Saying "fascist corporatism was to achieve organic national unity by putting both corporations and unions under control of the government" is disingenuous. Under fascism, the government IS the corporations. Unions only existed to prevent unionization; it's not a real union if it is controlled by the company. Fascism was not the ultimate control of corporations by the government (that's socialism), its the other way around.
Given that libertarianism (I have never seen a descriptive definition of the term leftist) is all about individualism, it should not be at all surprising that the two are treated as so similar. You are doing the reviewer a disservice by saying he conflated the two. He just said they reflect each other.
Finally, in a practical sense, libertarianism and fascism are deeply, deeply intertwined in America. Here's[1] a popular alt-right blogger saying as such, using essentially the same arguments as I am. There's also this guy[2]. Ayn Rand made an argument like yours, that fascism is statist[3], but it holds zero water and doesn't even bear strong resemblance to modern American libertarianism. Her argument is that without a state government, corporations become the state- and therefor the solution is to give the state more power, so it doesn't become fascist. So... the way to become less statist is to give the state more power. That contradiction underlies the cognitive dissonance of libertarianism. The "rules" of libertarian canon cannot exist without state enforcement, the minimization of which is the avowed purpose of libertarianism.
[1] http://therightstuff.biz/2013/01/23/fascist-libertarianism-f...
It's a critique of right-wing libertarians that is common among anti-statist libertarian socialists or social anarchists. The argument is that the market is entwined with another kind of authoritarian violence and that liberatianism (and classical liberalism) are blind to (or worse, actively endorse).
Violence and coercion of the market is masked by [classical] liberal thinkers behind a veil of talk about contracts, negotiations between supposedly free parties, and natural rights. But in the end it comes from a history of enclosure, land expropriations, elimination of the commons, privatization, colonization, and is backed up by the army and the police.
Finally the corollary of this is that state (at least our kind of state) coercion is actually outcropping of market coercion. And so we have police forces, armies, schools, etc. enforcing property rights above all other things.
When a market is defined by mutually beneficial trade between consenting individuals coupled with free competition, how can exploitation arise in liquid markets? A large part of libertarian theory is that monopolies arise due to state intervention in the market (i.e. patents, regulation increasing cost-to-entry etc).
Because as soon as there is a power imbalance, such as one person owning a factory and another's primary skill being working in such a factory, the mutually beneficial arrangements will nonetheless tend to benefit the one with power more than the one without. And over time these imbalances can amplify such that the wealthy capture more and more of the wealth they create.
>A large part of libertarian theory is that monopolies arise due to state intervention in the market
Some do, but I think natural monopolies can also exist, due to inherent barriers to entry in some industries. Things like natural resources, incumbent infrastructure, and network effects.
I've seen this argued before, primarily in the Marxist analysis of the relationship between employer and employee (or capitalist and worker). I can see how this relationship could be exploitative given one employer, but in a liquid market where companies are competing for employees in the job market, the capitalist perspective would be that companies that offer a more enticing employment package (better benefits, wage etc) would naturally have an easier time hiring and would thus be able to grow faster, out-competing companies with poor offerings. I've not seen a good counter-argument to this.
Also, the idea of wealth capture going to the capitalist kind of makes sense in that part of the implicit exchange between employee and employer is one of income stability: the employer agrees to pay a set rate no matter how much value the employee is generating, and in exchange they absorb risks around market fluctuation, unemployment (which is a real risk for higher-value-capture individuals like contractors) and devaluation. At-will employment seems to mess with that arrangement in the US but here in the UK it seems like a fair trade. If one wants to capture a larger share of their value then one must go freelance/contract (or start a business) and accept the risks that come with those types of work arrangement.
> Some do, but I think natural monopolies can also exist, due to inherent barriers to entry in some industries. Things like natural resources, incumbent infrastructure, and network effects.
Natural resource monopolies don't seem to really exist (all natural resources are heavily competitive and end up being commoditised) and infrastructure such as water can be competed on (both directly as in a second water plant, and indirectly as in building home water tanks). As for network effects, there comes a point where pain from monopolistic exploitation outweighs the marginal utility of the product. If facebook started charging money, for example, people would leave in droves.
Government doesn't really solve any of these issues itself and instead acts as one big monopoly that increases prices not through profiteering but through inefficiency, politics and bureaucracy. Libertarianism certainly has its faults but when weighed up against statism it doesn't seem any worse even in its failings.
This assumes that hiring costs are significant relative to wages, which is rarely the case.
>At-will employment seems to mess with that arrangement in the US but here in the UK it seems like a fair trade.
The notable difference being the state regulation in the UK which requires employers to provide that stability. And even that is eroding with the rise of zero-hour contracts.
