by Rand Paul
When Thatcher finally arrived in 1979, the Brits had largely soured on the incompetence and stagnation of government ownership of industry. Most of Attlee’s nationalization of industry was reversed except for the National Health Service.
But the question remains: Is violence an inevitable part of socialism? Take Nazism, which did not even represent pure socialism. But though the Nazis did not completely ban private ownership, Mises and Hayek argued that the Nazis essentially negated true ownership via price controls and ultimately production controls. Reisman argues that “the requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls” ultimately and inevitably require state violence.8
How does enforcement of price controls ratchet up to require totalitarian methods? Well, sellers evade price controls to raise their prices. Buyers jump at the chance to get around the shortages. That’s how a black market develops.
Regulatory fines are imposed on any caught using the black market. Fines work as long as food and necessities can still be purchased legally but as shortages spread and prices become prohibitive, fines alone will not stop the black market.
According to Reisman, ultimately “the government has to make it actually dangerous to conduct black-market transactions.”9
Each black market trade must be accompanied by fear of discovery by the police. Any government wishing to enforce price controls must employ an “army of spies and secret informers.” To deter the black market everyone must fear everyone. Any time money changes hands, the government must create an environment where no one is certain whether their customer or supplier isn’t an informant or an undercover cop.
Product distribution, including food, breaks down to such a degree that a black market is nearly impossible to deter. Only with the utmost government diligence and spread of fear is there any hope of preventing everyone from trading on the black market.
As wage and price controls lead to shortages and lines, the mass bulk of the public becomes sympathetic to if not a participant in the black market. As Reisman explains, the government “cannot rely on jury trials, because it is unlikely that many juries can be found willing to bring in guilty verdicts in cases in which a man might have to go to jail for several years for the crime of selling a few pounds of meat or a pair of shoes above the ceiling price.”10
As fines ratchet up, criminal sentences are meted out. As the government resorts to extrajudicial incarcerations, Reisman explains that “the requirements merely of enforcing price-control regulations is the adoption of the essential features of a totalitarian state, namely, the establishment of the category of ‘economic crimes,’ in which the peaceful pursuit of material self-interest is treated as a criminal offense, and the establishment of a totalitarian police apparatus replete with spies and informers and the power of arbitrary arrest and imprisonment.”11
So, even without outright state confiscation of property, a form of tyranny coincides with and is indeed necessary to enforce and maintain market-wide wage and price controls. Reisman argues that it is not accidental that state violence ensues: “Clearly, the enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler’s Germany or Stalin’s Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people.”12
Do wage and price controls have to end in tyranny? Only if you want them to be enforced. Without the tyranny of government force, wage and price controls break down as the black market thrives. Even with totalitarian methods of enforcement, it is impossible to completely stifle the black market when the choice comes to buying food illegally or having no food at all.
To be fair, the Nazis were already meting out terror before they got to total enforcement of wage and price controls. However, once you accept that the government can exert organized state violence to control the individual for economic planning, by what logic do you then argue against state planning in reproduction, culture, or any other aspect of human life?
Under a centrally planned state, be it Nazi or communist, “the economic plan” is elevated to national, even patriotic significance. As Reisman writes, “disruption by workers and managers siphoning off materials and supplies to produce for the black market, is something which a socialist state is logically entitled to regard as an act of sabotage of its national economic plan. . . . Consistent with this fact, black-market activity in a socialist country often carries the death penalty.”13
The more complete the planning, the more complete the control, the more violence becomes acceptable in meeting economic goals. Since central planning doesn’t work as well as the marketplace, the citizenry becomes increasingly unhappy with the rationing, the lines, the lack of food, the crowding. The citizenry is told that they must suffer temporarily for the public good. Much of this frustration is directed at the state planners, the government.
As Reisman points out, “it follows that the rulers of a socialist state must live in terror of the people. By the logic of their actions and their teachings, the boiling, seething resentment of the people should well up and swallow them in an orgy of bloody vengeance. The rulers sense this, even if they do not admit it openly; and thus their major concern is always to keep the lid on the citizenry.”14
Economic chaos and public discontent must be managed and the state must respond by restricting freedom of the press and freedom of speech. Socialism not only owns all the newspapers, broadcast stations, and publishing houses; socialism also feels compelled to try to placate the people’s resentment over the economic chaos. So, as Reisman explains, “the socialist rulers’ terror of the people” causes them to feel the need “to protect themselves[;] they must order the propaganda ministry and the secret police to work ’round the clock.”15
Propaganda helps to direct people away from the misery of a centrally controlled economy. Secret police are necessary, as Reisman puts it, “to spirit away and silence anyone who might even remotely suggest the responsibility of socialism or its rulers—to spirit away anyone who begins to show signs of thinking for himself.”16
These regimes can never admit that socialism is failing. It is always someone else’s fault. Reisman writes that socialist rulers become so “desperate [in their] need to find scapegoats for the failures of socialism, that the press of a socialist country is always full of stories about foreign plots and sabotage, and about corruption and mismanagement on the part of subordinate officials, and why, periodically, it is necessary to unmask large-scale domestic plots and to sacrifice major officials and entire factions in giant purges.”17
Thus, when the Soviets’ agriculture plan failed to provide enough food, it was not the government’s fault. It was due to saboteurs and even the fault of peasants who resisted collectivization of their farms.
