“Bernie Sanders’ socialist inclinations do not bother his fans,” blared a Los Angeles Times headline. Just kidding. That’ll be the day a left-liberal ignoramus hypocrite at the LA Times lobs insults at the beloved Bernie’s supporters.

The real title to this fatuous piece is, naturally, “Donald Trump’s fascist inclinations do not bother his fans.” Because the author is ignorant about everything, not least political philosophy and history, he sees nothing comparably vile, detestable and totalitarian about other candidates’ socialist prescriptions and proclivities. You’ll never hear a word from moron media members (David Horsey) to the effect that professing anything remotely socialist ought to be stigmatized as totalitarian.

Of course, no fascism is involved. As at least one legal scholar writing at the New York Times offered, “Trump’s Anti-Muslim Plan Is Awful. And Constitutional.” In other words, a president’s plenary power to prevent a possibly dangerous cohort from obtaining immigration status is not fascistic, it’s just not “nice.” In line with the writer’s liberal asininity, the rest of this bloke’s article (David Horsey) consists in appeals to authority, not argument: “Megyn Kelly said, Max Boot said, Paul Ryan said.”

George Reisman, PhD, explains “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian”:

… apart from [the great economist] Ludwig von 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.

The effect of the combination of inflation and price and wage controls is shortages, that is, a situation in which the quantities of goods people attempt to buy exceed the quantities available for sale. …

…

… Read “Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian.”