WWHD ? What would Hitler do + advice from Rowan Atkinson to Gordon .."Government's plans to boost spending - addict returning to the drug"

David Gordon at the Mises Institute has an excellent esssay "Nazi Economics"

"What, then, would be Hitler’s economic policy?" he asks at one point .... or in a more contemporary fashion WWHD ?

He shows that pre-war Nazi economy couldn't be described as capitalist as all forms of private ownership (depending if you were Jewish , homosexual etc.,) were preserved. The government did not nationalize the means of production, as in Soviet Russia. Prices could not be set by the individual or the business , - appearance of ordinary markets, prices, wages, and interest rates was retained but wholly state controlled. Both internally and externally.

Businesses in all their activities were bound to obey unconditionally the orders issued by the government’s supreme office of production management. This office (the Reichswirtschaftsministerium in Nazi Germany) tells the shop managers what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. It assigns every worker to his job and fixes his wages - (what banks should lend, what for and to whom ?). It decreed to whom and on what terms the capitalists must entrust their funds. (what banks should lend, what for and to whom ?)

Externally the Nazis engaged in bilateral trades which were engineered by Schacht (his full name was remarkably Hjalmar Horace Greeley Schacht) , especially with South east European countries. Such agreements would involve particular commodities, with the rate of exchange between the German and foreign currencies "fixed at a level different from the actual rate of exchange... the barter agreements gave Germany a kind of monopoly of the trade with the countries of southeastern Europe which could not fail to link these countries politically with the Reich."

He points to the calls for extreme measures for extreme circumstances and exemplifies it by the increasingly lunatic Paul Krugman, e.g., in The Return of Depression Economics and the Crisis of 2008 [Norton, 2008] who said "there will have to be an assertion of more government control – in effect, it will come closer to a full temporary nationalization of a significant part of the financial system."

David Gordon adds finally that the rapid transition to state socialism under Germany during the 1930s illustrates the dangers of such a course.

He quotes Mises (Human Action, Mises Institute, 1998, p. 854.)

If one wants to correct their manifest unsuitableness and preposterousness by supplementing the first acts of intervention with more and more of such acts, one must go farther and farther until the market economy has been entirely destroyed and socialism has been substituted for it.

If you want to try to trace a perspective and put some sort of order for your own sake on the increasingly bizarre decisions of our masters, political, economic and even religious, now that the Archbishop of Canterbury has seen fit to chime in... read this.