Quote of the Day: Authoritarianism: The common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties

Marx’s error, Hitler believed, had been to foster class war instead of national unity – to set workers against industrialists instead of conscripting both groups into a corporatist order. His aim, he told his economic adviser, Otto Wagener, was to “convert the German Volk to socialism without simply killing off the old individualists” – by which he meant the bankers and factory owners who could, he thought, serve socialism better by generating revenue for the state. “What Marxism, Leninism and Stalinism failed to accomplish,” he told Wagener, “we shall be in a position to achieve.”...

In fact, authoritarianism was the common feature of socialists of both National and Leninist varieties, who rushed to stick each other in prison camps or before firing squads. Each faction loathed the other as heretical, but both scorned free-market individualists as beyond redemption. Their battle was all the fiercer, as Hayek pointed out in 1944, because it was a battle between brothers.

Authoritarianism – or, to give it a less loaded name, the belief that state compulsion is justified in pursuit of a higher goal, such as scientific progress or greater equality – was traditionally a characteristic of the social democrats as much as of the revolutionaries.

This is from UK journalist, author and politician Daniel Hannan at The Telegraph (hat tip Lew Rockwell)

Video: Humor: Hitler on Cyprus Bailout

Quote of the Day: Overrated Sincerity, Incorruptibly Evil

Another reason when corruption seems a better option…

As far as I know, Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot were indeed unusually incorruptible, and I do hate them for this trait. 

Why?  Because when your goal is mass murder, corruption saves lives.  Corruption leads you to take the easy way out, to compromise, to go along to get along.  Corruption isn't a poison that makes everything worse.  It's a diluting agent like water.  Corruption makes good policies less good, and evil policies less evil.

I've read thousands of pages about Hitler.  I can't recall the slightest hint of "corruption" on his record.  Like Robespierre, Lenin, Stalin, Mao, and Pol Pot, Hitler was a sincerely murderous fanatic.  The same goes for many of history's leading villains - see Eric Hoffer's classic The True Believer.  Sincerity is so overrated.  If only these self-righteous monsters had been corrupt hypocrites, millions of their victims could have bargained and bribed their way out of hell.

This stirring excerpt is from George Mason University economics professor, Econolog blogger and author Bryan Caplan. [Source: Library of Economics and Liberty]

Hilarious Spoof Hitler Videos

Hitler Long the US Dollar (hat tip Charleston Voice)

Hitler on Scott Walker's victory at the Wisconsin Recall election (thanks to Dan Mitchell)

Germany Wants New EU Constitution: Lebensraum Merkel Version?

Sometimes I ponder upon the possibility that today’s crisis has been engineered to impose ulterior goals. In the resonant words of former White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emmanuel,

You never let a serious crisis go to waste. And what I mean by that it's an opportunity to do things you think you could not do before.

This I think may apply to the European Union

The Reuters reports,

Germany wants to reignite a debate over creating an EU constitution to strengthen the bloc's ability to fight off financial troubles and counter-balance the rising influence of emerging economies, Germany's foreign minister said on Friday.

Guido Westerwelle said the bloc's Lisbon treaty, drafted after Dutch and French voters rejected a proposed constitution in 2005, was not enough to keep European decision-making structures effective.

"We have to open a new chapter in European politics," Westerwelle told reporters on the sidelines of a meeting of EU foreign ministers in Copenhagen. "We need more efficient decision structures."

The German minister presented the idea to his counterparts at the Copenhagen meeting, during which they also discussed plans to run foreign policy more cheaply. He said discussions on the issue of a new constitution should continue in Berlin.

The desire and the insistence to centralize the EU translates to an implied expansion of Germany’s political power over the region. Since the EU crisis unfolded, it has dawned on me that the path towards a fiscal policy union seems like a variant of one of Adolf Hitler’s major goals—Lebensraum (living space) for the German people.

But instead of forcible (military based) annexations, the Germans have leveraged the acquisition of political power through stealth ‘expansionist policies’ such as bailouts and the attendant ‘proposed’ changes in EU’s political and regulatory framework as the above.

Yet in a world where forces of decentralization has been snowballing, these surreptitious designs are likely to meet the same fate as with the Hitler version.

Integrating the EU, should not be coursed through centralization but through economic freedom and sound money. With economic freedom, the relevance of geographical political borders diminishes.