One supposed silver lining of totalitarianism, Eric Falkenstein notes, is that dictators make the trains run on time:
That is, they are efficient. As Galbraith used to say, the Soviets never had involuntary unemployment! After the fall of the Iron Curtain and the revision of GDP data, this is rarely uttered much anymore.
Apparently though, those efficient German Nazis weren’t so efficient after all:
Historians have uncovered evidence leading to the estimation that the Nazis’ wartime confiscation of wealth from Europe’s Jews financed about 30 percent of the expenditure of the German armed forces during WWII.
But boy did the Gini coefficient decline from 1934 to 1945!, Falkenstein quips. He then cites Lew Rockwell on Nazi economic policy:
Proto-Keynesian socialist economist Joan Robinson wrote that “Hitler found a cure against unemployment before Keynes was finished explaining it.”
What were those economic policies? He suspended the gold standard, embarked on huge public works programs like Autobahns, protected industry from foreign competition, expanded credit, instituted jobs programs, bullied the private sector on prices and production decisions, vastly expanded the military, enforced capital controls, instituted family planning, penalized smoking, brought about national health care and unemployment insurance, imposed education standards, and eventually ran huge deficits. The Nazi interventionist program was essential to the regime’s rejection of the market economy and its embrace of socialism in one country.
Eric Falkenstein can honestly answer “almost all of it” to Jonah Goldberg’s question — but most modern liberals can’t:
If you leave out the parts about killing all the Jews and invading Poland, what specifically about the Nazi political platform do you disagree with?
(Hat tip to Aretae.)