I only recently came across the following diagram, so apologies if its been discussed before.
http://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2009/01/26/business/economy/20090126-recessions-graphic.html
If the Keynesian prescription for recessions is to cut taxes and increase spending, then by that definition Reagan was a Keynesian. And his policies worked. Yet Austrians argue that Keynesianism has never worked. But it did work for Reagan, didn't it?
Laotzu del Zinn: Mussollini called fascism the merger of the corporation and the state. I am using that broad definition here. Perhaps I should have said "ie, american fascism," or corporatism/corporatocracy. Besides Reagan's heavy merging of corporation and state, his regime was very anti-expression, pro military, and imperialistic. It relied on conservative values and the suppression of minorities. It's different than Italian and German fascism, sure. But it's fascism none-the-less. You can leave all your leftover republican bias for Reagen, the murderer, at the door.
Mussollini called fascism the merger of the corporation and the state. I am using that broad definition here. Perhaps I should have said "ie, american fascism," or corporatism/corporatocracy.
Besides Reagan's heavy merging of corporation and state, his regime was very anti-expression, pro military, and imperialistic. It relied on conservative values and the suppression of minorities.
It's different than Italian and German fascism, sure. But it's fascism none-the-less. You can leave all your leftover republican bias for Reagen, the murderer, at the door.
When did you stop beating your wife?
That's the fallacy you make here, as Aristotle would have put it. You make an assumption that I have any Republican bias or Reagan bias in the first place, even though I am not even American. Wouldn't you need to have a wife in the first place, before you decided to beat a spouse?
The following is whatever I remember from Tony Judt's Postwar and von Mises' Omnipotent Government. Yes, these are still limited sources.
First of all, Mussolini was not nearly as close to being anti-expression as many modern dictators or even democratically elected leaders today. Benedetto Croce was allowed to write and publish dissident works freely in his regime with not one word censored. So were other outright Communist anti-Fascist writers, who wrote even for mainstream publishing houses. In cases of those who did modify expression to favor the regime, Luschino Visconti and fellow Communist filmmakers made pro-Fascist cinema as a choice, because they did not want to draw attention as polemics and because they wanted a little state patronage, although they moved back to Communist-themed cinema afterwards. Young Mussolini was a newspaper editor and detested censorship then, although as a ruler, he must have remembered how weak and ineffectual journalism is at political change and how censorship doesn't even matter. Free speech is not necessarily a problem for authoritarian rulers, who can have dissident people channel their anger in public rather than in government. They don't become any less impotent by babbling. In a democracy such as the US, however, you had a culture czar appointed in the very progressive Kennedy era to clean up the "vast wasteland" of television.
Second of all, Fascism never existed in Germany, and the NSDAP's programs had entirely different working schemes from Mussolini's. Mussolini had borrowed heavily from the ideas of Economia Corporativa of Italian economists much before his own regime, and those Italian economists had borrowed heavily from the ideas of a Guild-based Commonwealth envisioned by Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Economia Corporativa was merely a connection of bureaucracy to every single daily activity, and thus incorporating all organizations into one single super-entity of economic activity. Hitler, on the other hand, merely continued a policy already in place in Germany, with the government controlling every single price, every single distribution of goods, every single allocation of capital, every single payment of wages, and every single allocation of workers until prices, wages, and interest rates were nominal figures. Both ideas had different sources and different implementations. Fascism and "Nazism" (as NSDAP programs were known) are quite different.
Thirdly, there is no such thing as Reaganomics. It was a mixture of five differing schools of thought put into an ill conceived hybrid by many advisors and top officials. One involved lowering tax rates and increasing government spending. One involved strictly controlling the money supply, until an artificial recession was created to end the stagflation era. One involved then using inflation to push people into higher tax brackets after the first attempt at lowering tax rates failed miserably. One involved a return to Eisenhower's Keynesian automatic stabilizers just in case all these new tricks failed. And so on. What is the difference? All these are merely interventionist measures. Hitler and Mussolini could have simply ordered a recession to be "over" by forcing businesses to hire, forcing prices down, forcing factories to produce more of one thing, all by a simple decree. US did not have such powers and had to tip toe around them by messing with the money supply, tax rates, and fiscal policy. American economic systems do not even closely resemble Fascism or NSDAP's economic controls.
But alas, what do facts matter next to the sublime idiocy of a conspiracy theory?
Yes, because I claimed any conspiracy theory.
I don't recall bringing Hitler up at all.
Regardless of their inspirations, they shared an authoritarian nature, conservative values, and corporate interests. We can call it corporatism, of which fascism is an Italian version. Fine. But most people know what is meant when i say it is fascism. Government/corporate marriage.
But it was informative, I'll give you that
In States a fresh law is looked upon as a remedy for evil. Instead of themselves altering what is bad, people begin by demanding a law to alter it. ... In short, a law everywhere and for everything!
~Peter Kropotkin
Prateek, if you don't mind my asking, where are you from? Also, I'm not really understanding how you're differentiating between Nazism and Fascism. It seems to me that you're contrasting them based on their causes rather than their effects. If two flash lights point at the same spot, don't the two beams become one at some point? So, how exactly has Germany not experienced fascism?
Perhaps if you trace the word to its etymological root, but I'm not quite sure that argument is applicable here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Italian_Fascism
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fascism