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Faramir -> Hitler as a Leader (6/29/2005 6:05:05 PM)
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From LAM in this thread:
quote:
Still, I'd like to know what FARAMIR meant, because it sounded fishy. My point was simple: a leader's popularity is no indication of whether he is a good or bad leader. (I said this in response to Faramir's argument that Bush can't be one of the worst presidents in American history because he was duly elected and we are a democracy.) If Faramir wants to deny that Hitler was one of the worst leaders in history, I would love to hear his argument.
I would hold Hitler as a superior political leader, with deep flaws. Please note that I am speaking strictly in efficacy – in his ability as a leader to meet the needs of his electorate. I’m not addressing his ethics – National Socialist Germany ranks only below The Lenin-Stalin experiment in collectivism for sheer horror.
Post-war Germany was in a rigged game – the Allies framed a game Germany could not win: reparation payments that were high enough a part of German GDP so as to marginally destroy the country. In order to make the payments, the Social Democrats had to set tax rates at a prohibitively high rate, moving from somewhere between points “E” and “C” on the Laffer Curve to perhaps point “A.” The move up the Curve lowered revenues, putting the Social Democrats in an insoluble bind: the higher they raised taxes to pay reparations, the less revenues from which to pay. They turned to one of the oldest revenue tricks in the book: coin clipping. Since the reparation payments were denominated in marks, each devaluation of the currency lowered the effective burden of the payments, but each introduction of increasing monetary error shrank the economy – the revenue pool continued to shrink as the economy was destroyed by monetary inflation.
The Social Democrats could not solve the nations problems* – another set of revolutions was around the corner, when Hitler arrived with a brilliant solution to the nation’s problems: unilateral suspension of payments to the Allies, monetary stability and tax reform.
Hitler met the needs of the German electorate in a fashion superior to that of the SD’s and other socialist parties in the Weimar – he was the superior leader among the available choices in Germany.
He was also deeply flawed as a leader. The global electorate had already demonstrated with Napoleon that empire through conquest was no longer a permissible way to lower production barriers and meet needs. I think there is a useful comparison between Imperial France and National Socialist Germany: two totalitarian dictatorships with a secret police security apparatus, imperial ambitions through conquest, and a failure to understand that the global electorate no longer allowed empire via conquest. Sure, the Nazi’s far exceeded the French in horror – but the difference is in scale, not type.
Now – I really don’t think of Hitler as a superior leader. Ultimately the global electorate put him down hard, and he led his nation to ruin. In the end Hitler really was an awful political leader. He was however superior to the other leadership choices out there at the time – it is useful to see how when you have two bad choices, the electorate chooses the best of them. I think if you simply put Adolf Hitler in the “evil” box it frees you from having to do nuanced, critical political thinking – and you miss some important lessons in political economy.
*I am simplifying for brevity and skipping over Stressemann and the Dawe’s Plan – the US destroyed any chance the SD’s had with Smoot-Hawley in 1929.
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