The New York Times endorses… Nazinomics. No, really:
In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.
More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.
The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escape the Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later).
What author David Leonhardt leaves out is one little tiny uncomfortable fact: Hitler’s plans required wars of global conquest no later than 1942-43 (that he got a global war in 1939 was an accident; he thought the Allies wouldn’t fight). Because after eight or nine years of Obamanomics Nazinomics, Germany was going to be out of money. Totally out of money.
So I’m thinking that sometime around summer 2017, we really ought to invade Poland.
Mmmkay?
(Hat tip, Mean ol’ Meany.)
UPDATE: We have a new corollary to Godwin’s Law.
So, conquer countries to fund your war machine, to conquer countries, to fund your war machine, to…
Nazinomics was a Ponzi scheme.
What’s funnier; is that liberals were quoting this piece as a positive thing. So now I presume it’s a compliment to say “Obama is like Hitler”. Liberals will retort “We can only hope!”
So, in 3 years we will start confiscating all jewish property, yes?
It’s all good. When today’s kids become adults and ask, “Hey, Pops, what about this debt you guys left us?” we can just stick up our fist and make a winding motion next to it with out other hand while gradually extending the middle finger from the fist.
Let’s us not forget the millions of German Jewish citizens during this time who were stripped of their property rights and their property, all of which went with great pomp and celebration to fund the needs of the German Reich. The homes, businesses, land and gold coinage were all deemed property of the state by a little bit of ink on paper and the deep burning need to “Get even” by large parts of the populance.
The German Reich took everything it could take, until in the end the state even found it necessary to take their very teeth and convert their bodies into lampshades and bars of soap.
Let us not forget that the German Chancellor and his policies, was in his time immensely popular with the German volk and many, many intellectuals on both sides of the Atlantic. It should also be pointed out that Hitler made Time ‘Man of the Year’, but that was back when they were an outlet of journalism and not another version of People magazine.
The lesson to history should be clear, once a government strips you of the right to own property, you become the property of the state and it will do what it pleases with you.
good thing i’m only part jew so they can only take some of my property.
Emphasis added. The problem with arguing that statism is a good thing, that expanding the power of government over the individual in the name of fairness, the problem is… well… eventually you end up going “Maybe the Reich wasn’t all bad. At least economically.”
Looking at the date it was posted… could this all be some elaborate April Fool’s joke?
And if so who is it on?
Some have said that if you lay out a facist platform and scrub it of any historical context, the Left would lap it up.
Goldberg’s book showed how these ideas kept popping up with the Liberal/Progressives.
Is Leonhardt showing that you don’t even have to whitewash facism, even Nazism, to make these ideas palatable?
What’s going on?
Sorry. Paste bungled
Meant to have this link
http://www.commentarymagazine.com/blogs/index.php/tobin/61022
Instead of the first paragraph
Jack –
I wondered the same thing. But the article is dated March 31, and the whole thing is just so serious.
So, most workers in Germany never saw the benefits because of a lack of collective bargaining? What the f?
This is a seriously ignorant article which also exists the more recent and on-point Japanese experiment with this style of Keynesian.
It also ignores the last 30-50 years of American growth that relied on Laffer style market economics. Also, the Germans never left their depression, they jumped into war. They never had a peacetime benefit of their Keynesian nonsense. Plus, I think that after losing the war, most of their debts were wiped clean so they never had to pay for their Keynesian nonsense.
Seriously, you mean the German National Socialist Party “doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining.”????
Doood, they were socialists…socialists are poor. The elites get to drive in Mercedes.
This is NYT writer is simply summarizing his own prejudices and ignorance between bong hits.
Why would you limit this to ‘this week’. This is one of the stupidest things I’ve ready…EVAH!
Imagine my surprise and relief when I saw in my referrals, “This Is the Stupidest Thing You Will Read All Week” and it was NOT something that I had actually written. Thanks for the link, VP!
VP, thanks for the best April Fools joke I saw!
Wait a second. What’s today’s date?
GCM –
It’s the New York Times. Have faith they’ll equal it next week.
Two Dogs –
Thanks for the great find. Actually saw it from you via someone else on Twitter first. Gotta love a nice tweet.
Applications are now being accepted for this generation’s Winston Churchill.
You guys missed the best part. Next year, Rahm Emmanual gets whacked as a part of the “Night of Long Knives”
Applications are now being accepted for this generation’s Winston Churchill.
…or maybe Winona Churchill?
For the Nazi takings, this time around Der ObamanFuhrer will be taking the properties and moneys of White, Evangelical, Christians – you know those horrible people whose genetic predisposition to deny the universal truths (of Global Climate Change, Universal Youth Sexualization and Lifestyle Immersion, and the lifetime debt that able-bodied people owe to all those who’ve been victimized by the unfairness of life) have so hampered the Progress of the Universal State.
Terrific! Thanks
There must be some inverse of Godwin’s Law at work here.
Poland? What are we going to do, live there?
If we want to be like Nazi Germany, we should invade Canada. Lots of Lebensraum, no army to speak of, and a meek populace. Cakewalk.
“We crossed over the border an hour before dawn, moving in lines through the day…”
One key to Adolph’s stimulus was jailing all the trade union leaders and suspending collective bargaining. I don’t see Barack doing that. Unless… maybe he sees firing CEOs as being just as good. Ya think?
Sherlock, we’ve got a Churchill all lined up – he just won his lawsuit yesterday, didn’t he?
