Perónism and Trumanism

May 5, 1952

Strangely little attention has been given to the striking parallel between the economic and political policies of President Truman, culminating in his seizure of the steel industry, and the economic and political policies of the Argentine dictator Perón, culminating in his seizure of the newspaper La Prensa. Yet the parallel has been underlined by Mr. Truman himself. Asked whether he could also seize newspapers under his “inherent powers” doctrine, he replied that a President has the power to do anything that (presumably in his own judgment) is for the best interest of the country. A week later, while denying any intention to seize the press, Mr. Truman reaffirmed his power to do so in an “emergency.”

The parallel is even more striking because both seizures were made on practically the same excuse. Mr. Truman contends that his seizure of the steel industry was the only way to prevent a strike; Perón contended that his seizure of La Prensa was the only way to settle a strike. Mr. Truman’s way of preventing a strike was to order the employers to pay a thumping wage increase, Perón turned La Prensa directly over to the unions. Yet Perón took pains to act with more color of legality than Mr. Truman. He did not seize La Prensa by his personal ukase. He asked for, and got, a Congressional law authorizing the seizure.

The parallel may be extended. Neither Perón nor Mr. Truman has any faith in free enterprise or free markets. Both want to fix prices; both want to dictate wages. Each gives as his excuse for this that he is “fighting inflation”—the very inflation that his own monetary and fiscal policies have created. (Since Mr. Truman became President in April 1945, the money supply of this country—adjusted deposits plus currency—has been increased from $138,000,000,000 to $183,000,000,000. Since Perón became President in 1946 the currency of Argentina has been increased from 2,581,000,000 pesos to 17,704,000,000 pesos.) Each poses as the champion of the “underprivileged,” the descamisados, the “shirtless.” Each courts and subserves the unions.

What has caused this parallel to be overlooked is the persistence of the spurious interpretation that Communist propaganda long ago imposed on Western intellectuals. This is that Fascism is essentially a movement of the conservatives of the Right—“the last desperate effort of capitalism to save itself.” This interpretation has from the beginning ignored the open facts. Fascism, Nazism, Perónism, have all been bitterly hostile to “plutocracy” and to “laissez faire capitalism.” None of them tolerates free prices, free wages, free markets. They demand government control of wages, prices, profits, dividends, interest rates, investments. “Nazism” is, we should not forget, merely a contraction of the official title, National Socialism—or, more completely, the “National Socialist German Workers’ “party.

It is a groundless myth that German labor was from the beginning opposed to Hitler. As Ludwig von Mises wrote in Omnipotent Government in 1944: “Although the closed-shop system was not carried to the extreme in Weimar Germany that it is today in Nazi Germany . . . it had gone far enough. . . . [The worker] had to join one of the unions. . . . German labor was not greatly disturbed when the Nazis finally forcibly incorporated all trade-union members into their Labor Front.” It was too late when German labor at last became disillusioned—when it found that by gleefully conniving at Hitler’s crackdown on employers, it had put its own neck in the noose.

We need not labor the moral. American workers and American intellectuals have been off guard for the last twenty years, because they have been looking for the danger of fascism from the wrong direction. If they acquiesce in lawless action now, because it is taken in the name of unionism, of jacking up wages and slashing “outrageous” profits, they’ll deserve precisely what’s coming to them once they have allowed the doctrine of executive omnipotence, above the law, to establish itself.