The late, great essayist Joe Sobran once coined the sardonic idea of what I’ve come to call Sobran’s Law, which, if I may paraphrase it, states: “The U.S. Constitution poses no threat to our current system of government.” (The New York Times wrongly worries otherwise.) Sobran observed that “The U.S. Constitution serves the same function as the British royal family: it offers a comforting symbol of tradition and continuity, thereby masking a radical change in the actual system of power.” Whenever someone posits that the U.S. Constitution is a “living document,” they invariably mean it’s a dead letter. 

The same goes for America’s economic system. I propose an Eddlem corollary to Sobran’s Law: “The free market poses no threat to our current economic system.” 

Neither, by the way, does socialism pose any serious threat. Why would it, when it threatens to lose for those in power so many billions of dollars in profits?

That’s why President Barack Obama proposed Obamacare as a quasi-private cartel run by the government rather than either restoring the old free market health care system in place before Medicare and Medicaid or creating the same socialized medicine structure established by other advanced economies. Matt Taibbi explained brilliantly why in his indispensable book Griftopia:

“Obamacare had been designed as a coldly cynical political deal: massive giveaways to Big Pharma in the form of monster subsidies, and an especially lucrative handout to big insurance in the form of an individual mandate granting a few already-wealthy companies 25-30 million new customers who would be forced to buy their products at artificially inflated, federally protected prices.”

The dominant economic wave of the present is fascism, which can very loosely be defined as the union of corporate and government power. There’s a fake quote that has been making the rounds for years that Mussolini (or, alternatively, his house philosopher Giovanni Gentile) said that “fascism may be defined as the union of corporate and government power.” Yes, it’s a fake quote, and neither ever said or wrote the phrase. That doesn’t change the fact that fascism is and has been since the beginning, economically speaking, the union of corporate and government power, along with the union of other powers with the state. Mussolini’s style of facism (and his was the original fascism) was technically “syndicalism.” Syndicalism brings in all the essential elements of society into the national government: elected officials, the permanent executive branch bureaucracy, corporations, civil society and labor unions. 

Stop me if any of this sounds familiar. 

Oh, and you should be stopping me at this point. Because government labor unions and private organizations in “civil society” receive billions in funds from federal and state governments every single week. That funding essentially makes them part of the government, even if they aren’t part of any of its formal branches.

Mussolini made his corporatist/syndicalist arrangement more formal than the economic fascism practiced in the United States today, putting all these interests in his government “Grand Council of Fascism,” and making Fiat’s founder Giovanni Agnelli senator for life beginning in 1923. Fiat made the revolutionary trains Mussolini supposedly made run on time, along with cars, trucks, airplanes and a whole host of products for the Italian war machine.

A fascist economic system does not necessarily preclude socialism by definition; Adolf Hitler’s National Socialist German Workers’ Party under the Third Reich had a giant dollop of socialism with his Reichewerke, the world’s largest-ever state-owned industrial conglomerate, managed by Hermann Goering. But World War II proved that state socialism was less economically efficient than nominally private corporatism controlled by the state. The military-industrial complex even put out a propaganda television series in Britain a few years ago advertising this fact, called “War Factories,” a series that analyzed the inefficiencies in fascist systems where private profits were not protected sufficiently in comparison to the allied military-industrial complex. 

At this point, you might be thinking: “The last thing we need is another person throwing around the accusation of fascism willy-nilly. The accusation has lost its sting.” And socially it has, and rightly so. So it’s perhaps best to put forward an historically accurate, formal definition of what fascism is, and more specifically what its economic system is.

One of the best political and economic studies on fascism was the book As We Go Marching by classical liberal author and journalist John T. Flynn, published in 1944. Flynn analyzed the fascist states of Italy under Mussolini, Germany under Hitler and Spain under Francisco Franco, and compared them to the New Deal in the United States at the time. Flynn sought to find the common themes among the fascist systems, concluding that “we may now say that fascism is a system of social organization which recognizes and proposes to protect the capitalist system and uses the device of public spending and debt as a means of creating national income to increase employment.”

Most importantly, Flynn summarized the eight essential elements of fascism present in all three of the fascist foreign states he analyzed: 

“[W]e may now name all the essential ingredients of fascism. It is a form of social organization 

1. In which the government acknowledges no restraint upon its powers—totalitarianism. 
2. In which this unrestrained government is managed by a dictator—the leadership principle. 
3. In which the government is organized to operate the capitalist system and enable it to function―under an immense bureaucracy. 
4. In which the economic society is organized on the syndicalist model, that is by producing groups formed into craft and professional categories under supervision of the state. 
5. In which the government and the syndicalist organizations operate the capitalist society on the planned, autarchial principle. 
6. In which the government holds itself responsible to provide the nation with adequate purchasing power by public spending and borrowing. 
7. In which militarism is used as a conscious mechanism of government spending, and 
8. In which imperialism is included as a policy inevitably flowing from militarism as well as other elements of fascism. 

