The New Order Was a Striking Reversion to Old-Fashioned Mercantilism

In many ways, the new order was a striking reversion to old-fashioned mercantilism, with its aggressive imperialism and nationalism, its pervasive militarism, and its giant network of subsidies and monopolistic privileges to large business interests. In its twentieth-century form, of course, the New Mercantilism was industrial rather than mercantile, since the industrial revolution had intervened to make manufacturing and industry the dominant economic form. But there was a more significant difference in the New Mercantilism. The original mercantilism had been brutally frank in its class rule, and in its scorn for the average worker and consumer. Instead, the new dispensation cloaked the new form of rule in the guise of promotion of the overall national interest, of the welfare of the workers through the new representation for labor, and of the common good of all citizens.

--Murray N. Rothbard, War Collectivism: Power, Business, and the Intellectual Class in World War I (Auburn, AL: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012), 8.