called 'over-consumption'.

And it's the left - including the last Labour government - who led the charge against people's lifestyles. Banning smoking in the pub, whacking a duty escalator on beer (while exempting wine and champagne), imposing planning restrictions on fast food takeaways and trying to ban gambling. It's the left that want taxes on fizzy drinks, bans on added sugar and salt, restrictions on portion sizes, the ending of multibuy offers and a host of other nannying interventions in people's lifestyle choices.

My party is not immune from these problems - you only have to look at Tracy Crouch and Sarah Wollaston to see this - but despising the worker is not 'hard wired' into Tory DNA. It people like Polly Toynbee who patronise and exploit ordinary people so as to prosecute their disturbed and disturbing political opinions. Political opinions we can trace back to that great Fabian socialist, H G Wells:

...the ethical system of these men of the New Republic, the ethical system which will dominate the world state, will be shaped primarily to favour the procreation of what is fine and efficient and beautiful in humanity - beautiful and strong bodies, clear and powerful minds, and a growing body of knowledge - and to check the procreation of base and servile types, of fear-driven and cowardly souls, of all that is mean and ugly and bestial in the souls, bodies, or habits of men. To do the latter is to do the former; the two things are inseparable.

And that equally renowned Fabian socialist, G B Shaw:

...If people are fit to live, let them live under decent human conditions. If they are not fit to live, kill them in a decent human way. Is it any wonder that some of us are driven to prescribe the lethal chamber as the solution for the hard cases which are at present made the excuse for dragging all the other cases down to their level, and the only solution that will create a sense of full social responsibility in modern populations?"

Or the ever so progressive Margaret Sanger:

 "... Degeneration has already begun. Eugenists demonstrate that two-thirds of our manhood of military age are physically too unfit to shoulder a rifle; that the feeble-minded, the syphilitic, the irresponsible and the defective breed unhindered; ... that the vicious circle of mental and physical defect, delinquency and beggary is encouraged, by the unseeing and unthinking sentimentality of our age, to populate asylum, hospital and prison. All these things the Eugenist sees and points out with a courage entirely admirable"

Eugenics was always a ghastly creed. But is was a creed - along with directing and controlling the lives of workers - that was at the very heart of Polly's Fabian socialism.

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The Guardianista solution to food waste - reintroduce rationing!

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There are times when the Guardian reads like a parody of itself. So part of me wants to roll about laughing at the woman who is so concerned about food waste she wants rationing back.

But then I stop and think - a national newspaper (with a growing international reach) has given this person space to write an article that opens with this:

Nobody does as they're told unless they're forced to...

And this wasn't just some sub-editor getting carried away - the writer, one Michele Hanson, really means it:

Don't they realise that hardly anyone does as they're told unless they're forced to? Especially if it means less money and less of what they like. I long for a strict nanny state, to bring back rationing, so no one would be allowed to over-stuff themselves with great slabs of meat daily, or waste their crusts or peelings, reject twirly cucumbers or knobbly fruit and veg.

The whole (blessedly brief article) reeks of that smug superiority the Guardian does so well. Telling the proles out there that they are victoms of something called 'consumerism', that they are fat and greedy, and that they would be better off if people like Michele Hanson stood over them to make sure they rendered down bones for stock.

As it happens I was brought up to dislike wasting food. But that's my choice. If another person wants to buy loads of food and then throw it away that's there prerogative - the secret is in the word 'buy'. This amazing innovation means that the food becomes the property (another term foreign to Guardianistas) of the buyer. And if they want to sit and watch it rot in a bowl, they can do just that. It has absolutely nothing at all to do with the EU, the House of Lords, the Guardian or Michele Hanson.

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Thomas Piketty, New Fascist?

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On the face of it Piketty's work is orthodox, envy-ridden social democracy. Backed up by dodgy charts. But when we poke around at the words in the FT article there's an odd smell:

US inequality may now be so sharp, and the political process so tightly captured by top earners, that necessary reforms will not happen – much like in Europe before the first world war.

Here's the thing - the masterpiece created by the Great War was Fascism. It's authoritarian, directed, Listian autarky was the solution to those very problems that Piketty alludes to - essetially the excesses of capitalism.

The essence of the the New Fascism is that there must be a new authoritarian, directed, Listian solution - but petty nationalist autarky is rejected just as is personal liberty, choice and the idea of individual achievement. The fruits of success are not ours but the state's to determine.

The deepest irony of the New Fascism is that its adherents use the old discredited Fascism as a threat to beat us into submission. We are told that we must embrace their new order or suffer a return to that frightening past, a past that scarred Europe so terribly:

Short of that, many may turn against globalisation. If, one day, they found a common voice, it would speak the disremembered mantras of nationalism and economic isolation.