Reisman again: “It is because of their terror, and their desperate need to crush every breath even of potential opposition, that the rulers of socialism do not dare to allow even purely cultural activities that are not under the control of the state. For if people so much as assemble for an art show or poetry reading that is not controlled by the state, the rulers must fear the dissemination of dangerous ideas. Any unauthorized ideas are dangerous ideas, because they can lead people to begin thinking for themselves and thus to begin thinking about the nature of socialism and its rulers.”18
Complete control of the economy means complete control of all the people participating in that economy. To exert such pervasive control, extraordinary state power is necessary. Since this stifling control also stifles economic growth, resentment becomes widespread and the threat of civil war is ever present.
Sound hyperbolic? Ask the citizens of Venezuela if they can feel civil war in the air. The central theme of socialism is state-organized force. The socialists argue that Stalin, Hitler, Pol Pot, Chavez, Castro, and Kim are all anomalies and not the logical conclusion of socialism. Reisman correctly states, “The inescapable inference to be drawn is that the terror actually experienced in
the socialist countries was not simply the work of evil men, such as Stalin, but springs from the nature of the socialist system.”19
Because state-organized violence is a necessary weapon of socialism, Reisman argues that rather than Stalin being an anomaly he actually may represent the norm in “the process of socialist natural selection. Stalin’s unusual willingness and cunning in the use of terror were the specific characteristics most required by a ruler of socialism in order to remain in power.” Perhaps complete socialism with complete control selects for the worst, for the most violent and evil.20
Some on the left will argue that by that definition of violence, isn’t all government predicated upon organized violence? The quick answer is yes. But by acknowledging that government relies on force, we admit what Thomas Paine and the founders of our country knew. Government is a necessary evil because it relies on force. Our founders believed that “government is best that governs least” because the bigger government becomes, the more that control, and potentially violence, is necessary to exert government edicts.
We accept a certain minimum amount of government force (or, conversely, loss of individual freedom) to achieve goals that individuals might not voluntarily achieve, like national defense or a legal system. Limited-government libertarians, at least, understand that we accept this “necessary evil” but wish to keep this evil limited by minimizing the tasks we assign to government.
So, yes, force and organized state violence is a function of all government. However, that simply restates Reisman’s thesis that when socialists exert control over all aspects of the economy either through wage and price controls or through direct state ownership, government becomes so pervasive as to require also a pervasive utilization of organized state force or violence—also known as totalitarianism.
That said, perhaps we should not express surprise at Stalin or Hitler. If all-encompassing government requires all-encompassing force, perhaps pervasive government’s “success” is proportional to the willingness of its leaders to use force.
Chapter 20
Hitler Was a Socialist
For obvious reasons, no significant party advocates Nazi socialism today. Ever since the general public became aware of the Nazi death camps, no one has wanted the stigma of being anywhere close to Nazism on any political spectrum. So, despite the Nazis literally having “socialist” in their name—the National Socialist German Workers’ Party—the left has made a concerted effort to label Nazis as “far-right-wingers.”
As George Watson points out: “For half a century, none the less, Hitler has been portrayed, if not as a conservative—the word is many shades too pale—at least as an extreme instance of the political right. It is doubtful if he or his friends would have recognized the description. His own thoughts gave no prominence to left and right, and he is unlikely to have seen much point in any linear theory of politics. Since he had solved for all time the enigma of history, as he imagined, National Socialism was unique.”1
The description of Hitler being from the “right,” however, had largely been cemented by the time of the Spanish Civil War in 1936. By then, as Watson puts it, “most western intellectuals were certain that Stalin was left and Hitler was right. By the outbreak of world war in 1939 the idea that Hitler was any sort of socialist was almost wholly dead.”2
Socialism is not a direct path to genocide or military imperialism. Still, national socialism was part and parcel to Nazism from the beginning. In 1920, Hitler first presented the Nazi Party a twenty-five-point plan for national socialism. Most of the plan could be found in any Bolshevik platform except for the racial animus against Jews.
Hitler’s platform called for “THE GOOD OF THE COMMUNITY BEFORE THE GOOD OF THE INDIVIDUAL.” I think both Marx and Bernie would approve of that collectivist motto.
