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02/04/2022David GordonDeflection outs you. I am not defending socialism by setting you correctly on Hitler's political philosophy. He was a fascist not a socialist.
Many readers will already know that Ludwig von Mises considers the Nazi economy to be a form of socialism. In the Nazi system, private property in production goods existed in name only. The ostensible owners were merely managers bound to follow the government’s directives. Rainer Zitelmann, the foremost authority on Adolf Hitler’s economic policies, has fully confirmed Mises’s analysis in Hitler’s National Socialism, which will be published next month. (The book is a revision and expansion of Zitelmann’s earlier book Hitler: The Politics of Seduction). Zitelmann also points out that Hitler admired Joseph Stalin’s economic planning and viewed him as a fellow exponent of a centrally planned economy.
In this week’s column, I’d like to discuss a letter that Mises wrote to the New York Times in June 1942 in which he discusses the Nazi wartime economy in substantial detail, making points about it that he doesn’t mention elsewhere.
Mises first sets forward his conception of the Nazi economy:
The German pattern of socialism (Zwangswirtschaft) [“compulsory economy”] is characterized by the fact that it maintains, although only nominally, some institutions of capitalism. Labor is, of course, no longer a “commodity”; the labor market has been solemnly abolished; the government fixes wage rates and assigns every worker the place where he must work. Private ownership has been nominally untouched. In fact, however, the former entrepreneurs have been reduced to the status of shop managers (Betriebsfuehrer). The government tells them what and how to produce, at what prices and from whom to buy, at what prices and from whom to sell. Business may remonstrate against inconvenient injunctions, but the final decision rests with the authorities.
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It Wasn't Capitalism: Mises Explains Nazi Economics | David Gordon
Many readers will already know that Ludwig von Mises considers the Nazi economy to be a form of socialism. In the Nazi system, private property in production goods existed in name only. The ostensible owners were merely managers bound to follow the government’s directives.mises.org