The greatest economic and political study of fascism, published by classical liberal journalist John T. Flynn at the height of World War II, is perhaps the best and most concise summary of America’s economic system today. The thesis of As We Go Marching (1944) states in part:

“Fascism…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.” [Emphasis added]

At its base, economic fascism is a form of capitalism, not socialism. It has always been this way, though many leading promoters of free markets today wish it wasn’t. But fascism has native-born citizenship in capitalism, in private property, and not in state property socialism. Fascism’s private property DNA can’t be denied. 

There are many words to describe statism generally, as well as words to describe our capitalist system that has been corrupted by parasitic billionaires. These include cronyism, fascism, corporatism, plutocracy, and kleptocracy (this latter one, admittedly, can apply to socialism or capitalism). We don’t have to shoe-horn socialism into the role. All the original socialist theorists defined socialism as government ownership of the means of production (as did all the early dictionaries), not regulatory control through the capitalist mechanism.

And it’s in economic fascism where virtually all the market distortions happen in the U.S. economy today. Socialism, on the other hand, is not a present or serious threat to the American economy. And it’s not because socialism is generally unpopular and has a long and documented record of economic devastation globally (though this is also true), but rather because the billionaire lobby controlling both parties of government wants to keep their profits guaranteed through crony subsidies, government contracts, and gate-keeping regulations.

Failure to correctly address a problem almost invariably leads to faulty solutions, and labeling fascistic, crony capitalism a sub-variant of socialism has already kept people from forcing a solution to America’s current economic troubles.

The entire capitalist propaganda narrative—at least among those foundations inside the Washington beltway—is geared up toward a fake political battle against socialism, the phantom threat, and very little energy is ever expended against the very real capitalist threat of fascism. 

Whenever a subsidy or a tax break for a particular politically-connected company or sector is proposed, the predictable response from Reason, the Cato Institute, the American Enterprise Institute, and the Heritage Foundation is always, essentially, “If it lowers taxes, I’m for it.” This billionaire-funded ideological complex favors the tax breaks even if it only lowers taxes for one politically-favored company and does nothing to lower government spending (implying that taxes, debt or inflation on everyone else must rise). That’s why America and the West are in the situation they’re in, where the billionaires always have the roulette wheel of finance magnetized to favor the house. 

And the reaction of dullard libertarians and conservatives following this ideological complex is “none of your problems is because someone else is a billionaire.” Of course, if Elon Musk takes in $36 billion in tax dollars in direct subsidies and contracts (which he has, not including tax breaks), that means the average American household is directly more than $2,300 poorer because of Musk alone. For a lot of families, losing $2,300 can in fact create a real problem where none existed before.

Beltway libertarians fight against the phantom socialist enemy and do next-to-nothing against America’s most potent enemy, the billionaires tied to government subsidies.

As usual, the left is also wrong. The problem with the economy is not that billionaires pay too little in taxes, nor is it that they should pay more in taxes. It’s that billionaires take too much taxes. Look at all the richest billionaires in America and you find all of them on the public teat. You’d be hard-pressed to name any billionaire in America today who wasn’t cashing government checks at least in sums amounting to an average of tens of millions of dollars per year. And if you think you can name one off the top of your head, you’re probably mistaken.

The richest half-dozen Americans include Tesla’s Elon Musk, Oracle’s Larry Ellison, Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, Amazon’s Jeff Bezos, and Google’s Larry Page/Sergey Brin. All of them have nine- or ten-figure annual contracts with the federal government, and often contracts with state and local governments as well. And all but Tesla are intricately connected to contracts with U.S. intelligence agencies (though Musk’s SpaceX undoubtedly helps spy agencies with satellites). 

It’s not that a business can’t run using only the free enterprise sector in the U.S. economy today; it’s that the upward size limits of those businesses are controlled by anti-market government machinations. When government at all levels spends more than 37% of GDP, it’s hard not to be big and not suck at the government teat. Profits for those largest capitalist ventures are often guaranteed by the state through lobbyists, contracts, legislative subsidies, and Deep State executive branch regulations. The monetary and regulatory incentives invariably pervert the natural markets forces toward the will of the plutocrats running the U.S. government.

It’s the billionaires who are the primary source of America’s economic inefficiency and the main attacks on free enterprise in America today, not socialism. Recall that health care reform under Barack Obama transformed from the promised socialist “public option” during the 2008 campaign to the cartelized “private” health care exchanges with hundreds of billions in annual federal subsidies that continues to guarantee insurance company profits. This happened because the billionaires own both parties in Congress and can override the president, the courts, and the electorate.

