Unacceptably Right

     Though it might surprise some Gentle Readers, there is such a thing as being unacceptably right. (Note the lack of a capital letter on right in the preceding sentence.) Neither is it a rare phenomenon, as the ghosts of several trailblazers in the physical sciences would tell you. Right and acceptable are not and have never been joined at the hip.

     Moreover, there’s more than one way to be unacceptably right. As Heinlein observed, one can be “right too soon.” In one sub-variety, foresight leaps ahead of the available evidence, such that one person glimpses what will eventually be clear to many before the evidence becomes conclusive. In another, a few minds accept that which the evidence has reliably confirmed before society at large is ready to accept their conclusions.

     There’s still another way to be unacceptably right, perhaps the deadliest way of all: to grasp an important truth that threatens a power structure willing to do whatever it takes to suppress it.

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     It’s been clear for some time that to allow government the power to decree who may buy and sell, and what, and for what price and under what conditions, is to destroy the foundations of both prosperity and freedom. Such arrogations of power always result in a concentration of wealth in a steadily shrinking circle of “insiders,” whose chief needs are:

1. To remain the favored of the political elite;
2. To prevent the political elite from battening upon them.

     The term crony capitalism is the one most often applied to such arrangements. While accurate, it fails to capture the full horror of the most horrible such regimes, the best example being Nazi Germany. The Nazis were determined to control all of German life in every detail, but were aware that the socialist approach – seizing all “means of production” (i.e., functioning businesses) and operating them as organs of the State – destroys the natural incentives that propel production, innovation, and economic efficiency. So they adopted Mussolini’s approach: they left nominal title to productive businesses in the hands of their previous owners, but taxed them so heavily and regulated them so tightly that they could only serve the purposes of the Reich. Concurrently, the Reich undertook to regiment the lives of Germans as minutely as possible, such that private life was eliminated de facto. In explaining this approach to Hermann Rauschning, Adolf Hitler put it thus:

     “Each activity and each need of the individual will thereby be regulated by the party as the representative of the general good. There will be no license, no free space, in which the individual belongs to himself. This is Socialism—not such trifles as the private possession of the means of production. Of what importance is that if I range men firmly within a discipline they cannot escape? Let them then own land or factories as much as they please. The decisive factor is that the State, through the party, is supreme over them, regardless whether they are owners or workers. All that, you see, is unessential. Our Socialism goes far deeper....

     “[T]he people about us are unaware of what is really happening to them. They gaze fascinated at one or two familiar superficialities, such as possessions and income and rank and other outworn conceptions. As long as these are kept intact, they are quite satisfied. But in the meantime they have entered a new relation; a powerful social force has caught them up. They themselves are changed. What are ownership and income to that? Why need we trouble to socialize banks and factories? We socialize human beings.”

     Leonard Peikoff, in his book The Ominous Parallels, expands on the Nazi method:

     During the Hitler years—in order to finance the party’s programs, including the war expenditures—every social group in Germany was mercilessly exploited and drained. White-collar salaries and the earnings of small businessmen were deliberately held down by government controls, freezes, taxes. Big business was bled by taxes and “special contributions” of every kind, and strangled by the bureaucracy....At the same time the income of the farmers was held down, and there was a desperate flight to the cities—where the middle class, especially the small tradesmen, were soon in desperate straits, and where the workers were forced to labor at low wages for increasingly longer hours (up to 60 or more per week).

     But the Nazis defended their policies, and the country did not rebel; it accepted the Nazi argument. Selfish individuals may be unhappy, the Nazis said, but what we have established in Germany is the ideal system, socialism. In its Nazi usage this term is not restricted to a theory of economics; it is to be understood in a fundamental sense. “Socialism” for the Nazis denotes the principle of collectivism as such and its corollary, statism—in every field of human action, including but not limited to economics.

     The “crony capitalists” of Nazi Germany – i.e., the shrinking circle of industry owners in contact with the Reich’s power elite – soon found out how little their “titles” to their enterprises were really worth.

     “What a dummkopf I was!” cried steel baron Fritz Thyssen, an early Nazi supporter, who fled the country. [Ibid]

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     The United States is currently laboring under a partially disguised system of “crony capitalism,” or as I like to style it, social fascism. Businesses deemed to be agreeable to and compatible with the aims and methods of the current Administration receive favorable regulatory treatment. Indeed, when the Obama regime was first fastened upon us we saw the phenomenon of corporations explicitly bailed out by federal intervention on the pretext that they were “too big to fail.” This is the antithesis of capitalism under a thin disguise of its least important attribute. Capitalism’s most important virtues include the way it contains losses to those who’ve legitimately accrued them. But spreading the losses to the entire population of the United States was quite acceptable to the social fascists at the helm of the Administration.

     The subsequent “recovery,” which has brought us the lowest labor participation rate and median family income the U.S. has seen in more than forty years, is ample testimony to the wrongness of government economic intervention and the rightness of a free market. Yet there are those who continue to insist that the only thing wrong with Obamunist economics is that “it didn’t go far enough:” that the firms bailed out should instead have been wholly socialized, thence to be operated as organs of the State.

     The power elite is not displeased by such sentiments. Neither is it at all unhappy about the enthusiasm among the supporters of Senator Bernard Sanders, the explicitly socialist candidate for the presidency of these United States. But those supposedly well-connected “crony capitalists,” so accustomed to having their interests attended to by the Administration, have begun to wonder which among them will be cast to the wolves to finance the next installment of the Democrats’ social-fascist agenda.

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     We who champion the free market, the restraint of Congress to its Constitutionally enumerated powers, and the elimination of the unaccountable regulatory bureaucracies are derided by a majority as “reactionaries,” often said to be “in the pay of robber barons,” and occasionally accused of “wanting to bring back slavery.” Yet every last groat of historical evidence is in our favor. We’re not wrong; we’re merely unacceptable. And because we’re right, the power elite must resort to lies, slander, vilification, and occasional outright coercion to prevent our case from being heard.

     The tumult of condemnation has proved too wearing for some, who have elected to retire from the fray. It’s entirely understandable; few persons possess enough fortitude to endure such a torrent for long. Yet we are right. In a sense, the intensity of the hatred being showered upon us is evidence to that effect, for it’s been devoid of both logical and evidentiary support for a century. The great challenge for us is to go on making our case despite the fury of those who despise us. If there will be an end to it, it might not come in our lifetimes. That doesn’t make the effort any less worthwhile.