PSYWAR on Two Fronts, Part 2

January 21, 2011 8:30 PM

Q: What kind of capitalism does Barack Hussein Obama support? A: Crony capitalism. There is another, less folksy word for a system in which a government, in collusion with corrupt businessmen, controls privately owned means of production. That word is fascism. Mussolini promoted it and Hitler's brand of socialism exploited it. Hitler's cronies in the chemical firm IG Farben were tried in 1947-8 for, among other things, using slave labor and making the Zyklon B gas for mass murder in the camps. Today's crony capitalism has managed to put on a much more benign face than the Nazis. Obama's deals with Goldman Sachs, BP, and, lately, General Electric come to mind.

Crony capitalism, a code phrase for fascism or Fascism Lite, plays a big role in the PSYWAR on Two Fronts. Republican opportunists and political hacks, claiming to be "moderates," are only to happy to make deals with business cronies of politicians, either purely to make big bucks, or on some kind of vague principle of "crossing the aisle" or "going along to get along," which they sometimes call "pragmatism." Even worse, politicians in the "Democrat" party and their supporters (cronies) in big business can claim to be centrists or non-ideological, while nullifying the US Constitution and grabbing huge chunks of the economy.

Karl Marx favored "public" ownership of the means of production, and so in theory, Marxists oppose fascism where the government controls privately owned production. Lenin, the co-creator along with Marx of Bolshevism, spent a few years trying to be a pure Marxist, before shifting to a "New Economic Policy," which was in essence, crony capitalism. Probably the greatest fascist nation in the world at the present time is the People's Republic of China: yes ,the same thugs wined and dined at the White House this past week by Obama. By contrast, North Korea adheres to a purer form of socialism with no private ownership allowed, which is why its people are starving and have to rely on South Korean charity to stay alive.

Socialist ideologues like to claim that all capitalism is crony capitalism, and therefore is bad. They are wrong. Crony capitalism is not capitalism. It is merely corruption. The dictionary defines capitalism as private ownership of the means of production, but to understand capitalism best, I prefer to use Ayn Rand's definition:

Capitalism is a social system based on the recognition of individual rights, including property rights, in which all property is privately owned.

Note that Rand defines capitalism as a social system, not an economic system, and in her definition, it is based on the recognition of individual rights including property rights. That means that a government which diminishes or abrogates property rights and other individual rights is attacking capitalism, not supporting it, with our without the collusion of cronies in the business world. Rand, who believed that government is necessary, viewed its proper role as defending individual rights from those who would take them away.

We must put an end to the crony capitalism which has gone out of control in Obama's Washington (one front) and also to the "go-along" Republican hacks who enrich themselves at the expense of individual rights under the banner of "moderation" (the other front.) We are not fighting a shooting war with these enemies, but a psychological (propaganda) war: A PSYWAR on two fronts.