My worry lately is that this all ends with us invading Mexico. Once we realize that we can no longer grow out of our debt through the free market or direct confiscation, imperial expansion is pretty much the only game left. And really, invading Mexico and taking their oil always would have been a smarter plan than invading Iraq to take their oil. We’ve got much easier logistics, a lot of troops familiar with the language and customs, and lots of oil that’s currently being underexploited.
It’s crap like this that makes me think that Glenn Beck isn’t completely off his rocker.
There was no Nazi Keynesian miracle, but some how ever since 1933 people continue to drone on about how Hitler pulled Germany out of the Great Depression. Hitler’s government almost collapsed in 1937 because of a market crash and an increasing balance of trade problems brought on by Hitler’s massive rearmament drive. Adam Tooze exposes nazi economics in painful detail in his book “The Wages of Destruction: The Making and Breaking of the Nazi Economy,” but some how the myth will not die.
As someone else as already stated, Nazinomics was a gaint Ponzi scheme, but we even have liberal university professors who keep teaching Nazi propaganda!
“because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining.”
Socialism and Communism–which Fascism is a dishonest cousin–hates unions as well. Fascism is socialism where the corporatists were allowed to run their operations under the direction of the government. Of course the corporate leaders enriched themselves–just as the Party leaders enriched themselves. No difference really, just another nameplate on the office door.
Union leaders were the first to be jailed once power was acquired in both pre-USSR Russia and Germany. In a totalitarian regime, no independent power centers are allowed.
The Nazi economy was based on organized looting. See The Wages of Destruction by Adam Tooze, and Hitler’s Beneficiaries: Plunder, Racial War, and the Nazi Welfare State by Gotz Aly.
Stephen Green is entirely correct in stating that the Nazi system required wars of conquest to avoid financial collapse.
Laugh now, but Russia rebukes Obama, he then in turn builds the missle shield, we invade Poland to protect American interests. Against stupidity the gods themselves contend in vain.
The liberal hack at the NYT is an idiot. Unemployment fell in Nazi Germany because millions of men joined the army. The NYT is a joke…just close it down.
I agree with Thomas von der Trave, we should invade Canada, not Poland. Why start the world war with a massive logistics headache?
Mexico is a lot warmer than Canada, but Mexico has a lot more guns. Granted, they aren’t in the hands of the military or the civil authorities, but they’ll probably be fired at any invading troops.
Yes! Canada must be the target.
We must eliminate the “Canuck Corridor” that seperates us from our northern territories, and re-establish the Greater America of our founders.
Lebensraum is what we need. It’s only natural for us to annex Canada.
Resistance is futile. All your beers are belong to us!
We require Lebensraum, Canada. All your beers are belong to us!
Sorry for the double, somewhat edited post.
Dear NYT,
“Who is John Galt?”
“unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later).
”
Does the author realize that most homeless and unemployed ended up in Dachau? Yeah, unemployment ended because those who couldn’t be employed ended up in a prison camp.
The National Debt will solve itself. One morning in the future some President will walk up to the microphone and (probably) read from his Teleprompter, “Debt? What debt? I don’t remember any ‘national debt’.” Then he’ll note that we have the world’s most powerful army and navy and ask the rest of the world what it’s going to do about it.
I read an economist one time who wrote that we’ve been taking the world’s wealth and giving them crinkly pieces of paper in exchange. “The trick is,” he explained, “to make it so they can’t do anything about it when they finally wake up and realize they’ve been scammed.” I >think< he was being facecious, but I’m not entirely sure.
I’ve seen a lot of mention of confiscated Jewish property, but let’s also not forget the Jewish slave labor that went into work here.
Somehow I think that turning a large ethnic minority into a slave labor force isn’t a policy that would go over very well with our current government.
At least this would require the Obama administration to maintain military spending.
Actually, I could easily argue that The One is a ready-made candidate to fall for the Gill Fallacy;
Gill Fallacy
The belief that the tools of totalitarianism, used by a benign leader, can accomplish good without in the end doing evil.
Source; Star Trek (The Original Series), episode # 50, “Patterns of Force”, written by John Meredyth Lucas, directed by Vincent McEveety, first aired 16 Feb 1968.
Named for John Gill (David Brian), a Federation cultural observer who, on the planet Ekos, introduced National Socialism as a way of helping the planet recover from a devastating world war. The results were, to say the least, unfortunate for all concerned.
There is always someone ready to believe that they can use such tools for “good”, because they are simply too “good” to be tempted by the urge to use them for personal gain.
About half of such people are not as “good” as they believe themselves to be. The other half find that their subordinates are much worse than they would have believed at the start. (This was what happened to Gill.)
Either way, the results are never what they anticipate starting out.
clear ether
eon
When you don’t know how to make wealth, you have to steal it from someone who does. One of the reasons why Bush was hated was that he knew how to, and one of the reasons Obama is who he is is because he doesn’t. As a result, all he can do is tax and spend like 1930s Germany did. Conquest is another way to steal wealth, but, like taxing, the supply is limited. Yes, it’s a Ponzi scheme, it’s all liberals with their zero-sum economics know how to play.
iconoclast:
How many times to I have tell you that it’s communism that is the bastard stepchild of Fascism. Socialism is the least successful form of Facist Ideology!
Russell Newquist, >>Somehow I think that turning a large ethnic minority into a slave labor force isn’t a policy that would go over very well with our current government.
Oh?
http://escapefromo-topia.blogspot.com/2009/02/yes-we-can-countdowns.html
Stupidest thing this week? maybe not.
#22- Al Stewart, “Roads to Moscow” Nice !
Be sure you nail down Austria and Czechoslovakia (Both halves) first.