Quote (Plaguefear @ Feb 12 2020 11:49pm)
Can you describe this connection?
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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.
https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarianhttps://fee.org/articles/were-the-nazis-really-socialists-it-depends-on-how-you-define-socialism/https://www.nationalreview.com/2014/02/nazis-still-socialists-jonah-goldberg/Quote
In Germany, the first purveyors of “State socialism” emerged shortly prior to Marx. Johann Karl Rodbertus, like Marx, rejected many of the existing socialist theories as untenable. Rodbertus was the first socialist thinker to advocate the control of both production and distribution, and to achieve this, the socialist must use the State. The greatest expositor of his ideas was Ferdinand Lassalle, whose proselytizing led to the rapid growth in popularity of what Mises would call “socialism of the German pattern.”
German socialism, as Mises defines it, differs from what he called “socialism of the Russian pattern” in that “it, seemingly and nominally, maintains private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurship, and market exchange.” However, this is only a superficial system of private ownership because through a complete system of economic intervention and control, the entrepreneurial function of the property owners is completely controlled by the State. By this, Mises means that shop owners do not speculate about future events for the purpose of allocating resources in the pursuit of profits. Just like in the Soviet Union, this entrepreneurial speculation and resource allocation is done by a single entity, the State, and economic calculation is thus impossible.
“In Nazi Germany,” Mises tells us, the property owners “were called shop managers or Betriebsführer. The government tells these seeming entrepreneurs what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and to whom to sell. The government decrees at what wages labourers should work, and to whom and under what terms the capitalists should entrust their funds. Market exchange is but a sham. As all prices, wages and interest rates are fixed by the authority, they are prices, wages and interest rates in appearance only; in fact they are merely quantitative terms in the authoritarian orders determining each citizen’s income, consumption and standard of living. The authority, not the consumers, directs production. The central board of production management is supreme; all citizens are nothing else but civil servants. This is socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism. Some labels of the capitalistic market economy are retained, but they signify here something entirely different from what they mean in the market economy.”
But the Soviets themselves also played a part in the crafting of the myth of the Nazi capitalist. The Nazis were not trying to hide their socialism (after all, snarky tweets aside, socialism was in the name); they were just implementing socialism according to a different strategy than that of the Marxist socialists.
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When the Nazis invaded the Soviet Union, Joseph Stalin and his lackeys used the new communist narrative to redefine Nazi Socialism — which was never Marxism but was based on the theories of the original German socialists who directly influenced Marx’s later ideas — as “capitalists.” According to this new narrative, the Nazis were in the final and worst stage of capitalism.
At a time when many members of the European intelligentsia were still enamored with the Soviet Union, this narrative of the Nazis as capitalists was a welcome lie. But this idea is one that comes not from any grounding in economic principles, but rather the Soviet interpretation of the Marxian framework. The Nazis, who touted their socialism proudly and implemented socialist policies with great consistency, were now being referred to as capitalists for no reason other than they did not fit cleanly into the Soviet-Marxist worldview, and this false narrative survives today.
https://mises.org/library/myth-nazi-capitalism