Dictator Howard Dean’s Fascist Agenda

Let’s begin by examining Dean’s ideology by examining an interview he gave on Hardball with Chris Mathews:

MATTHEWS: Would you break up Fox?…Would you break it up? Rupert Murdoch has “The Weekly Standard.” It has got a lot of other interests. It has got “The New York Post.” Would you break it up?
DEAN: On ideological grounds, absolutely yes, but…

To which one may ask: what about property rights? Do not Fox’s interests count? What about the right to free speech and association? In all fairness, Dean’s response connoted that he was joking, but as we see his “public policy” views are merely the application of his ideological views on free-speech, censorship, and property rights. Dean was not joking.

MATTHEWS: No, seriously. As a public policy, would you bring industrial policy to bear and break up these conglomerations of power?
DEAN: I don’t want to answer whether I would break up Fox or not, because, obviously [...]

Observe that Dean does not say “No, I would not break up Fox.” Dean evades the question, because to answer would make him unelectable amongst Fox fans, which comprise a large majority of the voting population.

MATTHEWS: Well, how about large media enterprises?
DEAN: …The answer to that is yes. I would say that there is too much penetration by single corporations in media markets all over this country. We need locally-owned radio stations. There are only two or three radio stations left in the state of Vermont where you can get local news anymore.

Why doesn’t Dean invest his own money (or organize a group of investors) and open up his own local radio station, and see if the people of Vermont will voluntarily support Dean’s station with their own dollars? Why? Because economically, the reason why there are so few “local” stations in Vermont, is because the locals in Vermont do not wish to financially support any more then they presently have. That is the “democracy” of the marketplace–a freedom Dean wishes to override with his own nightmarish “plan.”

In a free society there are many ways to get information: for those who want points of view, not available in the mass media (primarily because such views do not appeal to the “masses”) they can turn to the Internet, specialized journals and magazines, “zines,” etc.

Observe that Dean accepts the socialist premise that “industrial policy” (the government takeover and control of industry) is a valid function of government. The implicit premise behind Dean’s assault on “big business” and conglomerates is his implicit equivocation on economic vs. political power. Dean conflates economic power–the power of production earned in the free-market by voluntarily consent of willing consumers–vs. political power–the power Dean desires so he can ram his “small is beautiful” swastika down our throats at the point of a gun.

MATTHEWS: So what are you going to do about it? You’re going to be president of the United States, what are you going to do?
DEAN: What I’m going to do is appoint people to the FCC that believe democracy depends on getting information from all portions of the political spectrum, not just one.

In principle, there are only two fundamental political viewpoints. That is, two contradictory, mutually exclusive ends of the “political spectrum.” Those two principles are freedom versus slavery. So the fundamental issue is not: how many stations are in a given local, nor what “portions of the political spectrum” have radio stations. You could have five hundred Dictator Dean approved local radio stations and still be in a worse position then if you had only one radio station as determined by the free-market. What is essential is that if any private individual(s) desire(s) to start a radio station–whether they are a large conglomerate or a local mom and pop operation–that they are not physically prevented by law from doing so.

…MATTHEWS: Are you going to break up the giant media enterprises in this country?
DEAN: Yes, we’re going to break up giant media enterprises. That doesn’t mean we’re going to break up all of GE. What we’re going to do is say that media enterprises can’t be as big as they are today…
MATTHEWS: … regulate them.
DEAN: You have got to say that there has to be a limit as to how–if the state has an interest, which it does, in preserving democracy, then there has to be a limitation on how deeply the media companies can penetrate every single community. To the extent of even having two or three or four outlets in a single community, that kind of information control is not compatible with democracy.

Thus if a company owns a radio station and a small newspaper in a given “community”–heaven forbid if they also have the ability to create a TV station in that community as well–Dean and his bureaucratic thugs get to take them over, and hand over their property to their competition? All because Howard Dean thinks they have too much “control of information,” i.e., too many stations? What about a media companies’ right to their property, presses, and stations? By what right does Dean censor them?

