Fascism is the natural product of unrestrained capitalism as it devours the government to protect its beneficiaries from taxation and profit limiting regulation. Since most Americans don’t understand economics they cannot make the connection between capitalism and fascism, so they are subject to being willing accomplices to their own economic and social demise.
Firstly, capitalism isn’t the mom and pop store on the corner. It is the international corporation that empowers the competition to that store that most wish to protect. It is the constant downward pressure on middle-class workers’ wages to benefit shareholders who add no measure of productivity to the economy and reinvest their gains into rent-seeking that causes prices to escalate in a declining wage environment. It is the combination of these opposing forces that destroy the middle class in every instance where it can obtain access to the government that is supposed to protect the people as its first priority.
Fascism is convincing voters that their government functions just like their household and must obtain money from the “producers” before it can spend for the public purpose. That leads to a limited and weakened government that cannot benefit the people and must constantly restrain spending in a futile attempt to “balance its budget” to reduce the overhead it presents on the economy. Once the people can be made to equate taxation and borrowing to “revenue” for their government all hope is lost. The goal of government then becomes “efficiency” and it must compete with business and market capitalism in that regard as if it were just another overhead cost to the economy.
It is that loss of hope that motivates people to gaze around in search of a villain to blame for their continually degrading society and economy. With people in charge who they trusted enough to vote for telling them it is the “others” who are to blame, the true beneficiaries of the propaganda are insulated from the people’s anger. Should the people ever discover that their government, specifically Congress, is not only the source of “ALL” money but is Constitutionally mandated to create as much as is needed to fund the “general welfare” and that the entire monetary system is designed to “destroy” all revenue, including FICA and Medicare, not recycle it to spend, the fate of most politicians might turn ugly very quickly.
To avoid that possibility those politicians approach any spending that benefits the people as something the people must pay for themselves, which is never going to work by simple mathematics. The truth is that such benefits are “funded” by votes in Congress, not taxation or borrowing. Congress appropriates whatever funding is necessary to accomplish the intended goal and the President signs the bill. When that happens the money appears in the private sector account the Treasury spends from by keystrokes at the Fed.
Only after money is created in this process is it available to be collected as tax or borrowed, so it is spending that funds both, not the other way around. This makes borrowing unnecessary to funding the government and its programs and the national debt, that lights every politician’s hair on fire, simply a record of money created by Congress that hasn’t yet been “destroyed” by paying a federal tax obligation. It is an accounting entity that Treasury uses to track money, not an obligation on taxpayers and their children. It is our national “savings”, albeit poorly distributed, and the only store of value available for commerce.
A “balanced” budget, the holy grail of politicians, claws back all payments government makes to the private sector, effectively stealing any resources the government receives to provision itself. It is hardly a wonder that the last seven times we have come close to achieving it for any time has immediately resulted in recession or depression as people are forced to take on unsustainable bank debt without a means of retiring that debt. Only constant GDP growth can mask this as private debt is “rolled over” into new debt and stated as “growth”. This is how people’s wealth is siphoned to oligarchs and is responsible for so much misery. Any such misery in America that can be mitigated by Congress creating money is entirely a political decision, not economics.
