Nazism = Socialism = Totalitarianism

Only yesterday Poneke was expressing amusement that In the comments section of one of his posts, Trevor Loudon says he regards the National Front, the Italian fascists and the German Nazis as left wing. "I kid you not."  Never one to back down when he has truth on his side, Trevor's come out swinging, explaining this morning why fascists are leftists.

Since the debate has been thus re-opened, perhaps I could point debaters once again to the observation that while HItler's National Socialists didn't nationalise the economy's commanding heights as Lenin would have had them do; they didn't need to -- as Hitler said, they nationalised people instead. Political correctness at the point of a gun. The result for Hitler's Germany and in the end for most of Europe was the same as it was for Lenin's Russia. Destruction.

As George Reisman explains, Nazism was Socialism, and Socialism is Totalitarianism. (See him make the case in an onine video lecture).  Says Reisman:

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 as if your eyebrows aren't already heading for the ceiling, here's another claim of Reisman's that might get them there that is arguably even more important than the title thesis: "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.  We do not have a dictatorship, he says we also do not yet have Fascism. "Among the essential elements that are still lacking are one-party rule and censorship. We still have freedom of speech and press and free elections," he says...