[D66] neoliberale nazis

[Antid Oto]

Wat blijkt: privatisering is uitgevonden door de Nazis! Neoliberale 
ideologie met de roots in het Nazisme. Een neoliberaal is in feite dus 
gewoon een ordinaire Nazi...


New post on An und für sich	
	
	
A Fun Fact about Privatization: With Scattered Reflections on “the State”
by Adam Kotsko

James Meek's LRB article about electricity privatization in the UK 
includes an interesting tidbit:

     How did we get here? In 1981, with inflation and unemployment at 10 
per cent plus, with the recently elected Conservative government forced 
to yield to the demands of the miners, public spending cuts provoking 
general outrage and Thatcher’s prime ministerial career seemingly doomed 
to a swift, ignominious end, a 38-year-old economist from Birmingham 
University called Stephen Littlechild was working on ways to realise an 
esoteric idea that had been much discussed in radical Tory circles: 
privatisation. Privatisation was not a Thatcher patent. The Spanish 
economist Germà Bel traces the origins of the word to the German word 
Reprivatisierung, first used in English in 1936 by the Berlin 
correspondent of the Economist, writing about Nazi economic policy. In 
1943, in an analysis of Hitler’s programme in the Quarterly Journal of 
Economics, the word ‘privatisation’ entered the academic literature for 
the first time. The author, Sidney Merlin, wrote that the Nazi Party 
‘facilitates the accumulation of private fortunes and industrial empires 
by its foremost members and collaborators through “privatisation” and 
other measures, thereby intensifying centralisation of economic affairs 
and government in an increasingly narrow group that may for all 
practical purposes be termed the national socialist elite’.

That's right: privatization of government functions and state-owned 
industries was literally invented by the Nazis.

This reminds me of something I've been meaning to blog about for months. 
Read more of this post
Adam Kotsko | Tuesday, September 18, 2012 at 7:27 am | Categories: 
economics, fascism, Foucault, politics | URL: http://wp.me/p2IRQ-2dn