Submitted by Chris Rossini via The Mises Economic blog [3],
Hjalmar Schacht was Hitler’s economic guy. According to Wikipedia [4], Schacht: ”became a supporter of Adolf Hitler and the Nazi Party, and served in Hitler’s government as President of the Reichsbank and Minister of Economics. As such, Schacht played a key role in implementing the policies attributed to Hitler.”
Now, we all know what happened to Hitler. But what about Schacht?
On June 9, 1947 Henry Hazlitt would write in Newsweek:
Nazism was defeated in war. Hjalmar Schacht, the Nazi economic wizard, is in jail.
So Hitler was dead, and his economic guy went to jail
But what about the economic ideas that the two would implement together? What happened to them?
Hazlitt continues:
But when Schacht and his surviving comrades survey the world today, they must feel consoled. Intellectually Schachtism has conquered Europe. The system of price control, wage control, profit control, interest control, exchange control, foreign-trade control, bilateral treaties, rations, priorities, allocations, quotas, with a special license required for almost every more, and with a mounting currency inflation hidden and repressed by these devices – this is Schachtism. And this is the system which nearly every country in Europe has now embraced.
So the ideas did not die, nor were they confined to a jail cell. Each and every one of those ideas, were not only embraced by Europe, but by the U.S. as well!
Hitler’s foreign policy aspirations may have been defeated by the war. However, the same cannot be said about his economic policies. Those ideas would be embraced and implemented by the victors of the war!
More than any other system of ideas, it is Fascism that should be #1 on the Libertarian priority list to debunk and persist against. The governing elites are well aware that even they can’t sustain themselves under a system of Communism. However they do believe that Fascism is their golden chalice.
What is Fascism?
Lew Rockwell [5] has the answer:
Fascism is the system of government that cartelizes the private sector, centrally plans the economy to subsidize producers, exalts the police state as the source of order, denies fundamental rights and liberties to individuals, and makes the executive state the unlimited master of society.
Does that sound like America today? Do I even have to ask?
We are all involved in the struggle of Liberty vs. Fascism.