Matthew Vadum writes, “There is a whiff of Fascism emanating from the Obama White House”:
Although there have been some incidents of government exercising minor control over industry during wartime, this aggressive assault on American capitalism is unprecedented and should give all Americans who care about freedom pause.
Strict government control over businesses is the essence of Fascism, or more precisely, Mussolini-style corporatism. As Mussolini said, “Fascism should more appropriately be called corporatism because it is a merger of state and corporate power.” Corporatism boils down to this: government tells industry (and labor) what to do and they do it for the supposed good of the country.
And that quote from Il Duce (who saw a kindred spirit for a time in FDR) dovetails remarkably well with Arnold Kling’s Progressive Corporatism thesis–which of course also dovetails quite well with Newsweek’s infamous cover story from February.
And it also dovetails into Goldberg’s Liberal Fascism.
Phineas,
Absolutely, which is why that was one of the categories I assigned the post to.
Here’s my review of Jonah’s book, which I wrote in November of 2007. I was actually Jonah’s first interview when he started promoting it, in order to make the deadline of the dead tree magazine which originally carried the article.
Indeed you did. I’ll have to remember to look at the tags.
Heh. I’ve had tags on this and the old blog going back to mid-2004 related to various themes that interest me. I don’t know how many people follow them, but a reader interested in a particular topic could probably kill a few hours going down one of the rabbit holes!