Wherever you find a nation using all of these devices you will know that this is a fascist nation. In proportion as any nation uses most of them you may assume it is tending in the direction of fascism.”

So now we have a definition of fascism to measure against the United States, and economic systems generally. The first two, totalitarianism and the “leadership principle,” are not economic. And while the concepts were perfectly echoed by Paul Begala on behalf of President Bill Clinton’s executive orders (“Stroke of the pen, law of the land. Kinda cool.”) back in the 1990s and the disappearance of Palestinian protester and green card holder Mahmoud Khalil from the streets without charges under Donald Trump, today America doesn’t strictly follow the leadership principle. But one could argue Mussolini’s Italy also didn’t have an absolute leader; Mussolini was deposed by his own government when the war went sour for Italy.

America definitely has perpetual public spending with perpetual deficits as jobs programs and spends more on the military than the next biggest dozen armies in the world combined. 

American fascism in particular shows the power of the third point of Flynn’s description of fascism in the permanent bureaucracy of the executive branch of government, an unelected Deep State, that in America largely controls the elected branches. America has essentially had for decades a zombie Congress that does nothing but rubber stamp the finances for the permanent executive branch bureaucracy without any real supervision, and under Joe Biden this country had a literal zombie president suffering from severe mental decline. 

American government—at least the constitutional branches—is undead. 

The five fingers of America’s fascist economy, essentially a shadow government, are the Deep State, the permanent bureaucracy in the executive branch that really runs the government; BigTech/legacy media who censor (or at the very least least curate) media and online content for the Deep State; the military-industrial complex which gives an advertising lifeline to legacy corporate media companies; giant pharmaceutical, agricultural, and chemical companies (Big Pharma and Big Ag) that act as the other pillar of advertising for legacy corporate media companies; and the last finger, the thumb that tips the economic scale, the “too big to fail” financial institutions headed by the Federal Reserve Bank, which continues to game the financial system against working people and in favor of the other four fingers above.

The economic system is also undead, but resembles a vampire, sucking the blood out of working people and entrepreneurs to keep money flowing to the Deep State bureaucracy and its politically-favored, subsidized corporatists using the tools of inflation, interest-rate manipulation, gate-keeping regulations, and heavy subsidies. We’re not talking laissez-faire free enterprise here.

Matt Taibbi explained in Griftopia that “the twofold basic deception of American politics: a system that preaches sink-or-swim laissez-faire capitalism to most but acts as a highly interventionist, bureaucratic welfare state for a select few.” And by “the select few,” he means the five fingers of America’s fascist economy. It’s no coincidence that seven of the ten richest counties in the United States are those inside the Washington DC beltway.

The regulations keep out competition and the bailouts keep those at the financial peak on top when their bets go wrong. Consider, for an example on regulations, the slaughterhouse industry where for a long time only four USDA approved slaughterhouse companies in the United States slaughtered more than 85% of the meat in the country. “These slaughterhouses are throwing record amounts of money at politicians right now because they see farmers and voters clamoring for change and they want to stop it,” author Austin Frerick told Successful Farming magazine last year. The flurry of lobbying efforts comes after independent ranchers came together in 2021 and proposed to build their own slaughterhouse, a process of butchering meat that has been done independently by ranchers for millennia. But the independent ranchers had to put up more than $300 million to get their slaughterhouse built and approved, and is expected to go on line this year. That’s a huge barrier to entry.

Bailouts have a long history in fascism. Mussolini’s fascism also resembled the American economy with state bailouts, especially of wealthy banks and financial institutions. Mussolini bailed out the large banks with his Institute for Industrial Reconstruction in 1931 and his Istituto Mobiliare Italiano, and later industrial bailouts under the Istituto per la Ricostruzione Industriale.

The only difference between finance in Fascist Italy and “Free Enterprise” America today is that the financial and industrial bailouts in the American economy today are many multiples larger by any metric, and have been ongoing since the bailout of Chrysler in 1979. Some of the more prominent financial industry bailouts include Continental Illinois National Bank and Trust Company (1984), the Savings and Loan crisis of 1989 through the 1990s with Long-Term Capital Management (1998), the TARP and secret Federal Reserve Bailout of the late 2000s financial crisis, right up until the massive Silicon Valley and Signature Bank bailouts of 2023. And that’s just a handful of the better-known bailouts.

Fascism in an economic sense is not a threat to America, as Democrats have warned since January 20, but the perpetual budget deficits, huge military spending programs with global interventions, bailouts, and subsidies demonstrate it has been our working economic system for decades.