anarcho-Nixonism?

Today's article at Mises.org is Murray Rothbard's assessment of President Nixon in late 1970, "before Nixon's price and wage controls and many other interventions over the course of his presidency. Rothbard predicted the future state of the Nixonian economy in every respect."

Two stand-outs from the article:

1. In the 1960 campaign there first appeared the curious phenomenon of "anarcho-Nixonites", several friends of mine who had become aides to Dick Nixon, and who assured me that Tricky Dick had assured them that he was "really anarchist at heart"; once campaign pressures were over, and Nixon as President was allowed his head, we would see an onrush toward the free market and the libertarian society.

   In the 1968 campaign, anarcho-Nixonism redoubled in intensity, and we were assured that Nixon was surrounded by assorted Randians, libertarians, and free-market folk straining at the leash to put their principles into action.

   Well, we have had two years of Nixonism, and what we are undergoing is a super-Great Society -- in fact, what we are seeing is the greatest single thrust toward socialism since the days of Franklin Roosevelt. It is not Marxian socialism, to be sure, but neither was FDR's; it is, as J. K. Galbraith wittily pointed out in New York (Sept. 21) a big-business socialism, or state corporatism, but that is cold comfort indeed.

2. definition of the economy of fascism: an economy in which big business reaps the profits while the taxpayer underwrites the losses

I've put #2, the concise definition of economic fascism, in both my Rothbard quotes file and my BlackCrayon.com definition of fascism.

I still like my own concise definition of fascism -- anti-egalitarian collectivism -- but in its concision, it does leave out the all-important consideration of who reaps the benefits and who bears the costs.