Lights, Camera, Action!

So much for fascism (or communism, or socialism, or dictatorships) not happening here.  Between Wilson’s War Socialism and Franklin Roosevelt’s New Deal, complete with exhortations to report traitors not adhering to the dictates of the NRA’s Blue Eagle, we’ve come perilously close to a complete government takeover of our lives in the past.  And today, of course, things are not necessarily that different.

Unlike Venezuela, the government already has taken over GM and Chrysler.  And like Chavez’s trade minister, our auto czars are to make sure the automakers produce the vehicles that “people” (i.e., the right sort of people) want us all to buy.  All these dictates, of course, are happening in a very public manner and we’ll see if the matter plays out in a deliberative manner, or in the more direct, activist method.  Already though, unions and community organizers are manipulating the law (and people) to their advantage.

In the same Saturday edition, Patrick Wright and Michael Jahr report from Flint, Michigan.  They tell the story of Michelle Berry who owns a day care center in Flint called “The Berry Patch”.  She thought she was the owner and operator, but has since found out that she and forty thousand other day care operators were actually government employees and she was enrolled in a union called “Child Care Providers Together Michigan”, a joint venture of the UAW and AFSCME unions.  Apparently, some sort of ballot had been sent out by mail that only 6,000 daycare operators paid any heed to.  Perhaps they had been tipped off. And now Ms. Berry is having her pocket picked for union dues.  Such is the banality of evil, and of oppression.

So, you thought fascism was a right wing thing?  No, as unions supported Juan Peron and the underclasses were fanatic supporters of Hitler and Mussolini, fascism is primarily socialism in action.

In America today, our government decided with the birth of the new administration that a “Crisis was a terrible thing to waste”.  They felt that they had carte blanche for action given the current economic malaise, all in the cause of “remaking” America.  Consider the three big initiative of the Obama Administration; the $780 Billion “Stimulus” Bill, the recent Health Insurance initiative, and the upcoming Cap and Trade legislative fight in the Senate (the House already passed this reordering of society).

For each, the issues could have been addressed via actions that would have preserved what is good and working in our society, but instead the administration wants to turn society of its head.  When faced with a recession in 2001, the Bush Administration reacted quickly with a modest stimulative tax cut, which amazingly worked and, except for the temporary panic associated with the 9/11 attack, few people even noticed the economic downturn.  Instead of economics that works, putting money in the hands of job creating businesses, we have nearly a trillion dollars put into politicians’ wasteful pet projects, while the President responds to criticism saying that “one dollar spends pretty much the same as all others”.  So, we wait and only about 15% of those dollars have been spent thus far, to little positive effect.

Brian Daley, a Charter Life Underwriter from Chicago, started off his Monday, December 21 Letter to the Editor of the Wall Street Journal saying, “Everyone likes his doctor but hardly anyone likes his health insurer.  So what puzzles the logical mind is why Congress and the administration have focused on taking over the country’s health-care delivery system when what everyone really wants is health-insurance reform.”  Mr. Daley goes on to suggest a number of reforms that would not cost a trillion dollars nor add any more burdensome taxes.  He suggested standardized forms, co-ordination of the 50 separate state insurance departments, nationwide competition, and nationalized catastrophic insurance.  All of which were mentioned in my piece “Your Money or Your Life” and couple of years ago, by the way.  The problem, though, is that fixing what was broken and providing some coverage for the putative reason for Obama-Care, the uninsured, doesn’t provide for that possibility of inserting government into our life and death decisions.

When it comes to the issue of “climate change”, there is little more to add to the debate in terms of what is happening to the climate.  But even those scientists who do agree that there’s some modest warming, such as Bjorn Lomborg in Denmark and others, will tell you that there lots of very cost effective ways to further moderate any negative effects.  Whether or not humans are causing any climate change via carbon dioxide (as opposed to pollution and environmental damage, which is another topic), all this research will be instructive against the day the climate does actually change to any noticeable effect.  That would be reasonable and prudent.  But it doesn’t sit with the reordering of Western and other Industrialized economies and shift hundreds of billions to dictators in the developing world, as shamefully demonstrated in Copenhagen last week, now does it?

In our own industry, we’ve seen over $130 billion in taxpayers’ money (or at least borrowed on our behalf from the Chinese) gone not only to prop up damaged automakers, but to take over ownership of GM and create a joint venture with the UAW to takeover Chrysler (while handing over the keys to Fiat – FIAT!?).

Why did I take this readership down this discussion of current events and recent history?  To let you, the decision-makers and implementers of one of the greatest industries on the face of the Earth, know what policymakers are thinking.  Or rather, not thinking about, as we find that both fascism and progressivism are non-rational at heart.  While fascism and its sister, American Progressivism, have some intellectual roots, fascism is impossible to define.  Mr. Goldberg spends several pages going over academic attempts at definition, but all are unsatisfactory.  As in medicine, if you know the cause you can define a disease.  If you can identify a condition only by its symptoms, you have a syndrome.  Fascism is like that.  It tends to be national, but not necessarily racist (the Nazis were a notable exception).  It may be militaristic, but militaries tend to shy away from fascism, while civilians clamor for the “moral equivalent of war”.  It can be violent, and in the Nazi case, extremely so, but sometimes it uses intimidation instead, like Wilson and Roosevelt.  

Two symptoms, though, are paramount, the primacy of the State as a secular religion.  Adoration of the “great one” is part of this as is the breakdown of traditional religion.  Statism is the delivery system for socialist ends.  The other symptom is for Action, the more dramatic, far-reaching and “transformative” the better.  Reason is the enemy of Action and that is why you cannot argue with facts and reason with someone who has accepted the mantle of fascism or progressivism.  For them facts can be used or abandoned or manipulated at will.  The notorious East Anglia CRU e-mails are a case in point.

So, automotive engineering types should know why courts rule that carbon dioxide is a pollutant and threat.  Why, if the Congress can’t pass transformative “climate” legislation, then the EPA will compel that change, no matter the economic cost.  

Are these people fascists?  One can argue both sides.  If you think fascism is its own “big tent”, then American Progressives certainly fit into it, much like Bernard Baruch admired Mussolini.  Sort of  “fascism with a human face”.  Other than the crazed lefties that took over college campuses in the ‘60’s and killed people, like William Ayres and Bernadette Dohrn, most American Progressives favor coercion and legal machinations, like the ACLU, rather than putsch tactics.  In which case, Progressives are not fascists, but next door neighbors.

Regardless, it is these sorts of activist non-rational thinkers that are setting the course for society at the moment, and, for the moment, we will have to deal with it.