No Brains?

AS WE GO MARCHING--John T. Flynn --Doubleday, Doran ($2).

While fascism's beatings, blood lust and bombings have been getting the headlines, Economist John T. Flynn has been burrowing deep into pre-fascist history for the story behind the headlines. His findings, as set forth in As We Go Marching, are a model of pamphleteering clarity. For onetime America-Firster Flynn strikes a deadly parallel between what happened in Italy and Germany and what is now happening in the U.S., proving--to his own satisfaction, at least--that it can happen here.

Hunger for Magic. If there is one thing above all that can be isolated as the cause of fascism, says Flynn, it is the growth of an unwieldy public debt. In Italy, shortly after the peninsula was unified for the first time since the breakup of the Roman Empire, popular education and the modern newspaper gave Italians hope that abundance might be wrung from the bony ridges of their ancient land. But neither the schoolteachers nor the journalists could tell individual Italians how they might create that abundance. And so the first great prerequisite for fascism appeared: a wide spread hunger for economic magic.

Popularity-loving politicos fed the hunger by throwing the State budget radically out of balance. A succession of prime ministers, all of whom had begun political life as liberals, catered more & more to the pressure of important minorities. And along with this drift toward the politics of making the State a grab bag, there grew up in Italy a feeling that the capitalist system needed some kind of overall regulation. Both Right and Left wanted to be left alone to do their own "planning." And when various plans are offered, a coordinator is needed. Who could do the coordinating if not the Government?

Economy of Excuse. Author Flynn (Men of Wealth, Country Squire in the White House) disclaims any interest in the well-to-do as such. He nevertheless notes that it is their opposition to paying the interest charges on an ever-increasing Government debt that paves the way for the dictator.

For a time, the dictator may compel the rich to disgorge enough in taxes to keep a stream of job-creating money flowing into public works. But the continued use of tax money to subsidize one segment of society, such as the unemployed or the workers, inflames those who have to pay the steadily mounting bill. At some point along the line the dictator must find an excuse to make the tax-and-subsidize economy palatable to everybody. This is done by discovering an outside enemy, which justifies the final splurge in military public works.

All of this happened in Italy, which was a nation well within the stream of Graeco-Roman culture. It happened also in Germany. Mr. Flynn's plain point is that fascism can come to any Western capitalist nation, and he thinks that it is coming to the U.S. if someone doesn't figure out a way to lick old devil budget.

Dynamic Debt. As a prophecy of a "decline and fall of the U.S. empire," As We Go Marching will appeal to all devotees of orthodox finance. Many a hopeful liberal, however, will wonder why Investigator Flynn did not look into the experience of Baldwin's Britain and the various Scandinavian successes in using the debt "dynamically," yet within safe limitations.

If budgets are balanced over the period of the business cycle, cannot some deficit financing be risked to bring about a business upturn at the bottom of the cycle? To such a hypothetical question, Mr. Flynn would probably answer: Yes, the Swedes know how to spend on the downbeat and how to tax and pay off deadweight debt on the upbeat. But the U.S., like pre-fascist Italy and pre-Hitler Germany, seems bent on spending all the time. Mr. Flynn seems to imply that we just haven't got the brains of the Swedes.

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