In my post Crony Capitalism Booming Under Obama Rule in February of 2010, I wrote:
One of my biggest fears about the Obama administration is not that it is liberal and not that it is communist, but rather that it is the beginning of a renaissance of National Socialism. One of the common misconceptions that people have about National Socialism is that it was against big business, or that big business opposed it. Free markets oppose national socialism, and individuals oppose national socialism, but Big Business, threatened by government, does the logical thing, and joins in. National socialism leads to an alliance of Big Business, which enjoys government protection against challenges to its market share and in exchange transforms itself into a tool of government control over the economy. Top executives and lobbyists do very well under a National Socialist regime, while the people suffer.At the time, I was responding to a post that I found on powerlineblog called Crony Capitalism, which itself was a response to the article from Michael Barone called: "Under Obama, crony capitalism again rules the day."
That was several months ago now, and with the passage of time, we can re-evaluate my thesis- that the Obama administration is putting place a version of fascism that you can nicely called Crony Capitalism or State Capitalism, whereby the government subverts the free market for the good of the 'state' and makes alliances with Big Business to crush smaller companies through regulation and taxation.
Gregory Scoblete updates the situation with his article Will Free Markets Give Way to State Capitalism:
Here in America, we have a ruler who wants us to emulate China, Russia, or Saudi Arabia- he wants to create a 'hybrid system' here where the fascist state can leverage capitalism for the good of the all-powerful state through the heavy hand of a tyrannical government. I'd love to sugar coat this, but the evidence is piling up that this is his intention.State capitalism, Bremmer writes, "is a system in which the state dominates markets primarily for political gain." From state-owned corporations operating in strategic industries like natural resources or defense, to enormous sovereign wealth funds in the hands of autocrats with opaque operating principles, state capitalism has enabled the world's autocratic states to reap the benefits of capitalist enterprise while maintaining a vice-grip on political freedom.
In Bremmer's telling, the world's autocratic states learned a valuable lesson from the implosion of the Soviet Union: command economies do not work and when they fail, they can bring down the over-arching political system with them. They also watched the post Soviet experiment in crash liberalization with horror. To protect their hides and preserve their privilege, autocratic rulers in China, Russia, Saudi Arabia and elsewhere have created a "hybrid" system that leverages many of the tools of capitalism to generate wealth while the heavy hand of the state ensures that wealth is put to the service of the elites and rulers of each country.
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