If you weren’t informed that the following points were from the Nazis’ twenty-five-point plan, you could be excused for believing them to be part of any socialist manifesto, even a “democratic” one. Highlights of Hitler’s national socialism included:
“The state [was to] be charged first with providing the opportunity for a livelihood and way of life for the citizens.”
“Abolition of unearned (work and labour) incomes.” (This plank derives from Marx’s belief that the value of a product equaled the labor used to create the product. If the owner or banker who lent the money took any portion of the product’s sale price then this “profit” was “unearned.”)
“Breaking of debt (interest)-slavery.” (Hitler not only accepted Marx’s view that the collection of interest was robbing labor but argued against Jews explicitly for collecting interest income.)
“Common national criminals, usurers, profiteers and so forth are to be punished with death, without consideration of confession or race.”
“. . . personal enrichment through a war must be designated as a crime against the people. Therefore, we demand the total confiscation of all war profits.”
“We demand the nationalisation of all (previous) associated industries (trusts).” (The essence of socialism—state ownership of the means of production)
“We demand a division of profits of all heavy industries.”
“We demand . . . immediate communalization of the great warehouses. . . .”
“We demand a land reform suitable to our needs, provision of a law for the free expropriation of land for the purposes of public utility, abolition of taxes on land and prevention of all speculation in land.”
“The state to be responsible for a fundamental reconstruction of our whole national education program.”
“For the execution of all of this we demand the formation of a strong central power in the Reich. Unlimited authority of the central parliament over the whole Reich and its organizations in general.”3
Hayek described “the famous 25 points drawn up by Gottfried Feder, one of Hitler’s early allies, repeatedly endorsed by Hitler and recognized by the by-laws of the National-Socialist party as the immutable basis of all its actions, . . . [as being] full of ideas resembling those of the early socialists.”4
And yet, during Hitler’s rise and fall, he and his followers fought the communists for political power in Germany. Instead of the battle being seen as a fight between different strands of socialism, purposefully or not, the dispute came to be categorized as right versus left.
Today’s left presents the argument that Hitler’s attacks on the Communist Party and Bolshevik socialism prove that he was not a socialist. In National Review, Jonah Goldberg responds that “when people say Hitler can’t be a socialist because he crushed independent labor unions and killed socialists, they need to explain why Stalin gets to be a socialist even though he did likewise.”5
The left persists in trying to convince us that the Nazis were not socialists because they were not orthodox Marxists. But, as Goldberg writes, while the “German National Socialist economics differed from Russian Bolshevik economics. So what? The question was never, ‘Were Nazis Bolsheviks?’ Nor was it ‘Were Nazis Marxists?’ The question was ‘Were Nazis socialists?’ Demonstrating that the answer is no to the first two doesn’t mean the answer to the third question is a no, too.”6
Reisman laments that today “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.”7
But, as we will see, industries were privately owned in name only. State control over industry was so complete that, in reality, owners were essentially stripped of private control of their property.
Some argue that fascism and communism are not variants of socialism, but as Peter Drucker writes, “It’s not that communism and fascism are essentially the same. Fascism is the stage reached after communism has proved an illusion, and it has proved as much an illusion
in Russia as in pre-Hitler Germany.”8
If you read the Nazis themselves, they never doubted their socialism and were proud of its distinct brand.
In the Independent, George Watson disputes the idea that Hitler was not a socialist. He writes, “It is now clear beyond all reasonable doubt that Hitler and his associates believed they were socialists, and that others, including democratic socialists, thought so too. The title of National Socialism was not hypocritical.”9
Watson writes: “Hermann Rauschning, . . . a Danzig Nazi who knew Hitler before and after his accession to power in 1933, tells how in private Hitler acknowledged his profound debt to the Marxian tradition. ‘I have learned a great deal from Marxism,’ he once remarked, ‘as I do not hesitate to admit.’”10
George Orwell, the author and socialist, although a critic of Hitler, did still agree that Hitler’s rise and dominance proved that socialism works, and that “a planned economy is stronger than a planless one.”11 As Watson describes it, “The planned economy had long stood at the head of socialist demands; and National Socialism, Orwell argued, had taken from socialism ‘just such features as will make it efficient for war purposes.’”12
Rather than argue that Hitler’s Germany was not socialist, Orwell acknowledged at the time: “Internally, Germany has a good deal in common with a socialist state.”13
Not only did Hitler promote socialism, but he considered socialism to be the unfulfilled mission of Christianity. As Watson explains: “Socialism, Hitler told fellow Nazi Wagener shortly after he seized power, was not a recent invention of the human spirit, and when he read the New Testament he was often reminded of socialism in the words of Jesus. The trouble was that the long ages of Christianity had failed to act on the Master’s teachings.”14