But Piketty and others propose the same solutions as did Gentile and Spirito - that identity is subsumed in a wider society and individual sovereignty is a false aspiration. Above all this is the central idea that the state must enforce society's sacrifice for the greater good. In this case it is a vain search for material equality built on the idea that we are unequal because the powerful have stolen from the weak.

I don't comment here on Piketty's economics but on the imperative behind his words - that liberty must be sacrificed on the altar of equality. This is the New Fascism.

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Larry Summers embraces the New Fascism

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“All within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state.” Benito Mussolini

There's been a deal of comment about a little spat between Larry Summers (who is I discover a top American lefty economist chap) and George Osborne, Britain's Chancellor of the Exchequer. The debate between the two can be summed up as "hey you, yah boo, I'm right and you're wrong." Except it wasn't as witty or intelligent as that. It came across as a rather pompous version of an exchange on Question Time (and just as edifying).

However, I was curious about Mr Summers opinions and what he supposes we should be doing differently. Essentially the gist is here:

"It’s tragic that we are bequeathing to our children a deficit in the form of massive deferred maintenance on our infrastructure. If at a moment when we can borrow money for 30 years in the 3pc range, in a currency we print ourselves and the construction unemployment rate is in double digits, if that is not the moment to fix Kennedy airport, when will that moment ever come?"

Rather than have a money deficit, we have instead an 'infrastructure deficit'. Which supposes two things - we actually need that infrastructure and, more importantly, government borrowing is the only way to provide it. At the heart of this argument is a belief (which has nothing at all to do with macroeconomics but is absolutely an ideological position) that, in Isabella Kaminska's words:

...the only productive use of capital is increasingly through government spending.

This ideological position - the conviction that the only good investment is through government - is a core tenet of what I call the 'New Fascism'. This is a philosophy that adopts the same assumptions about society as Mussolini and his colleagues did in designing the Fascist state - for draining the Pontine Marshes read floating airports, high speed railways and freeways rammed through previously attractive small towns.

If (and this is a big question) it is right to raise government borrowing, why does Summers surmise that spending it without return on expensive and unproductive infrastructure programmes is better than cutting taxes on businesses and consumers? If businesses have more money will they not invest that money? And will that investment not generate a return - a real one - unlike those grand projects Larry likes?

And if we cut taxes for consumers won't they spend that money buying the things that the businesses are making? Perhaps on houses, maybe on cars? Isn't that a rather more efficient approach to stimulus that tying loads of borrowed cash up in incompetent government procurement programmes?

The truth is that Larry Summers is a New Fascist - wanting a planned, directed, controlled, state-led system rather than an untidy, exciting and people-led system.

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The New Fascism - a comment on economic nationalism

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I had a wry smile about Friedrich List. Here's the opening of his wikipedia entry:

Georg Friedrich List (August 6, 1789 – November 30, 1846) was a leading 19th-century German-American economist who developed the "National System" or what some would call today the National System of Innovation. He was a forefather of the German historical school of economics, and considered the original European unity theorist whose ideas were the basis for the European Economic Community.

Now one of the important things about Italian Fascism was the way in which it drew on List (and others) to provide the economic arguments supporting protectionist, centrally-directed economic policies. The central argument - familiar to development economists weaned on import-substitution - is that tariffs are needed to protect nascent industries. Moreover that the cost of this protection to consumers is an acceptable investment in the collective future of the nation.

This isn't to say that List was a Fascist but it is to point out that his economics provides an important rationale for nationalism since it is founded on both the idea of the nation state (not merely the idea of nationhood) and also the belief that nations, as collective identities, compete. You'll be familiar with this idea's associated rhetoric - "global race", "the only way Britain can win", "British jobs for British workers". Such language is appealing and populist, indeed it harks back to an age of one-sided "free trade", ever higher tariff barriers and protectionism.

A further, and essential, element of Fascist economics is the idea that only investment directed by the state - as the embodiment of nation - is good investment. Other investment - by big business especially - represents a drag away from the vital agenda of national development and progress.

This view persists today - here from an article in the FT:

...especially in an economic environment where the only productive use of capital is increasingly through government spending.

Private investment is anti-social, indeed it represents:

...the pursuit of personal gain over the common good in a nefarious and unproductive way for society.

Since the writer here isn't proposing a Stalinist command economy, the only conclusion is that she believes that the state, as the mirror of society's needs, must direct investment in the economy. And, just as was the case with Italian Fascism's drawing on List, a core policy is the rejection of consumption today in order that the state of the future may thrive. Today this policy is couched in terms of 'climate change', 'well-being', 'sustainability' and 'equality' rather than 'industrialisation', 'competitiveness' and 'national power' but it is otherwise indistinguishable.

