Phaedrus -- what do you think of this?

DarrylParsons · Apr 10, 2004

Same question to others who care to give their opinion...

I just stumbled upon a pamphlet from the American Nazi party and there is an interesting section on Hitler's approach to the economy. In that environment the approach seemed to make sense. Of course he later blundered with his war atrocities but his economic approach is interesting. Just wondering, what do you think...!?

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Unlike the plutocratic regimes in the U.S., Britain and France, Hitler did not have to resort to war preparations to bring his country back to social and economic health -- as lying propagandists of the liberal-democratic order have claimed.* By rejecting the materialistic values of finance capitalism, he adopted a revolutionary formula instead: He simply based the German economy on the productive capacity of the German worker himself -- rather than on some extraneous metal like gold or silver -- the supply of which was controlled by outside interests.

Hitler also freed Germany's foreign trade from control by the international banking houses of London and Wall Street, introducing several radical innovations. One of these was a policy of self-sufficiency, with strict limitation of German imports to those materials essential to the national economy. Another was the international barter system. If Germany, for example, had farm machinery to export and a country like Argentina had wheat, the two nations would just swap.

In other words, what Hitler did was simply ignore the "rules of the game," which decreed that a country without gold or foreign-exchange reserves -- like Germany -- could not engage in foreign trade without coming, hat in hand, to the international bankers for credit. These global parasites, of course, didn't like the idea of losing their cut, and so they naturally hated the man who was upsetting their applecart!

footnote reference:
* Burton H. Klein, Germany's Economic Preparations for War (Cambridge, 1959)

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Phaedrus · Apr 10, 2004

It is a fairy tale, just like all tales of the victory of socialism. I'm sure certain posters here will eat it up.

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Hitler did not have to resort to war preparations to bring his country back to social and economic health -- as lying propagandists of the liberal-democratic order have claimed.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

I seem to recall Hitler having made a bit of war in his time. Of course, I was educated by lying propagandists of the liberal-democratic order. To say that the Third Reich's endless warmòngering contributed nothing to the appearance of propserity in Nazi Germany is asinine.

Of course, the premise itself is mistaken, which only makes it more amusing. Frederic Bastiat exposed the fallacy of war as a means to economic prosperity decades before the practice became the global norm (which I would pinpoint as the Spanish-American War, but that's open to debate.)

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By rejecting the materialistic values of finance capitalism
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If "finance capitalism" is a reference to fractional reserve credit -- which is what has more or less bankrupted the entire world since it was introduced a century ago -- then Hitler was right to reject it, but ...

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... he adopted a revolutionary formula instead: He simply based the German economy on the productive capacity of the German worker himself
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

This statement presupposes an enormous level of ignorance on the part of the reader. The labour theory of value was first hinted at by Adam Smith and perfected as a (thoroughly incorrect and dim-witted) theory by Marx and Engels, quite a long time before Hitler took it up.

The labour theory of value was one of the great many things Smith got wrong in his seminal work on economics, <A HREF="http://www.econlib.org/library/Smith/smWN.html" TARGET=_blank>An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of
Nations</A>. Marx drew heavily on Smith in his formulation of communist theory, and quotes him often. It's always amusing to see socialists quote Smith in an attempt to refute some capitalist premise, when so much of socialist ideology is drawn from Smith.

But enough about Smith.

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rather than on some extraneous metal like gold or silver -- the supply of which was controlled by outside interests.
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Contrary to popular belief, by WWII the world was off of anything remotely resembling a gold standard, so one could hardly blame Hitler or anyone else for wanting to get away from it.

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Hitler also freed Germany's foreign trade from control by the international banking houses of London and Wall Street, introducing several radical innovations. One of these was a policy of self-sufficiency, with strict limitation of German imports to those materials essential to the national economy. Another was the international barter system. If Germany, for example, had farm machinery to export and a country like Argentina had wheat, the two nations would just swap.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

There is nothing radical about an isolationist approach to trade, and there is certianly nothing impressive about barter, the oldest form of trade known to man.

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In other words, what Hitler did was simply ignore the "rules of the game," which decreed that a country without gold or foreign-exchange reserves -- like Germany -- could not engage in foreign trade without coming, hat in hand, to the international bankers for credit.
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

This was never the law, and Germany in fact did a rather brisk trade in gold with America, with Switzerland as the middleman -- a practice revisionist historians now refer to as "Swiss profiteering on the blood of the Jews" or something along those lines.

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These global parasites, of course, didn't like the idea of losing their cut, and so they naturally hated the man who was upsetting their applecart!
<HR></BLOCKQUOTE>

Basically, Hitler is being praised for implementing ideas which had been in existence in Germany for at least a century and a half prior to the rise of the Third Reich (see R.D. Butler's The Roots of National Socialism and Freidrich Hayek's The Road to Serfdom) and which were made popular in the wake of WWI by Sombart and other revisionists of the era (Sombart's work Händler und Helden ["Merchants and Heroes"] painted WWI as an inevitable consequence of perfect, righteous German society being in contact with icky, decadent British society.)

Other historians and economists of the WWI era, such as Paul Lensch, contributed enormously to the economic policies of the Third Reich. It is just patently absurd to credit Hitler as the originator of these policies, and then masquerade tham as not only original thought on the part of the Fürher but revolutionary in anyway at all.

Phaedrus