Fascism is an economic system that marries the state to business, where business holds the title but state holds control.
The idea that religious people cannot make thoughtful arguments is belied by
R C Sproul Jr's commentary on fascism's true nature (audio at the link):
Some of you, though I trust not all of you, are familiar with what we
call “Godwin’s law.” This is a particular law which is born out of
empirical study of the Internet and it holds that, given enough time,
any and all internet arguments will eventually involve some side of the
argument accusing the other side of the argument of either being like
Hitler or of being a Nazi. The corollary to that is that the first one
to make that observation loses the argument.
… The problem is, however,
that because we don’t know what fascism is, and because we associate it
with a bunch of accidental trappings to it, we miss it when it comes us.
Fascism, first and foremost, is an economic theory. It has precious
little to do with the horrors of the Holocaust, it has precious little
to do with world conquest, and it certainly has nothing whatever to do
with goose stepping and “heil hitler” signs and all the other kinds of
stock bad-guy things that we get from Nazi Germany.
Fascism is an
economic system that is distinguished from socialism or communism in a
very narrow way. Don’t forget that, while we like to present fascism as
the hard right on the political spectrum and communism as the hard left
on the political spectrum, fascism is a socialistic concept. The
name “Nazi” stands for the “National Socialist Party.” What
distinguishes the fascists and the communists is not socialism or
not-socialism but rather national socialism versus international socialism.
There is also this critical distinction: communism exists as a theory
that suggests that the only way to have economic justice is not merely
to divvy up the fruit of production equally among all members of
society, but that it is about ownership of the means of production. This
has to be universal or ultimately in the hands of the state. The state
owns the means of production.
Fascism disagrees with that. Fascism is a
system that affirms that private individuals certainly may own property,
they certainly may own the means of production, the tools and the
factory, the ways in which things get made. What defines fascism however
is that while individuals may own property or the means of production,
control of that property and the means of production remains in the hand
of the state.
Now if we know much at all about what ownership is, what property is,
we would recognize that essential to the concept of “property” is
control. If you control my car, you drive it, you fill it with gas when
you want to fill it with gas, you change the oil when you want to change
oil, but you let me hold onto the title in my file cabinet at home then
I don’t really own that car, you own that car. Ownership requires control.
Fascism then is that system that maintains the facade of private
property, but what you end up having is this bizarre marriage of
business and state. Where the business is protected by the state, the
business is shielded from competition, guaranteed of profits but
ultimately controlled by the state.
Does this, I wonder, sound awfully familiar to anyone? Fascism allows
us to own property, but it tells us what we have to pay those who work
inside our factory. It tells us what percentage of this material we must
include in the thing that we make. It tells us how many hours people
are allowed to work. It tells is this and it tells us that until finally
you are left with the obvious conclusion that the state owns what we think we own because it controls all that we have.
Friends, we don’t have a socialist economy here in United States,
despite all the squawking and screaming about President Obama. Nor do we
have a free market, despite what we would like to believe or what we
once might have enjoyed. What we are living in, economically speaking,
is fascism where property is held privately in name only, but controlled
by an army of bureaucrats from the central government.
This is one
reason why we are called to love and to seek liberty because fascism is a
betrayal and assault upon the right of property–a right which was given
to us by God Himself. That is what our founding documents say and, more
importantly still, that is what the ten commandments say. Fascism isn’t
just bad economics, it is theft.
Related: Mitt Hitler and Double Standards:
Godwin's Law Applies to Thee, But Not to Me
A fellow going by the name of Budd Whitebook has a handful of funny quips
for the Economist from Washington DC, and since they only occurred
between 2005 and 2008, I wonder if the weren't mailed in from some
diplomat (from some British diplomat?) stationed there and writing under a
pseudonym.