Moreover, like fascism, these ideas are anti-democratic (or in modern parlance post-democratic):

Party government was formally suspended in Italy on 18 November 2011. On that day, less than a week after Silvio Berlusconi’s resignation, a new government led by the former European commissioner Mario Monti received the support of the Chamber of Deputies, with only the regionalist-populist Lega Nord (Northern League) voting against it. By an overwhelming majority, all but one of Italy’s parliamentary parties approved a government that contained not a single party representative or elected parliamentarian.

And this returns me to my wry smile about List:

...the original European unity theorist whose ideas were the basis for the European Economic Community

Leaving aside the admirable desire to avoid war, the European project was founded on the idea of state-directed, protectionist economics. The entire programme is the antithesis of laissez faire and the political imperative is both anti-democratic - as we have seen with the response to the Euro crisis - and anti-enterprise. Or rather against enterprise that falls outside the 'plan', does not confirm to the 'agenda' and lacks the endorsement of collective technocratic leadership.

Today we tend to characterise fascism as ignorance, jackboots and racism but the core economic ideas remain - nations, regions or cities competing, the state directing economic investment and the belief that technical expertise is better than democratic leadership. Above all there is this view that we have, as a nation (or in the EU's case 'group of nations') a 'common purpose', a greater mission than our personal, selfish interest. And that this purpose requires sacrifice - higher taxes, lower incomes, reduced choice - for the greater good of the nation.

This is the New Fascism.

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Prince of Bureaucrats calls for guided democracy...

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I'm told that Gus O'Donnell is a terribly clever man. I'm sure this is the case but he clearly has lost all grip on the concept of democracy:

Would-be MPs should be forced to meet "pre-qualification criteria" before being allowed to stand, a former cabinet secretary has suggested.

Lord O'Donnell - once the UK's most senior civil servant - said the idea could make Parliament more effective.

Government policies would also be vetted by former ministers, accountants and ex-civil servants under Lord O'Donnell's proposals.

I wanted to take this apart bit by bit. But is so completely and utterly stupid - unless, of course, the Prince of Bureaucrats has converted to Sukarno's concept of 'guided democracy':

He proposed a government based on the four main parties plus a national council representing not merely political parties but functional groups—urban workers, rural farmers, intelligentsia, national entrepreneurs, religious organizations, armed services, youth organizations, women’s organizations, etc.—through which, under presidential guidance, a national consensus could express itself.

Of course, there was a much earlier form of this idea invented by an Italian called Benito!

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Bitcoin and the new fascism...

Guiseppe Volpi, Mussolini's Finance Minister

Like this from Izabella Kaminska:

Currencies of the realm represent a social contract between citizens and the government. Not only are they mandated as official tender, they end up being inherently superior to other units because of that government affiliation. This is because the government is the one common denominator between all participatory agents in the economy, all of whom at some point have to pay taxes. Why would you accept settlement in BP shares, when you know that ultimately your liability to the government is in national fiat.

That currencies exist because we have to pay taxes is not only untrue but a misrepresentation of the point of currency. Indeed, the liberation of money from state monopoly must be one of the objectives we strive for - monopoly is always bad and doubly bad when it exists solely for the purpose of allowing the government to take that which is ours by main force.

The other reason this is nonsense is because the direction we are travelling is away from government not towards it - thus it is no surprise that governments dislike systems of exchange they don't control. Moreover the size of government requires that these initiatives be stopped - if they are not then government cannot sustain itself (other than by debauching the very currency that Isabella claims is 'inherently superior'). That superiority is simply a consequence of government's monopoly of effective force rather than anything inherent in some mythical 'social contract'.

But then the writer here compounds the misperception by revealing her prejudice:

This is because it is still based on anti-social instincts and the pursuit of personal gain over the common good in a nefarious and unproductive way for society. 

Now - given that the writer claims some economic knowledge - I'm not going to talk about Adam Smith and that famous bit about the butcher's self-interest. Rather I'm going to ask who defines the 'common good'? If (as I suspect is the case here) the definition is 50%+1 then we are simply living in a tyranny and creating the circumstances for the rebirth of what Finer called the 'oikos' state. And the tyranny would be a platonic one - the great and good, the heads of that 'oikos' would decide the common good. Anything - such as a private currency - that would threaten what those heads determine is 'good' must be stopped. As our author puts it:

At its heart the currency is founded on anti-social tenets, which will always tempt capital that wishes to be used unproductively, especially in an economic environment where the only productive use of capital is increasingly through government spending.

Or as Benito Mussolini would have put it:

Everything within the state, nothing without the state.

Welcome to the new fascism folks!

