No Nazis Here...

I am working on a post about China and the Xinjiang situation. In the meantime, here is a brief video on the NRA, the National Recovery Administration (and not the gun rights group), that the Roosevelt administration used during the 30's to help "fix" the ailing economy: Thanks very much to zeno at Vox Popoli for digging this up. Several things to note about the video:

• the similarity of the parade to Nazi rallies of the era
• the similarity of the Blue Eagle to the Nazi eagle emblem
• the outright socialist mindset of the program and its supporters
• the discrimination against blacks (and the Republican opposition to the program)

What struck me most in relation to my previous post, being a capitalism freak, was the remark about the program destroying small business and strengthening large, established corporate interests. It is my opinion that virtually all large corporations would cease to exist in a more capitalist system. Corporatism itself is a bit of an anathema to the individualist mentality of capitalism. The ability to legally escape market risk through collective ownership and limited liability is one of a vast number of ways in which anti-capitalist, interventionist legal structures favor large corporations over smaller interests. Corporatism is almost always linked to big government, as the prevalence and persistence of gigantic state-owned and state favored firms in more heavily statist societies will attest. I do not think that a large, hulking corporation, with its bureaucratic inertia and inefficiency, would be able to compete with more nimble smaller fry that were more in touch with local tastes and practices. I do not think that economies of scale, which are the usual advantage cited by those trying to account for corporate dominance in modern markets, actually outweigh the advantages of a small business with a smaller, more flexible capital base, especially in an environment where business conditions weren't so heavily "stabilized" by state interventionism. In short, I think the enormous power of corporations in America and elsewhere is largely the result of government intervention to "help businesses" and the economy, and probably not the result of capitalism per se. I think America would be vastly more differentiated and interests far more local and parochial without the homogenizing effect of state interventionism. If you look around and see the actions of corporations and it makes you angry, you probably ought to think twice before you attack capitalism as the culprit. Those corporate leaders may be far less "capitalistic" than you think, and more in the camp of the socialists and politicians than you realize. Who is in the pocket of whom? It is often hard to tell. ----Update!---- And just in case you think that kind of thing could never happen again, don't be so sure!