Nazism = socialism = totalitarianism

I've noticed some bloggers and commentators around the traps that still get upset at claims that the Nazis were socialist. Well, they were. It's true that the National Socialists didn't nationalise the economy's commanding heights; they didn't need to -- as Hitler said, they nationalised people instead. Political correctness at the point of a gun. George Reisman makes the case for Nazism = Socialism in an article here, (which he also delivered as a lecture on video.)

De facto government ownership of the means of production... 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.

The Mises Economics Blog describes Reisman's thesis thus:

Contrary to myth, Germany was a socialist state, not a capitalist one. And socialism, understood as an economic system based on government ownership of the means of production, positively requires a totalitarian dictatorship. Indeed, the identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.

And here's another claim that might raise a few eyebrows: "In the United States at the present time, we do not have socialism in any form. And we do not have a dictatorship, let alone a totalitarian dictatorship." Read on to find out what Reisman says about the present system in the US, and by implication the rest of the west.

FULL ARTICLE Here is a video of the speech too.