Dean’s straw man attack on “information control” by private businesses is nothing else than an assault on free speech and property rights–the right to broadcast your views at your own expense. There is only one way to “control information”, and that is by forcibly controlling the people who discover, create, and communicate that information. The only power that can control information is political power, the power of the gun. As an example I refer you to any dictatorship, i.e., theocratic Iran, or communist Cuba. It is only political power–the power of physical force–that can censor speech, and silence the speech of media conglomerates by forcing them to divest of their property. Dean sets up the bogeyman of the “information controllers” as an excuse to allow Howard Dean to forcibly replace the market’s vision with his own vision of what the world should be like. (Parenthetically, one must seriously wonder if Howard Dean has ever heard of the Internet, which is one of the free market’s answers to so-called “information control.”)

What is Dean’s justification for violating the right to free speech and property rights? Observe how Dean uses the term “democracy” as his standard of judging government’s role in political matters, and observe what term Dean avoids using–”freedom.” Yet, the real political issue is not whether the actions of those who broadcast information are compatible with democracy, but whether their actions are compatible with freedom. Dean uses “democracy” as his justification, and does not mention freedom; because it is freedom that Dean is attacking.

To which the reader may ask, “Are not democracy and freedom the same?”

Democracy does not mean freedom– a freedom that Dean is seeking to “regulate” and extinguish piecemeal. Democracy means majority rule, where Howard Dean is the “voice” of that majority, so empowered to violate the rights of any minority, the minority in this case being the conglomerates.

The term “democracy” only has a valid purpose if it is specifically delimited to refer to the conception that one has the right to vote for one’s political representatives, i.e., political suffrage, i.e., the freedom to vote for one’s political representatives. But this is not the conception of democracy foisted upon us in today’s Post Modern world. Democracy as used by Dean is a vague, anti-concept packaging two opposite principles: the slavery of unlimited mob rule with the small ounce of “freedom” to vote–for the mob leader. The trick is to sugar coat the tyranny of majority rule, by emphasizing that one is “free to vote”–for the mob ruler. It is by the muddy- thinking created by such a package deal that Dean expects to become mob leader.

The classic historical example of democracy is demonstrated by the execution of Socrates by the democracy of ancient Athens. What was Socrates’ “crime”? He had the audacity to exercise the right to free speech in order to spread his anti-democratic views.

This is why America‘s Founding Fathers were opposed to the rule of the mob–democracy–and instead referred to America as a constitutional republic–a representative government limited by a constitution created to protect the rights of the individual. As students of history, the Founding Fathers grasped that the majority–a mob of dictators–could be just as tyrannical as a single dictator or monarch. Quoting James Madison arguing in favor of a constitutional republic in Federalist No. 10:

“…democracies have ever been spectacles of turbulence and contention; have ever been found incompatible with personal security or the rights of property; and have in general been as short in their lives as they have been violent in their deaths.”

Quoting Alexander Hamilton:

“It had been observed that a pure democracy if it were practicable would be the most perfect government. Experience had proved that no position is more false than this. The ancient democracies in which the people themselves deliberated never possessed one good feature of government. Their very character was tyranny; their figure deformity.”

The purpose of the American system of government was to limit the power of the majority to protect the inalienable rights of the smallest minority that exists: the individual. For details I refer you to the opening lines of the American Declaration of Independence.

Returning to Dean’s interview with Chris Matthews:

MATTHEWS: How-how far would you go in terms of public policy? This is not-what you describe is not laissez-faire. It’s not capitalism.
DEAN: It is capitalism.
MATTHEWS: How would you–what would you call it?

Matthews is correct, what Dean describes is not capitalism, but a form of socialism known as fascism. It is a “mixed-economy”–a facade of capitalism. It is the government takeover of business via regulation, where the government makes the central decisions, by taking control of businesses in fact, as the business “owners” remain owners only in form and title–as they follow Dictator Dean’s orders under the threat of fines, imprisonment, and possibly even death (for those innocents who physically resist the immoral fines and wrongful imprisonment).

This is the essence of political power that Howard Dean wishes to enlarge: the power to threaten the legal use of force against someone, who has violated the rights of no one, but who has failed to conform to Dean’s orders. Now in a free capitalist society it is a legitimate function of government to use force in retaliation against those who initiate its use; but, do we want someone as president who instead of using that force morally, to go after violations of individual rights (e.g., murder, rape, fraud, etc.), instead uses that force to go after individuals “on ideological grounds”?

