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Can you clarify what you mean by "the left"?


Anti-market bias seems to be the unifying constant.


So the fascists are those with "pro-market" bias?

If we are allowed to use terminology like "left" willy nilly.


No, that wouldn't make any sense. Fascism and Socialism are on the same side of the statism fence. Both are anti-free markets. Both argue in favor of a large, powerful government with full control over the economy. The sole variance between them is how they implement and direct their statist controls, not whether they do.

The left / right premise as far as Socialism and Fascism is concerned is a fraud.


>Fascism and Socialism are on the same side of the statism fence.

Quite the contrary. Hitler was more or less sponsored by the big businesses of his era, and he cattered greatly to their interests. The big exception was that there was also lots of arms industry spending by the state. Under the Nazis Germany underwent a huge privitization effort.

From Wikipedia:

Big business developed an increasingly close partnership with the Nazi government as it became increasingly organized. Business leaders supported the government's political and military goals, and in exchange, the government pursued economic policies that maximized the profits of its business allies. Nazi Germany transferred public ownership and public services into the private sector, while other Western capitalist countries strove for increased state ownership of industry.


The policies of Nazi Germany were heavily guided by their requirements for war. As you said, they privatized so as to generate considerable revenue for the government.

Cherry picking this fact and proclaiming that Nazi Germany wasn't socialist is a bit sketchy. But there was plenty of nationalization going on, such as the entire steel industry.

Here's a nice summary from Wikipedia on Nazi Germany's pre-war economy:

Due to state control, business had little entrepreneurial freedom[39] in a regime that has been described as "command-capitalism".[74] In place of ordinary profit incentives guiding the economy, financial investment was regulated as per the needs of the state. The profit incentive for businessmen remained, but was greatly modified; Nazi agencies replaced the profit motive that automatically allocated investment, and the course of the economy.[75] Nazi government financing eventually dominated private financial investment and heavy business taxes limited self-financing of firms.[citation needed] The largest firms were mostly exempt from taxes on profits,[citation needed] however, government control was extensive.[76] Some economists argue that such control was responsible for the rationing, shortages, and low standard of living of Germans during this time.[77]

[1] -http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Economy_of_Nazi_Germany#Pre-war...


You can always compute a large similarity between two very different points by projecting them down onto a smaller space, particularly when the smaller space elides most of the real differences.

Or in other words, if you conceive of politics as "statists" versus anti-state proprietarians (what you call "libertarians", which by the way excludes actual anarchists), you can make anything look like anything.




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