>infrastructure such as water can be competed on (both directly as in a second water plant, and indirectly as in building home water tanks)
A second water plant isn't competition for the infrastructure, just the purification process. The water still has to get to your house, and the company which has already built a pipe is at a huge advantage compared to one that hasn't.
>As for network effects, there comes a point where pain from monopolistic exploitation outweighs the marginal utility of the product.
It's certainly possible for monopolists to push things too far and end up vulnerable to a market entrant, but the result of this is a brief period of competition followed by the winner returning to monopolistic behaviour. And the entry cost of this kind of disruption is sufficient that it happens very infrequently.
Monopolies wouldn't exist or form with perfect competition (in theory, monopolies would be overcome by an infinite number of startups undercutting them), but there is no such thing in reality and monopolies have so much market power they can just buy out or undercut startups indefinitely. Also borne out by reality, where the vast majority of the time monopolies must be dismantled by the state. It's a little tricky in that the government also allows some companies advantages over smaller companies, but in general a government is much more dangerous to a (non-state) monopoly than it is beneficial. Anywhere you get weak governments, you immediately get markets that are entirely dominated by one company or group, who then usually manipulate prices and quash competition.
More generally the idea of laissez faire economics/libertarianism is that government actions are "unfair", and that causes the problems. In reality if there are "unfair" actions, they are far better used by the government (which normally has the interest of its citizens in mind) than they could be used by corporations (who have the interest of their shareholders in mind). NB that this is a strawman attack and that some types of libertarian philosophy knowledge some kinds of rules and government are necessary, but that kind of reasoning is not at issue.
What the quote says is that 'getting the government of your back' reflects the infatuation with 'Mussolini's fascism's corporatism'. He is not equivocating. He's just saying they reflect the same thinking.
First of all, most obviously, Mussolini's fascism is the destruction of the people's government, and its replacement with corporations. The only difference is that the corporations are constructed by the government. The reflection comes in the lack of a people's government so that corporations or market forces decide what the people do. In that way, pure libertarianism and Italian fascism are superficially the same. It's not hyperbolic, its a real parallel, similar to how you can draw a parallel between communism and dictatorships through (varying amounts of) authoritarianism. Fascism and libertarianism are parallel due to having no (or lesser) personal representation.
Unrelated, but following from that, is the idea that the government is basically a union for the people. Individually a person has no recourse against a greater power eg a company can fire me on a whim, and it may easily ruin my life but will certainly be a large upset and setback as I lose 100% of my income. Meanwhile that company operates at 99% efficiency for a few weeks or months, before returning to 100%. The company is clearly less bothered by firing people than they are. This stance rejects any idea that the government is less than (or at least, that it should be less than) operated to further the interests of its citizens. It rejects Hobbes. Under that, "getting the government off your back" is perverse- it means unloading your ability to advocate for yourself onto a despotic party who is only interested in their own goals, be it money or the "state". Fascism does this overtly- its literal intention is to remove all power from the individual, and give it to the interests of the state. Libertarianism does it obliquely, but nevertheless if you assume the government should represent the people's interests as a whole, then it can only be taking away power (power derived equally from everyone, implying democratically) and giving it to someone else. That makes it much easier for corporations to force individuals into making poor choices because again a corporation by its nature has better information and more resources than individuals, and can always get the upper hand.
The real problem IMO is that the political parties aren't able to really influence what way the world moves anymore. It's now mostly in the hands of technology and it's tendency to force change no matter who gets exposed to it.
I wrote many years ago that technology is like a tsunami which can't be stopped. The only thing we can do is learn how to surf the wave.
My impression is that this kind of general dissatisfaction with government is more a result of the globalism brought about by technology, rather than the technology itself.
I think the reason governments end up doing things people don't want, even before you consider blatant corruption, is that global companies are too important for individual economies to ignore. So governments end up in a race to the bottom to attract global business.
Any country, company, organisation who is not using technology and trying to catch up the to progress of it is loosing. Any country, company and organization who is trying to catch up is seeing itself needing less and less to do the same things.
Technological jobs are more or less the only jobs that pays really well and have some sort of a future and anyone who want to make money in todays economy have to use technology to scale their business even if it means undermining their own value.
The companies who are really transformative today and disrupting aren't just disrupting industries they are disrupting the legal system.
Bitcoin, Airbnb, Uber, self driving cars, drones all push the legal boundaries politicians are represented by special interest groups, these are at odds with the advantages tech brings to consumers.
AI in pushes the need for humans to relearn at an ever increasing speed sooner or later we can't re-educate ourselves fast enough.
Globalization is a byproduct of technology, we can't not have globalization if we want progress, countries who don't want progress aren't going to be able to compete with countries who do.