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Now the Liberal Democrats want to ban cars...

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I guess this is something to do with saving the planet. But quite frankly they can shut up and go away:

Nick Clegg’s party has unveiled proposals to only allow ultra-low carbon vehicles on UK roads by 2040.

The controversial measures would mean millions of petrol and diesel cars being forbidden.

Only electric vehicles and ultra-efficient hybrid cars would be allowed on UK roads under the Lib Dem plans. 

What is it about these so-called 'liberals' that makes them want to ban things, stop things and generally restrain and curtail the liberty of ordinary Brits?

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The truth about evidence-based policy making...

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Via Dick Puddlecote, the low down about the manipulation of truth by so-called academics:

Evidence based policymaking (EBPM) is about power: to decide what counts as evidence; to ignore or pay attention to particular studies; to link the evidence of a policy problem to a particular solution; and, to ensure that policymakers have the motive and opportunity to turn a solution into policy. Indeed, an attempt to portray EBPM as a technical or scientific process is often an attempt to exercise power: to rule some evidence in and most evidence out; and, to use particular forms of evidence to justify political action.

There you have it from Professor of Politics and Public Policy at the University of Stirling Paul Cairney. This is, as I have said many a time, the misuse of science to justify political control. While there are no uniforms it is objectively little different to the abuse of science practiced by certain 20th century regimes.

Bear in mind that the writer is a sociologist not a scientist. And understand that it is people like Prof Cairney who are misusing the science - the scientists themselves are, in the main, just useful idiots providing the substance from which the control freaks of government can carve their judgemental, nannying state.

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Tell me Sir David who are you going to kill first?

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It seems that (at least according to George Monbiot*) the sainted David Attenborough has been peddling his eugenicist message again:

On the Today programme on Wednesday, Sir David Attenborough named the rising human population as the first of the factors causing the loss of the UK's wildlife. 

We know that Sir David believes in a mythical thing called 'optimum population':

On joining the Optimum Population Trust, Sir David said growth in human numbers was "frightening".

Sir David has been increasingly vocal about the need to reduce the number of people on Earth to protect wildlife. 

What interests me (leaving aside that the current population projections for the world suggest stabilisation by the middle of this century and decline thereafter) is who Sir David wants to kill off.

Is he proposing to sterilise less productive members of society - cripples, people without university degrees, members of parliament? Or are we to expect a sort of Logan's Run:

"The seeds of the Little War were planted in a restless summer during the mid-1960s, with sit-ins and student demonstrations as youth tested its strength. By the early 1970s over 75 percent of the people living on Earth were under 21 years of age. The population continued to climb—and with it the youth percentage..."

Perhaps 21 is too young to pop us off, maybe thirty as in the film or perhaps a more modest 45!  Or will we have be some dystopic variant on the National Lottery - with the prize being sterilisation or even death.

The truth is that Attenborough is perhaps the last of a dinosaur generation - the inheritor of the authoritarian state direction (I hesitate to give it its real name) that so appealed to Keynes, to Beatrice and Sidney Webb, and to that self-indulgent English elite: Shaw, Wells, Tawney, Foot. These people, for all their supposed socialism, saw a load of little peons to be herded about, organised, hectored, lectured and patronised. And if needs be, neutered.

So given it isn't gorillas Sir David plans on killing, who is it?

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*Can I point out that Monbiot's article is (as usual) a pile of factually incorrect dribble

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Ban cars!

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Yes folks it's the latest piece of public health nonsense. The people who brought you "third hand smoke", "obesogenic environments" and "passive drinking" -  a veritable torrent of nannying fussbucketry - now want to do the same for cars:

Private cars cause significant health harm. The impacts include physical inactivity, obesity, death and injury from crashes, cardio-respiratory disease from air pollution, noise, community severance and climate change. The car lobby resists measures that would restrict car use, using tactics similar to the tobacco industry. Decisions about location and design of neighbourhoods have created environments that reinforce and reflect car dependence.

I seem to recall that tobacco was 'unique' as a product and that no other product was so exceptionally damaging. So why is it that the judgemental little authoritarians in the public health fraternity keep finding more things they wish to ban? That they advocate:

Car dependence is a potent example of an issue that ecological public health should address. The public health community should advocate strongly for effective policies that reduce car use and increase active travel. 

How long before they start banning car ads 'targeting children'? And adding health warnings to cars? Sock puppet organisations  - Traffic Concern or some such wibble - will spring up and the lobby the councils and government departments that fund them?

Will we have laws restricting engine size, saying we can only own one car, rationing petrol - all in the cause of making us healthy (whether the policies work or not - it's the campaign that matter).

 And just before we dismiss the article as just another bit of daft academic nonsense - the lead author works for the NHS.