The Cause of Hitler's Germany by Leonard Peikoff

Author:Leonard Peikoff
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Penguin Publishing Group
Published: 2014-10-27T04:00:00+00:00

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The culture of Weimar Germany advocated irrational emotion. The economy demanded it. It provided conditions which allowed men no other mode of functioning.

The Republic was a mixed economy, the kind established by Bismarck and mandated by the nation’s new constitution. There was an element of economic liberty, and there were growing government controls—direct or indirect; federal, state, or municipal—over every aspect of the country’s productive life. The controls covered business, labor, banking, utilities, agriculture, housing, and much more. As a rule each new set of controls conferred benefits on some German group(s), at a cost. The cost was incurred by other groups, whose forced sacrifice paid for the benefits. The victims responded predictably.

Confronted with increasing British exactions one hundred and fifty years earlier, the American colonists did not decide to beef up their lobby in the English court; they heralded the rights of man and decided to throw off the yoke. There were no such ideas in Weimar Germany. The Germans did not question the code of sacrifice or the principle of statism. These ideas, they had been taught by every side and sect within their culture, specify how man ought to live and the only way man can live. They define the moral and the practical.

The Germans, therefore, practiced them. In order not to be eaten alive by the next round of legislation, virtually everyone joined or identified himself with a group (since an isolated individual had no chance against large, vocal blocs). And every group knew only one policy: to demand new economic benefits from the government and/or new legislative sanctions against the other groups.

The hostile forces included big business versus small business, importers versus domestic producers, employers’ associations versus labor unions, blue-collar workers versus white-collar, the employed versus the unemployed, industrialists versus Junkers, Junkers versus peasants, farmers versus city dwellers, creditors versus debtors, the lower classes versus the middle, the lower middle versus the upper middle, the middle versus the upper. The plea which all these groups addressed to the Reichstag was a cacophony of contradictions, such as: higher tariffs/freer trade; more subsidies to business/less government intervention; tight money/easy credit; longer hours/shorter; higher prices/lower; bigger profits/smaller; more competition/less; more public works/fewer; more public ownership/no more; higher wages/give us jobs; more social benefits/stop the inflation; what about us?/cut the taxes.

The authors of the Weimar Constitution had believed that a controlled economy in the hands of a democratic government would foster peaceful cooperation among men, as against the “ruthless competition” and “war of all against all” which they held to be inherent in a free market. What the mixed economy produced instead was a ruthless competition among groups, a collectivist “war of all against all.”

It was not his own selfish advantage that he sought—said the laborer, the businessman, the farmer, as he fought to impose legal restrictions or hardships on the others—but the welfare of his group: the livelihood of the workers, the progress of industry, the preservation of agriculture. His group, he said, was deserving, because of the services it had rendered to an overriding entity: the nation as a whole.

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