There are of course many other factors than just technology but it's my belief that today technology is at the core of any human progress. Without it we can't progress and and so we have no choice other than one that ultimately leads to our extinction. Technology is natural. It's part of evolution. If we don't adapt we perish.
Well, China is doing "great" with its Great Firewall to keep citizens in check, despite the technology advance. Many more countries are following this idea and I'm sure we will see more "Great Firewalls" upcoming in few years.
V = pB − C + D
Italy and Greece don't have FPTP voting but people there feel pretty disenfranchised even if they theoretically have more representation in government than an American or Canadian would.
In the last 20-30 years there has been an attempt to move Italy to a two party system, first with an almost purely FPTP electoral law, then with a proportional system with large majority bonus and minimum thresholds.
The results have been an unmitigated disaster. Not only the two party system didn't materialize, major parties have disintegrated, and the population has felt increasingly disenfranchised and participation has been falling down election after election. The electoral law and constitution have been tweaked so many times that now, in a perfectly bicameral system, is is pretty much impossible to get the same majority on both chambers.
Among modern democracies, there is a very strong positive effect of proportionality of results produced by the electoral system and all of electoral participation, degree of satisfaction with government, and number of supported dimensions of public policy debate. It's certainly not the only factor, but it's a clear, strong factor. See, e.g., Lijphart's Patterns of Democracy.
Currently, attendance at most precincts/wards/etc. in both Democratic and Republican parties is fractions of a percent of eligible voters. This yields the emergent behavior you see today: the ones controlling the levers of political parties are the "true believers" who simply showed up, and as an aggregate tend towards more extreme positions. It is Yeats' "the centre cannot hold" and "The best lack all conviction, while the worst / Are full of passionate intensity" come to life.
Not everyone who shows up even needs to spend all that much time participating at the precinct level. Just enough to send onwards to the next level of the party machinery those you trust to vote similarly-enough to your own interests. It works out to about 2-3 hours per year at most: you mount an effective DDOS upon the party establishment, then go home if you want. Say you spend about another couple day's worth of due diligence each year to suss out who you vote to send onwards to the next level of participation.
Participating at the higher levels of both parties' machinery takes more time and adds money to the requirements, but not all that much in the grand scheme. To represent a county-level/senatorial-district-level/etc. at a state convention, generally about the highest most people will get within a handful of years of starting participation, is once every two years spend 4 combined days in a couple major cities in your state, split into a one-day and a 3-day meeting spread across several months. If you pack your own meals or similar (grocery store run and cook your own), drink only water, drive to the cities, and stay with a bunch of like-minded citizens who split the tab on a house-share, usually about a day's worth of accumulated logistics organizing, about $120-200 total expenditures. If you eat out, order drinks out, stay at a hotel and do some tourist activities, about $600+. The state conventions do fall on a weekday, so you'll give up a vacation day once every other year. Say you spend another couple hours a week discussing and reading about issues of the day, so call it about 17 8-hour days every year of participation.
However, not many people really know how this all works, and give up within 2-3 years of participating. They think that showing up, organizing and kibbutzing with like-minded citizens for a year or two should yield perceivable results. It realistically takes closer to 10-20 years of sustained effort, starting only from the year where the numbers are on your side. The Ron Paul and Bernie Sanders supporters learned this lesson to their disappointment. Most who attend for the first time do not cotton on that they need to show up, find enough like-minded to effectively caucus, study how the current leadership maintains and loses their power in their internecine knife fights, devise their own strategy and tactics, then make their bid to seize power of the leadership posts, a process that takes many years, failures, and setbacks that teach along the way.
Politicians are money-driven because most voters' civic duty starts and stops at voting (when in an active civic civilization, casting a vote is actually the endpoint of an involved process), and most voters are highly susceptible to media-based messaging in such a low-information decision-making environment. Politicians pay more attention to giant majority voting blocs over money; no amount of money can win against overwhelming votes of aware citizens.
We simply don't have enough aware citizens.
https://www.amazon.ca/Unconscious-Civilization-John-Ralston-...
"Saul engagingly explains the current woes of democracy, especially in Canada, the U.S., and Britain. He argues from history and philosophy that the democratic meaning of individualism has been obscured and the importance of economics overemphasized throughout the twentieth century. With Socrates, he maintains that in a democracy, citizenship is the incumbent duty and government the great responsibility of the individual. Minding one's own business and getting the government off one's back are derelictions of democracy that reflect infatuation with corporatism, the brand of utopianism exemplified by Mussolini's fascism, with its melding of huge business interests and government to achieve the managed society. Privatization as a remedy for government inefficiency and the conception of individualism as the capacity to purchase consumer goods bespeak corporatism's present power, for both reduce citizenship and place control with managers accountable primarily for the bottom line, not the public good. There are many more compelling--and disquieting--ideas in this exciting, though discursive, little book." Ray Olson