Claire Wolfe on Economic Fascism

Several weeks ago I linked to a Sean Gabb piece on the economic fascism that hides behind the vulgar libertarian agenda of faux "privatization" and "deregulation." Of the Adam Smith Institute--which "sells market solutions to statist problems"--he wrote, in part:

The old statism was at least mitigated by incompetence. The people in charge of it were paid too little to feel really important; and much of their energy was absorbed in disputes with stupid or malevolent union leaders. They presided over a system that was never very strong, and that failed to weather the storms of the 1970s.

As reconstructed in the 1980s - partly by the Adam Smith Institute - the new statism is different. It looks like private enterprise. It makes a profit. Those in charge of it are paid vast salaries, and smugly believe they are worth every penny....

But for all its external appearance, the reality is statism. And because it makes a profit, it is more stable than the old. It is also more pervasive. Look at these privatised companies, with their boards full of retired politicians, their cosy relationships with the regulators, their quick and easy ways to get whatever privileges they want....

As with National Socialism in Germany, the new statism is leading to the abolition of the distinction between public and private....

There has been no diminution in the economic power of the State, only a change in its mode of operation....

Some time earlier, I had linked (in this post) to an amazing article by Nicholas Hildyard of Corner House. In it he argued that the neoliberal agenda of "free market" reform carried out under the auspices of NAFTA, GATT, CAFTA, etc., really meant just reducing the amount of activity nominally carried out in the "public" sector, while greatly augmenting the state capitalist framework within which the so-called "private" sector functioned. While more social activity might be "private" than ever before, and profits might be soaring for the commanding heights of the corporate economy, those privileged corporations operated within a set of rules stacked in their favor.

Now Claire Wolfe has more:

And yet ... all those "free-market" ideas are being used and twisted by the same politicians and bureaucrats who would once have marshalled behind the banner of some -ism. Now we have "free-markets" in the form of statist monstrosities like NAFTA and the WTO. And who would have thought, all those years ago when Reason magazine was extolling the virtues of "privatization," that privatization would mean such cruel insanities as private prison companies lobbying the federal government to give them more, more, more, more? Or private contractors delegated by the IRS to go out and collect taxes? Or "private" corporations, founded and funded by government, running government programs like AmeriCorps?...

Somehow, I won't feel one bit better about national ID if Oracle is given a "private" contract to develop its databases. Or if the Department of Homeland Security is someday turned into the "Corporation for Homeland Security" with a board of directors drawn from Microsoft, Boeing, Amtrak, and the CIA.