 Welcome to George H. Smith's Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. Ein Rand on Fascism In a letter written on March 19th, 1944, Ein Rand remarked, Fascism, Nazism, Communism, and Socialism are only superficial variations of the same monstrous theme, collectivism. Rand would later expand on this insight in various articles, most notably in her two lectures at the Ford Hall Forum in Boston, The Fascist New Frontier and the New Fascism Rule by Consensus. Rand knew better than to accept the traditional right-left dichotomy between Socialism or Communism and Fascism, according to which Socialism is the extreme version of left ideology and Fascism is the extreme version of right ideology, i.e. Capitalism. Indeed, in the Ein Rand letter, she characterized Fascism as Socialism for big business. Both are variants of Statism, in contrast to a free country based on individual rights and laissez-faire capitalism, as Rand put it in conservatism and obituary. The world conflict of today is the conflict of the individual against the state, the same conflict that has been fought throughout mankind's history. The names change, but the essence and the results remain the same, whether it's individual against feudalism or against absolute monarchy or against Communism or Fascism or Nazism or Socialism or the welfare state. The placement of Socialism and Fascism at opposite ends of a political spectrum serves a nefarious purpose according to Rand. It serves to buttress the case that we must avoid extremism and choose the sensible middle course of a mixed economy, quoting from extremism or the art of smearing. If it were true that dictatorship is inevitable and that Fascism and Communism are the two extremes at the opposite ends of our course, then what is the safest place to choose? Why the middle of the road? The safely undefined, indeterminate, mixed economy, moderate middle with a moderate amount of government favors and special privileges to the rich and a moderate amount of government handouts to the poor with a moderate respect for rights and a moderate degree for brute force with a moderate amount of freedom and a moderate amount of slavery with a moderate degree of justice and a moderate degree of injustice with a moderate amount of security and a moderate amount of terror and with a moderate degree of tolerance for all except those extremists who uphold principles, consistency, objectivity morality and who refuse to compromise. In both of her major articles on Fascism, cited above, Rand distinguished between Fascism and Socialism by noting a rather technical and ultimately inconsequential difference in their approaches to private property. Here is the relevant passage from The New Fascism, Rule by Consensus. Observe that both Socialism and Fascism involve the issue of property rights. The right to property is the right of use and disposal. Observe the difference in those two theories. Socialism negates private property rights altogether and advocates the vesting of ownership and control in the community as a whole, i.e. in the state. Fascism leaves ownership in the hands of private individuals but transfers control of the property to the government. Ownership without control is a contradiction in terms. It means property without the right to use it or dispose of it. It means that citizens retain the responsibility of holding property without any of its advantages while the government acquires all the advantages without any of the responsibility. In this respect, Socialism is the more honest of the two theories. I say more honest, not better because in practice there is no difference between them. Both come from the same collectivist-statist principle. Both negate individual rights and subordinate the individual to the collective. Both deliver the livelihood and the lives of the citizens into the power of an omnipotent government and the differences between them are only a matter of time, degree and superficial detail such as the choice of slogans by which the rulers delude their enslaved subjects. Contrary to many conservative commenters during the 1960s Rand maintained that America was drifting toward fascism, not socialism, and that this dissent was virtually inevitable in a mixed economy. A mixed economy is an explosive, untenable mixture of two opposite elements, freedom and statism, which cannot remain stable but must ultimately go one way or the other. Economic controls generate their own problems and with these problems come demands for additional controls so either those controls must be abolished or a mixed economy will eventually degenerate into a form of economic dictatorship. Rand contended that most American advocates of the welfare state are not socialists, that they never advocated or intended the socialization of private property. These welfare statists want to preserve private property while calling for greater government control over such property. But that is the fundamental characteristic of fascism. Rand gave us some of the finest analyses of a mixed economy, its premises, implications and long-range consequences, ever penned by a free market advocate. In the New Fascism, for example, she compared a mixed economy to a system that operates by the law of the jungle, a system in which no one's interests are safe, everyone's interests are on a public auction block and anything goes for anyone who can get away with it. A mixed economy divides a country into an ever-growing number of enemy camps, into economic groups fighting one another for self-preservation in an indeterminate mixture of defense and offense. Although Rand did not evoke Thomas Hobbes in this context, it is safe to say that the economic chaos of a mixed economy resembles the Hobbesian war of all against all in a state of nature, a system in which interest groups feel the need to screw others before they get screwed themselves. A mixed economy is ruled by pressure groups. It is an amoral, institutionalized civil war with special interests and lobbies, all fighting to seize a monetary control of the legislative machinery to extort some special privilege at one another's expense by an act of government, i.e. by force. Of course, Rand never claimed that America had degenerated into full-blown fascism. She held that freedom of speech was a bright line in this respect, but she did believe that the fundamental premise of the socialist-collectivist morality, the foundation of all collectivist regimes, including fascism, was accepted and preached by modern liberals and conservatives alike. Those who mistakenly dubbed Rand a conservative should read conservatism an obituary, a scathing critique in which she accused conservative leaders of moral treason. In some respects, Rand detested modern conservatives and led modern liberals. She was especially contemptuous of those conservatives who attempted to justify capitalism by appealing to religion or to tradition. Rand illustrated her point in The Fascist New Frontier, a polemical tour de force aimed at President Kennedy and his administration. Rand began this 1962 lecture by quoting passages from the 1920 political platform including demands for an end to the power of financial interests, profit sharing in big business, a broad extension of care for the aged, the improvement of public health by government, and all around enlargement of our entire system of public education, and so forth. All such welfare state measures, this platform concluded, can only proceed from within on the foundation of the common good before the individual good. Rand had no problem quoting similar proposals and sentiments from President Kennedy and members of his administration, such as Kennedy's celebrated remark, and so my fellow Americans, ask not what America will do for you, ask what you can do for your country. The particulars of Rand's speech will come as no surprise to those familiar with her ideas, but I wish to call attention to her final remarks about the meaning of the public interest. As used by Kennedy and other politicians, both Democratic and Republican, this fuzzy phrase has little if any meaning, except to indicate that individuals have a duty to sacrifice their interests for the sake of a greater, undefined good as determined by those who wield the brute force of political power. Rand then stated what she regarded as the only coherent meaning of the public interest. There is no such thing as the public interest, except as the sum of the interests of individual men, and the basic common interest of all men, all rational men, is freedom. Freedom is the first requirement of the public interest. Not what men do when they are free, but that they are free. All achievements rest on that foundation and cannot exist without them. The principles of a free, non-coercive social system are the only form of the public interest. I shall conclude this essay on a personal note. Before I began preparing for this essay, I had not read some of the articles quoted above for many, many years. In fact, I had not read some of the material since my college days 45 years ago. I therefore approached my new readings with a certain amount of trepidation. I liked the articles when I first read them, but would they stand the test of time? Would Rand's insights and arguments appear commonplace, even hack-need with the passage of so much time? Well, I was pleasantly surprised. Rand was exactly on point on many issues. Indeed, if we substitute President Obama for President Kennedy or President Johnson, many of her points would be even more pertinent today than they were in the 1960s. Unfortunately, the ideological sewer of American politics has become even more foul today than it was in Rand's day. But Rand did what she could to reverse the trend, and one person can only do so much, and no one can say that she didn't warn us. This has been Excursions into Libertarian Thought, a production of Libertarianism.org and the Cato Institute. To learn more about Libertarian philosophy and history, visit www.libertarianism.org.