[PEN-L] Comments by Jim Farmelant on Nazi economics (from Marxmail)

[Louis Proyect]

I think that what has often been forgotten about Hitler's regime was that 
during the 1930s, in domestic policy at least, it out-social-democratized 
the Social Democrats. Under the Weimar Republic, the SPD either 
participated in governments or supported governments that responded to the 
economic downturn by following strictly orthodox fiscal and monetary 
policies, which needless to say exacerbated things. The Nazis after they 
took power in 1933 rejected orthdodox economic policies in favor of cutting 
taxes, increasing expenditures on public works, and later on rearmament, 
and increasing spending on social welfare.

John Maynard Keynes noted that the economic policies of Hitler's regime for 
dealing with the Depression, were close to the sort of policies, that he 
himself favored. In 1936, in a forward that he wrote for the German edition 
of his *General Theory*, Keynes noted that:

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The theory of aggregated production, which is the point of the following 
book, nevertheless can be much easier adapted to the conditions of a 
totalitarian state [eines totalen Staates] than the theory of production 
and distribution of a given production put forth under conditions of free 
competition and a large degree of laissez-faire. This is one of the reasons 
that justifies the fact that I call my theory a general theory. Since it is 
based on fewer hypotheses than the orthodox theory, it can accommodate 
itself all the easier to a wider field of varying conditions. Although I 
have, after all, worked it out with a view to the conditions prevailing in 
the Anglo-Saxon countries where a large degree of laissez-faire still 
prevails, nevertheless it remains applicable to situations in which state 
management is more pronounced. For the theory of psychological laws which 
bring consumption and saving into relationship with each other, the 
influence of loan expenditures on prices, and real wages, the role played 
by the rate of interest�all these basic ideas also remain under such 
conditions necessary parts of our plan of thought. 
http://tmh.floonet.net/articles/foregt.html

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Of course, as Goetz Aly points out in his book, all these generous 
expenditures were ultimately paid for through imperialist conquest and open 
thievery, but then again the same has been true for the US and other Wester 
countries that more or less successfully implemented Kenyensian economic 
policies after WW II.


Louis Proyect
Marxism list: www.marxmail.org