The old Socialists, with their luminous dreams, got power in Germany after World War I, and operated a society not greatly different from that now in… - John T. Flynn

All the government planning involved government spending. And that involved heavy taxation and debt. Taxes and debt were supposed to be an evil and were certainly unpopular. But now came the new theory that governments could borrow al-most indefinitely, that government borrowing was a good thing, that government debt was not a burden, did not have to be paid and was, literally, an unmixed blessing.

Hitler liked to think that he was ‘making a front against the entire public opinion’ and that national socialism must never become the bailiff of public opinion, never its slave but its ruler. But actually Hitler was forever feeling around for the pulse of the great controlling minorities. He played with them all, coddled them all, promised all, and lied to everyone. He courted the old nationalist Hugenberg while he pampered the socialist Gregor Strasser. He cajoled his old comrade Feder, the enemy of the ‘bond slavery of interest,’ while he made terms with Schacht the banker. He made ambiguous promises to labor while he dealt with Thyssen for funds. He sent Goering to Rome to assure the Vatican that national socialism was rooted in Christianity while Rosenberg attacked religion and preached his weird forms of paganism. He played every card, worked every side of every street until he was able to put his finger on what may be called the great mass pulse and say: here lies power.

When the fountains of government abundance began to dry up, when through lack of funds and the impossibility of negotiating fresh loans the state was forced to check the extension of bureaucracy and to put a stop to [Public works |public works]], then and then only did the Italians realize what it meant to have allowed themselves to be made one of the most heavily taxed nations in the world.