[Skybird]

https://mises.org/friday-philosophy/...ere-socialists

If we look at the Nazi program, this isn’t quite what comes to mind. Its dominant theme is that the German people have to come together as a collective entity: the common good must be put before the individual good. Differences in class and wealth must be strictly subordinated to the good of the German people (Volk) as a whole. Points 10 and 11 of the program declare:

The first obligation of every citizen must be to productively work mentally or physically. The activity of individual may not clash with the interests of the whole, but must proceed within the framework of the whole for the benefit for the general good. We demand therefore: Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes. Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.

Point 14 is “We demand that the profits from wholesale trade shall be shared out.” Crucially, point 24 is

We demand freedom of religion for all religious denominations within the state so long as they do not endanger its existence or oppose the moral senses of the Germanic race. The Party as such advocates the standpoint of a positive Christianity without binding itself confessionally to any one denomination. It combats the Jewish-materialistic spirit within and around us and is convinced that a lasting recovery of our nation can only succeed from within on the framework: “The good of the community before the good of the individual”. (“GEMEINNUTZ GEHT VOR EIGENNUTZ”).

The great Austrian historian Erik von Kuehnelt-Leddihn has given the best analysis of Hitler and the the Nazi Party Program in his Leftism. He emphasizes Hitler’s disdain for traditional German society:

[Hitler] wanted to see Germany in complete monotony, with local traditions eliminated, regional self-government destroyed, the flags of the Länder strictly outlawed, the differences between the Christian faiths eradicated, the Churches desiccated and forcibly amalgamated. He wanted to make the Germans more uniform, even physically, by planned breeding and the extermination, sterilization, or deportation of those who deviated from the norm. The tribes (Stämme) should cease to exist.

Contrary to the impression Sehon gives, Hitler didn’t see himself as a partisan of business. In a conversation with Carl J. Burckhardt, the League of Nations high commissioner in Danzig, Hitler called himself a “proletarian.”

Sehon’s answer to this is that Hitler in power wasn’t a radical. There were socialists in the Nazi Party, such as Gregor Strasser, but Hitler kicked them out and in many cases killed them. He surrendered to big business in order to gain power. He did not nationalize the major industries of Germany. He was no socialist but favored private property and business enterprise.

In answer to Sehon, I mentioned Mises’s vital distinction between two kinds of socialism. In one of them, the state owns the means of production. In the other, private property still exists but the state tells the owners what to do. This is a form of central planning and still counts as socialism, and it was this that the Nazis put into practice.
[etc.]

https://mises.org/mises-daily/why-na...m-totalitarian

evertheless, 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.
[etc.]

https://oll.libertyfund.org/quotes/m...socialism-1944

The prices set on the unhampered market correspond to an equilibrium of demand and supply. Everybody who is ready to pay the market price can buy as much as he wants to buy. Everybody who is ready to sell at the market price can sell as much as he wants to sell. If the government, without a corresponding increase in the quantity of goods available for sale, decrees that buying and selling must be done at a lower price, and thus makes it illegal either to ask or to pay the potential market price, then this equilibrium can no longer prevail. With unchanged supply there are now more potential buyers on the market, namely, those who could not afford the higher market price but are prepared to buy at the lower official rate. There are now potential buyers who cannot buy, although they are ready to pay the price fixed by the government or even a higher price. The price is no longer the means of segregating those potential buyers who may buy from those who may not. A different principle of selection has come into operation. Those who come first can buy; others are too late in the field. The visible outcome of this state of things is the sight of housewives and children standing in long lines before the groceries, a spectacle familiar to everybody who has visited Europe in this age of price control. If the government does not want only those to buy who come first (or who are personal friends of the salesman), while others go home empty-handed, it must regulate the distribution of the stocks available. It has to introduce some kind of rationing. …
The isolated measures of price fixing fail to attain the ends sought. In fact, they produce effects contrary to those aimed at by the government. If the government, in order to eliminate these inexorable and unwelcome consequences, pursues its course further and further, it finally transforms the system of capitalism and free enterprise into socialism.
Many American and British supporters of price control are fascinated by the alleged success of Nazi price control. They believe that the German experience has proved the practicability of price control within the framework of a system of market economy. You have only to be as energetic, impetuous, and brutal as the Nazis are, they think, and you will succeed. These men who want to fight Nazism by adopting its methods do not see that what the Nazis have achieved has been the building up of a system of socialism, not a reform of conditions within a system of market economy.
There is no third system between a market economy and socialism. Mankind has to choose between those two systems—unless chaos is considered an alternative.

If it looks like a frog, jumps like a frog, squawks like a frog, then its probabyl a frog.

The political left cannot allow to see that the Nazis were socialists, it would shaken them in their moral very fundaments. Its the left versus the Nazis, right, it always was, right?



History gets written by the victors.


I say this not since Weidel's conversation with Musk, or since the rise of the AfD in recent years, or the rights' campaign since some years to push this thought. I say this already since I clashed with Sailor Steve about this topic once, and by feeling that is twelve, thirteen, fourteen years or so ago, since it was brought up again in a book with political and economic comments on the present events around 2010 that I red at that time, give and take a year. And even earlier! In fact it was a - very good! - history teacher already who provoked us with this queston, or topic, or theory., however you call it. And that was in the early 80s.

This understanding is part of my thinking since my teen years. I'm getting 58.


The war of weblinks could be continued endlessly. But they are only illustrave for me, not new in content. I stick to the points that I have already repeated several times, in this thread, and in recent years. The Nazis were socialists. From beginnign on. Goebbels made that clear already in the earliest 30s.