What Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama Have in Store

This is from an email blast from the Glenn Beck program. Since this is in the actual email and not a link to an article I will provide all of it.

**SPECIAL REPORT: What Hillary and Barack have in store**

This is the second special report in a week-long series with author Jonah Goldberg, investigating how Liberal Fascism is trying to control your life from the cradle to the grave. Don't miss part three tonight on TV: Government Knows Best at 7 pm and 9pm ET, only on Headline News. And look for another special report in tomorrow's newsletter.

What Hillary and Barack have in store
By Jonah Goldberg

The most common left wing definition of fascism is "when business runs the government." Historically, this is basically nonsense. But that hasn't stopped liberals like Robert F. Kennedy Jr. from saying it over and over again.

But if we are going to go by that definition, conservatives in the U.S. are hardly the fascists. The principled conservative position is that the free market should rule the day. Businesses are never "too big to fail" and corporate welfare is folly. In all honesty, we must admit that many Republicans fail to live up to these conservative principles. But what are liberal principles? They are simply this: corporations should be "progressive." Government should regulate corporations heavily as a means of using big business as another branch of the state. Hillary Clinton wants "public-private partnerships." She believes that businesses must collude with government in providing universal healthcare to the point where it's impossible to tell where the government begins and business ends. She has contempt for entrepreneurs and small business. When it was pointed out to her that "Hillarycare" would hit small businesses while enriching big corporations, she replied that she couldn't worry about every under-capitalized business in America. Barack Obama, meanwhile, talks incessantly about how government must police the "patriotism" of corporations. His definition of "patriotism" in this regard seems extremely elastic.

We've seen something like this before. Woodrow Wilson implemented a form of "war socialism" during WWI. Big Business and government worked seamlessly together under the auspices of the War Industry Board. Industry rigged the system for its own benefit, with the approval of government. When the war ended, the American people rejected Wilson's war socialism, but Progressive intellectuals didn't. They proclaimed "we planned in war" and, hence, felt they should be allowed to plan the economy during peacetime as well. They looked enviously at Fascist Italy and, even more so, the Soviet Union. These were the sort of grand "experiments" they wanted to conduct here at home. "Why," Stuart Chase asked in his 1932 book, A New Deal (which many credit with originating the phrase) "should the Russians have all the fun of remaking a world?"

They finally had their chance under the New Deal, where FDR - a veteran of the Wilson Administration - tried to recreate what the Progressives had wrought during the war. When Hugh Johnson -- the head of the National Recovery Administration, the centerpiece of FDR's New Deal - took office in 1932, one of the first things he did was hang a portrait of Mussolini on his wall and started handing out pro-fascist literature to FDR's cabinet.

The left has told us that the New Deal rescued the little guy, the "forgotten man." But in reality it prolonged the Great Depression and served as a boon to Big Business.

For example, Clarence Darrow was charged with studying the effects of the NRA. In "virtually all the codes we have examined," he reported, "one condition has been persistent . . . In Industry after Industry, the larger units, sometimes through the agency of . . . [a trade association], sometimes by other means, have for their own advantage written the codes, and then, in effect and for their own advantage, assumed the administration of the code they have framed." We may believe that FDR fashioned the New Deal out of concern for the "forgotten man." But as one historian put it, "The principle seemed to be: to him that hath it shall be given."

The fundamental mistake Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, John Edwards and company make is that they assume "clamping down" on corporations will lessen the role of big business in politics. The reality is exactly the opposite. Microsoft had nearly no lobbyists in Washington DC until Washington DC decided to go after Microsoft. Now, Microsoft has an enormous lobbying operation. Walmart is the same story. Once big business discovers that it's profit margins are determined in Washington, big business focuses on Washington.

Perhaps more importantly, really big corporations like regulations. Coca-Cola can pass its costs onto the consumer. But smaller business are not only hurt by regulations, they are also prevented from competing with the big boys because those regulations serve as a "barrier to entry."

The great "fascist bargain" with big business goes something like this: The government promises corporations market share, a lack of competition and reliable profits in exchange for compliance with its political and ideological agenda. Today big corporations hold up their end of the deal. They buy into global warming (often at a profit) they agree to all the tenets of diversity-mongering and affirmative action. They cast themselves as "Progressive" corporate citizens and in exchange we get economic policies that punish entrepreneurs and inhibit free markets.

This is as it should be according to the Progressives, the New Dealers and today's Democratic Party. And whether you want to call it fascism is up to you, but it fits what liberals have been saying about fascism to a T.

Jonah Goldberg is the author of the New York Times bestseller Liberal Fascism.