…and they say that’s a good thing.

This story is a year old, but I just stumbled across it. In March of 2009, the NYT ran a piece in the economy section, extolling the virtues of porkulus:

In the summer of 1933, just as they will do on Thursday, heads of government and their finance ministers met in London to talk about a global economic crisis. They accomplished little and went home to battle the crisis in their own ways.

More than any other country, Germany — Nazi Germany — then set out on a serious stimulus program. The government built up the military, expanded the autobahn, put up stadiums for the 1936 Berlin Olympics and built monuments to the Nazi Party across Munich and Berlin.

Yay Nazis! Economic geniuses of their time!

Dumb and outrageous as that may have been by itself, the author then jumps shark #2 with the next paragraph:

The economic benefits of this vast works program never flowed to most workers, because fascism doesn’t look kindly on collective bargaining. But Germany did escapethe Great Depression faster than other countries. Corporate profits boomed, and unemployment sank (and not because of slave labor, which didn’t become widespread until later). Harold James, an economic historian, says that the young liberal economists studying under John Maynard Keynes in the 1930s began to debate whether Hitler had solved unemployment.

Only through collective bargaining does the wealth created by the private sector trickle down to the workers? How many employees in the American private sector are unionized? Are the rest of them working for slave wages? Are you, Mr. journalist genius?

No sane person enjoys mixing nuance and Nazis, but this bit of economic history has a particular importance this week. In the run-up to the G-20 meeting, European leaders have resisted calls for more government spending. Last week, the European Union president, Mirek Topolanek, echoed a line from AC/DC — whom he had just heard in concert — and described the Obama administration’s stimulus plan as “a road to hell.”

The inevitable “big but”. The Euros are resisting the irrefutable logic of the Obamanians, and ignoring their own glorious history of the 1930s which proves the Obama approach superior to the outmoded fiscal restraint that the benighted Europeans seem stuck on.

Here in the United States, many people are understandably wondering whether the $800 billion stimulus program will make much of a difference. They want to know: Does stimulus work? Fortunately, this is one economic question that’s been answered pretty clearly in the last century.

Yes, stimulus works.

Thank you, Mr. Hitler. You have shone the path.

George Soros, the billionaire investor who was born in Budapest and works in New York, came to Washington last week and captured both the problem and the potential for a solution. “I think they can be brought around,” he said of the Europeans. “I am actually hopeful something constructive can happen.”

You learned well from your masters, didn’t you, George?

But then again, the NYT is just being true to form. They never met a totalitarian system they didn’t immediately fall in love with.