But alas, the most terrifying aspect of the whole fascist episode is the dark fact that most of its poisons are generated not by evil men or evil peo… - John T. Flynn

This dangerous grant of powers to the politicians may be said—as I shall show—to be at the bottom of all our troubles-our entanglement in the brawls of other nations all over the globe, our own oppressive national debt, the swarms of political hirelings consuming our substance in every part of the country and—most serious of all—the slow but quickening creep of this great free nation into the toils of something called the Collectivist State, which is a pretty name for socialism. It may be well to remind the reader that Karl Marx, the father of modem socialism, put the income tax high up on his blueprint for destroying private enterprise and building the socialist State.

Mussolini and Hitler, of course, realized that a system like this, which undertakes to impose a vast complex of decrees upon a people while subjecting them to confiscatory taxes to support the immense activities of the State cannot be operated save by an absolute government that has the power to enforce compliance. Actually this system had spread over Europe. For nearly 70 years all the countries in Europe, with Germany in the lead, had been experimenting with the baleful idea of the security State, the State which attempts to provide its people with jobs and protection from all the hazards of life. After World War I, the dominance of this idea over the populations of every European state became complete and every state in Europe was riding, before World War II, hell-bent for bankruptcy under the impossible burden of meeting these obligations.

The German states held investments in numerous enterprises— railroads, power companies, municipal transport, mines, forests, and some industrial enterprises. This has led to the impression that the empire had diluted its capitalism with a good deal of socialism. The empire had but little of these enterprises. They were held by the several states. But even here it was not socialism but rather state capitalism, if such a term is permissible. The German states made a point of operating their enterprises for profit as a source of state revenue.