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the case for the state’s helping to organize a comprehensive system of social insurance is very strong.
To the same category belongs also the increase of security through the state’s rendering assistance to the victims of such “acts of God” as earthquakes and floods.
No. Private insurance is the proper solution.
Wherever communal action can mitigate disasters against which the individual can neither attempt to guard himself nor make provision for the consequences, such communal action should undoubtedly be taken.
Disappointing.
There is, finally, the supremely important problem of combating general fluctuations of economic activity and the recurrent waves of large-scale unemployment which accompany them.
Many economists hope, indeed, that the ultimate remedy may be found in the field of monetary policy, which would involve nothing incompatible even with nineteenth-century liberalism. Others, it is true, believe that real success can be expected only from the skillful timing of public works undertaken on a very large scale.
this is neither the only nor, in my opinion, the most promising way of meeting the gravest threat to economic security.
the very necessary efforts to secure protection against these fluctuations do not lead to the kind of planning which constitutes such a threat to our freedom.
Unnecessary and immoral.
the last resort of a competitive economy is the bailiff, the ultimate sanction of a planned economy is the hangman.
some voluntary labor service on military lines might well be the best form for the state to provide the certainty of an opportunity for work and a minimum income for all.
Why the state?
There has never been a worse and more cruel exploitation of one class by another than that of the weaker or less fortunate members of a group of producers by the well-established which has been made possible by the “regulation” of competition.
the ideal of security over that of independence cannot be better illustrated than by a comparison of what ten or twenty years ago could still be regarded as the English and the German type of society.
“Those who would give up essential liberty to purchase a little temporary safety deserve neither liberty nor safety.”10
if I had to live under a Fascist system, I have no doubt that I would rather live under one run by Englishmen or Americans than under one run by anybody else.
There are strong reasons for believing that what to us appear the worst features of the existing totalitarian systems are not accidental by-products but phenomena which totalitarianism is certain sooner or later to produce.
the unscrupulous and uninhibited are likely to be more successful in a society tending toward totalitarianism.
It is then the man or the party who seems strong and resolute enough “to get things done” who exercises the greatest appeal.
it is the ineffectiveness of parliamentary majorities with which people are dissatisfied.
It is here that the new type of party, organized on military lines, comes in.
That socialism can be put into practice only by methods which most socialists disapprove is, of course, a lesson learned by many social reformers in the past.
If a numerous group is needed, strong enough to impose their views on the values of life on all the rest, it will never be those with highly differentiated and developed tastes—it will be those who form the “mass” in the derogatory sense of the term, the least original and independent, who will be able to put the weight of their numbers behind their particular ideals.
he will be able to obtain the support of all the docile and gullible, who have no strong convictions of their own but are prepared to accept a ready-made system of values if it is only drummed into their ears sufficiently loudly and frequently.
it is easier for people to agree on a negative program—on the hatred of an enemy, on the envy of those better off— than on any positive task.
In Germany and Austria the Jew had come to be regarded as the representative of capitalism
The fact that German anti-Semitism and anticapitalism spring from the same root is of great importance for the understanding of what has happened there, but this is rarely grasped by foreign observers.
socialism so long as it remains theoretical is internationalist, while as soon as it is put into practice, whether in Russia or in Germany, it becomes violently nationalist,
the desire of the individual to identify himself with a group is very frequently the result of a feeling of inferiority and that therefore his want will be satisfied only if membership of the group confers some superiority over outsiders.
“an increasing tendency among modern men to imagine themselves ethical because they have delegated their vices to larger and larger groups.”5
To act on behalf of a group seems to free people of many of the moral restraints which control their behavior as individuals within the group.
Zivilcourage,
Define.
Once you admit that the individual is merely a means to serve the ends of the higher entity called society or the nation, most of those features of totalitarian regimes which horrify us follow of necessity.
Quotable.
When German philosophers again and again represent the striving for personal happiness as itself immoral and only the fulfilment of an imposed duty as praiseworthy, they are perfectly sincere, however difficult this may be to understand for those who have been brought up in a different tradition.
Kant.
the striving for equality by means of a directed economy can result only in an officially enforced inequality
Plato’s “noble lies” and Sorel’s “myths” serve the same purpose as the racial doctrine of the Nazis or the theory of the corporative state of Mussolini.
The people are made to transfer their allegiance from the old gods to the new under the pretense that the new gods really are what their sound instinct had always told them but what before they had only dimly seen.
wherever liberty as we understand it has been destroyed, this has almost always been done in the name of some new freedom promised to the people.
The situation in a totalitarian state is permanently and in all fields the same that it is elsewhere in some fields in wartime.
The desire to force upon the people a creed which is regarded as salutary for them
Probably it is true enough that the great majority are rarely capable of thinking independently, that on most questions they accept views which they find ready-made, and that they will be equally content if born or coaxed into one set of beliefs or another.
Still less was the cause, as so many people wish to believe, a capitalist reaction against the advance of socialism.
It was certainly not through the bourgeoisie, but rather through the absence of a strong bourgeoisie, that they were helped to power.
the ruling elements in Germany for the past generation were opposed not to the socialism in Marxism but to the liberal elements contained in it, its internationalism and its democracy.
Notable.
Claims of the individual are always an outcome of the commercial spirit.
“The ideas of 1789”—liberty, equality, fraternity—are characteristically commercial ideals which have no other purpose but to secure certain advantages to individuals.
The war economy created in Germany in 1914 “is the first realization of a socialist society and its spirit the first active, and not merely demanding, appearance of a socialist spirit.
Göring’s Five-Year Plan administration.
Socialism must present a conscious and determined opposition to individualism.
“In Prussia there existed a real state in the most ambitious meaning of the word. There could be, strictly speaking, no private persons.
The “Prussian idea” requires that everybody should become a state official—that all wages and salaries be fixed by the state.
Is in the future trade to govern the state, or the state to govern trade? In the face of this question Prussianism and Socialism are the same. . . . Prussianism and Socialism combat the England in our midst.”37
Quotable.
Moeller van den Bruck’s Third Reich was intended to give the Germans a socialism adapted to their nature and undefiled by Western liberal ideas.