As we shall see Howard Dean’s protests that he is an advocate of capitalism are no more truthful than a prostitute who stridently defends her chastity.

DEAN: I am absolutely a capitalist. Capitalism is the greatest system that people have ever invented, because it takes advantage of bad traits, as well as our good traits, and turns them into productivity. But the essence of capitalism, which the right-wing never understands…it always baffles me–is, you got to have some rules. Imagine a hockey game with no rules.

The essence of capitalism is not some murky, floating set of arbitrary “rules” created in order to make the outcome of capitalism resemble Dean’s brand of socialism. Neither does laissez-faire advocate anarchism, as Dean dishonestly smears laissez-faire as “a hockey game with no rules.”

Dean would have Americans believe that the two choices facing society are either anarchism–a state of tribal warfare amongst competing gangs with no state or laws–or socialism–an economy regulated and run by the almighty state. How “baffling” that Dean–who is so concerned about other views across the “political spectrum”–leaves no choice for a third option: a social system operating under a “rule of law” based on the protection of individual rights by the state. This third option is capitalism–the system of laissez-faire–the system that holds to the absolutism of the moral principle of individual rights, i.e., the individual’s right to life, liberty, property, pursuit of happiness, etc.

It is the political protection of these individual rights that gives rise to the economic prosperity of the free-market–a market free from private criminals who seek to violate the rights of others through theft, rape, and fraud, and free from their government counterparts who seek to do the same though interventions, regulations, and controls. It is under capitalism, the social system that banishes the initiation of physical force, that all “interests” are left with only one option: to pursue their own happiness by peacefully competing with each other through production and voluntary trade.

But what if a politician like Dean does not like the outcome based on the choices made by others in the free-market? Capitalism has only one option for such a statist and his cronies: laissez-nous-faire–leave us alone! [EDIT: Check on French] “If you don’t like the situation, you are free to change it in the free-market as a private individual, but not through threats of government force and coercion.”

In practice this mean that just like a small mom and pop has a right to their property, so does a huge national conglomerate have an equal right to their property–whether Dictator Howard Dean, or the democratic mob, likes it or not is irrelevant. It is the conglomerate’s property and their inalienable right to dispense with it as they see fit, just as it is your right to dispense and use your property as you see fit. And just as it is wrong for a private citizen or Mafia to violate the rights of a conglomerate by pointing a gun at them in order to physically force them to divest of their radio stations, so is it morally wrong for Dean to use the power of the police to do the same.

Under capitalism, government leaves the individual free to live his own life, and to “regulate” his own affairs, so long as he does not violate the rights of others by initiating physical force. And owning two stations or two million stations, in and of itself, violates the rights of no one. Neither does broadcasting views that are not in Howard Dean’s opinion “compatible with democracy” violate the rights of anyone; as the right to broadcast such speech is protected under capitalism.

What of businesses, like Enron, that commit fraud? Where it can be objectively be proven that someone’s rights have been violated (and fraud is such a violation) the perpetrator should be punished–but to regulate and punish all businesses under the assumption that all businesses are guilty of committing fraud—until they can somehow prove themselves innocent–is forbidden. To smear all businessmen as potential crooks, because of the actions of some crooks as a pretense for regulating their affairs, is a violation of the rights of the innocent businessmen. Under the “rules” of capitalism one is innocent until proven guilty of violating the rights of others. So just as it is wrong to violate an individual’s rights because of his color, so it is wrong to violate an individual’s rights because of his occupation–even if that occupation is that of the much envied and maligned businessmen.

The freedom of “big” business is not the only thing incompatible with Howard Dean’s vision–Dean’s vision has no room for the freedom of “small” labor either. In the case of “small” labor he wishes to violate their liberty to negotiate their own contracts independently of “big” labor. Apparently “bigness” is only a crime if you don’t vote for Dictator Howard Dean.

MATTHEWS: Do you protect-do you protect the right of the person to go work somewhere and not have to join a union? Do you accept the right of right-to-work states to say you don’t have to join a union. Dick Gephardt sat here and came out and said he was going to say no more right to work and we get rid of 14B, get rid of Taft-Hartley, repeal that, and force people to have to join unions, where they’re organized. [