Daniel Davies wrote,
>> Every time *this* comes up, I register disagreement by bringing up
Hjalmar
>> Schacht, Hitler's Reichsbank chairman in the relevant period and one of
the
>> few people to have been acquitted at Nuremberg. The only relevant Nazi
>> econonomic policy in the 1930s was aggressive monetary expansion,
financed
>> by default on overseas debt. Hence, (possibly) M. Sawicky's analogy
with
>> the current USA?
> Evidently no one pays attention, then.
nah, just me.
>The last time I saw someone post
>such an absurdity, I urged that all parties to the debate consult (German
>left communist) Alfred Sohn-Rethel's Economics and Class Structure of Nazi
>Germany.
Sounds a bit long and dense, care to give us a summary?
>In that book Sohn-Rethel demonstrated that the most productive
>modern industries (such as Siemens) were incapable of recovery under
ordinary
>capitalist remedies, while the most backward and traditional ones (Krupp,
>Thyssen, I.G. Farben) recovered only by plundering the state treasury with
>war production. The Nazi regime "solved" this economic dilemma by shifting
>from the production of relative surplus value to the production of
absolute
>surplus value, by shifting from a liberal bourgeois system of "free" labor
to
>the Nazi system of slave labor.
Oh, right, thanks. Can't have been paying attention.
>Hence Doug Henwood is correct, and the
>snipers have not grazed his point with any of these potshots.
Not sure about that. For a start, all you're describing is the shift from a (more or less) liberal economy to a totalitarian one, and that doesn't really address the monetary question at all. For seconds, the Nazi economic miracle occurred between 1933 and 1936 in my book, ie: before the rearmament programme had really taken off in earnest.
> Davies
Hang on, old boy, were we at college together? People tend to address me by my first name these days, or else to use "Mr."
>is wrong about Hjalmar Schacht too. Anyone who regards Schacht's
>monetary tricks as crucial must regard Alan Greenspan as the U.S.
sovereign
>today.
Yep, I confess. I certainly regard him as being every bit as independent as Schacht, if that's what you mean.
> That inverts the relation between the ruling class and its central
>banker.
A premis which might have been argued for rather than asserted. (what do you mean?)
> The U.S. economy is not today a Nazi economy;
Correct
>Alan Greenspan is not
>Hjalmar Schacht;
Also true
> and central bankers do not constitute the ruling class.
I'm still not sure what you mean here; but there is an important sense in which they do.
In any case, how is it relevant to the monetary theory whether or not central bankers constitute the ruling class?
dd (the first "d" stands for "Daniel")
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