Alabama Rep. Mo Brooks reads from Hilter's 'Mein Kampf' while bashing Democrats,media

[Dill]

(03-27-2019, 02:59 PM)Stonyhands Wrote: Yes...it couldn’t possibly have anything to do with the left repeatedly calling Trump Hitler.

Here’s an interesting read.

https://mises.org/library/why-nazism-was-socialism-and-why-socialism-totalitarian

Ha ha, I've been following this stuff for years. 

The von Mises Institute has a row of short articles on "socialism" defined largely as state intervention in the free market, which they argue inevitably leads to totalitarianism.  Ludwig von Mises, for example, studied wage and price controls in the 3rd Reich, and by a kind of reverse engineering argues that socialism follows because then the state "really" controls private property even though it is left in private hands. And since the controls don't work and require more controls, this "mission creep" leads to totalitarianism.

So in these guys' terms, a doctrine which defined itself against liberalism and socialism/marxism, especially regarding conceptions of individual equality, can be cast as "socialist" because of the power it gives the state.  Nevermind that Nazis, in contrast to virtually every other state during the Great Depression, actually set about privatizing government owned properties like railroads.

The people running/supporting the institute are what I would call free-market fundamentalists, and pretty much assign to any politics which intervene in markets the label "socialist."  

This is not going to be convincing to people who have actually read socialists and fascists and can place them in a more neutral analytical framework.  

PS actually I have respect for von Mises as an economist and intellectual, and I have some of his earlier writings in PDF form.   But especially in his later writings he seems like he is always beating one drum.  Not good on history of ideas, though. Will settle for caricatures as a basis for research. Sort of but not really surprised at how the institute named after him aligns with elements of the alt-right: https://vdare.com/articles/hans-herman-hoppe-libertarianism-the-alt-right-and-antifa-a-libertarian-strategy-for-social-change