Obama had a popular electoral mandate for a little sliver of socialism in 2008, and he still couldn’t get it enacted. Such is the power of the fascist/plutocratic lobby in Washington, and the result is that the United States spends about twice as much as countries that have socialist medicine, with measurably worse health results. The current cartelized private health care system is arguably less efficient than the openly socialist health care systems in place in European and other developed economies. So while it’s good that the “public option” socialism failed under Obamacare, the free market was distorted even more under “private” Obamacare than it would have had the public option (or even full socialization) been implemented. Americans pay more for “capitalist” medicine than Europeans pay for socialist medicine, and they don’t even live as long as Europeans with that pricey health care.

If socialism is so bad, and so inefficient—and it is—how bad must be the corruption that currently subsists in America’s current health care system to make it less efficient than a socialist plan? This is not an indictment of free enterprise, which has nothing whatsoever to do with the U.S. health care system. But it is a heavy indictment of, and proof that, crony capitalism can be even more economically devastating than socialism.

And Obamacare is only one example among many. “Operation Warp Speed” under COVID amounted to warp-speeding government dollars over to universities and pharmaceutical companies, guaranteeing their private profits with hundreds of billions in taxpayers’ funds and using totalitarian methods to force new consumers to consume their products. And then there was the financial bailout in 2008, the ongoing arms manufacturer/surveillance state subsidies for the forever wars, inflation and interest rate subsidies for the financial and real estate industries, and on and on. And each of these subsidies (other than the 2008 bailout) mentioned above separately distorts the free market by more than $1 trillion every year on an ongoing basis, more than Obama’s public option could have ever distorted away from the free market. And all of them explicitly favor billionaires. Note: One trillion dollars is more than $6,500 per American household.

Yet the meme “None of your problems is because someone else is a billionaire” persists, generated by the billionaires and spread by gullible people who have not taken a hard look into the anti-market crony forces in our current economic system.

The ideological complex in Washington funded by the billionaires would have us fear socialism rather than cronyist fascism, as if the government-owned Amtrak and New York City’s Mayor-elect Zohran Mamdami establishing a handful of city-run grocery stores and making subway fares free could ever threaten American freedom.

How can Mamdami’s tiny and pathetic socialism (if it even gets enacted in a city controlled by Wall Street) possibly threaten the average American’s economic well-being?

It can’t. Neither can Amtrak.

Billionaires desperately want to keep the current thesis/antithesis paradigm of capitalism/socialism, with the compromise synthesis being the current corporatist kleptocracy that is probably most accurately labeled “economic fascism.” It keeps the money from taxpayers flowing into their coffers. It keeps their profits privatized and guarantees them against losses, so long as they control the levers of government power.

As a result, we have everything in the captive media mashed into this fake socialism vs. capitalism dialectic, including even silly inventions such as “cultural Marxism.” Cultural Marxism is an invented and fake thing, and it has nothing to do whatsoever with either Karl Marx or Marxists past or present—Marx’s dictum in the Communist Manifesto to end the traditional family and his atheism notwithstanding. The “woke” political left is likely a billionaire operation designed to keep the left focused on silly social issues such as pronouns instead of the ongoing billionaire financial rape of working classes.

This is why I detest the narrative that “Everything we don’t like is socialism.” Socialism is only one of many things we libertarians don’t like. Blaming socialism for everything bad that government does is like saying everything bad an individual does is murder, e.g., “larceny is murder,” “drunkenness is murder,” “littering is murder.” It gets to the point of silliness and even makes the definition of murder murky, perhaps even making murder more verbally defensible to an unthinking public.

Ironically, it’s confusing the term “socialism” that would give it its only chance to resurface. People are getting economically desperate, especially young people, and without any real clear alternative to the current fascist plutocracy. They might resort to that vague alternative “socialism” to avert current economic despair. 

Libertarians should take current economic reality as permission to hate on billionaires, as the political risk of socialism is nil and the upside in minimizing the kleptocracy of the plutocrats is virtually unlimited. Libertarians should instead focus their energy on opposing the real threat to free markets: billionaires and economic fascism. If they do that, and ignore the fake capitalist/socialist paradigm, they just might find their message will catch fire in the minds of the American working class, which is also the American electorate.

In the end, hating billionaires on the government take will accomplish far more than opposing the phantom socialist threat.