Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian

An old article from the Mises Institute:

The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises. When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism?

Nevertheless, apart from Mises and his readers, practically no one thinks of Nazi Germany as a socialist state. It is far more common to believe that it represented a form of capitalism, which is what the Communists and all other Marxists have claimed. The basis of the claim that Nazi Germany was capitalist was the fact that most industries in Nazi Germany appeared to be left in private hands.

What Mises identified was that private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive. The position of the alleged private owners, Mises showed, was reduced essentially to that of government pensioners.

De facto government ownership of the means of production, as Mises termed it, was logically implied by such fundamental collectivist principles embraced by the Nazis as that the common good comes before the private good and the individual exists as a means to the ends of the State. If the individual is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.

But what specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936. These were imposed in response to the inflation of the money supply carried out by the regime from the time of its coming to power in early 1933. The Nazi regime inflated the money supply as the means of financing the vast increase in government spending required by its programs of public works, subsidies, and rearmament. The price and wage controls were imposed in response to the rise in prices that began to result from the inflation. (Read more.)

 Israel and Soviet Communism. From The Daily Wire:

The Soviet Union has always hated and feared Zionism. Meir's arch political rival, Menachem Begin, had in 1940-1941 been a prisoner in Stalin's gulag, and has written about it in terrifying detail. Begin's crime? He was a Zionist. When facing his NKVD (later known as the KGB) interrogators, he was told that Zionism was "a farce and a deception, a puppet show. It is not true that you aim to set up a Jewish State in Palestine, or that you intend to bring millions of Jews there. Both these aims are utterly impracticable and the Zionist leaders are perfectly well aware of it. This talk of a State conceals the true purpose of Zionism — which is to divert the Jewish youth from the ranks of the revolution in Europe and put them at the disposal of British Imperialism in the Middle East. This is the kernel of Zionism."

Ironically, far from being an agent of British imperialism, it was Menachem Begin and his Irgun that would fight against the British in the Palestine mandate. And with further irony, the Soviet Union would support the founding of Israel for the purpose of, in the words of Golda Meir, getting "the British out of the Middle East."

But Meir's reception at the Moscow synagogue had a huge impact. What Meir did not know then, and has been revealed by the defector Lt. Gen Ion Mihai Pacepa, was that "Stalin's political police, at that time called the MGB (Ministerstvo Gosudarstvennoy Bezopasnosti), organized a two-month total mail-intercept throughout Russia. The results were presented to Stalin in December 1948, in the form of a report showing that an impressive number of Russian Jews had started promoting the idea of emigration to the newly created state of Israel."

The Soviet Union refused to accept that millions of its persecuted subjects dreamed of a new (or, in this case, old) homeland. The Jewish Anti-Fascist League was disbanded, its members executed. Jewish cultural institutions were closed down, its members sent to the Gulag. Pravda announced that a plot by Jewish doctors had been uncovered, and preparations were being made to relocate Jews to resettlement (concentration) camps in Siberia (Stalin died before this could be carried out). Israel was declared a pawn of American imperialism and an enemy of the USSR. (Read more.)

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