Overflight, 76

“«Dear Mr. President:
I am in sympathy with the Soviet form of government as that best suited for the Russian people…»
(Letter to President Woodrow Wilson, October 17, 1918, from William Lawrence Saunders, chairman, Ingersoll−Rand Corp.; director, American International Corp.; and deputy chairman, Federal Reserve Bank of New York)
… Bolsheviks are at the left end of the political spectrum and Wall Street financiers are at the right end; therefore, we implicitly reason, the two groups have nothing in common and any alliance between the two is absurd. Factors contrary to this neat conceptual arrangement are usually rejected as bizarre observations or unfortunate errors. …
On the other hand, it may be observed that both the extreme right and the extreme left of the conventional political spectrum are absolutely collectivist. … Both systems require monopoly control of society. While monopoly control of industries was once the objective of J. P. Morgan and J. D. Rockefeller, by the late nineteenth century the inner sanctums of Wall Street understood that the most efficient way to gain an unchallenged monopoly was to "go political" and make society go to work for the monopolists — under the name of the public good and the public interest. This strategy was detailed in 1906 by Frederick C. Howe in his Confessions of a Monopolist. …
Therefore, an alternative conceptual packaging of political ideas and politico−economic systems would be that of ranking the degree of individual freedom versus the degree of centralized political control. Under such an ordering the corporate welfare state and socialism are at the same end of the spectrum. Hence we see that attempts at monopoly control of society can have different labels while owning common features.
Consequently, one barrier to mature understanding of recent history is the notion that all capitalists are the bitter and unswerving enemies of all Marxists and socialists. …