The different flavors of Democratic Socialism, National Socialism, and Communism are all wolves dressed in sheep’s clothing. If you look more closely, they are all quite similar. There is debate about whether Hitler was a socialist, despite that he declared it in his Second Book, I am a Socialist,” on page 50. He nationalized German industry by appointing Nazis to run the major industries, like I.G Farben, manufacturer of poison gas, synthetic rubber, and synthetic fuel, Daimler-Benz the manufacturer of Mercedes, Thyssen-Krupp, the steel manufacturer that built Germany’s war machines; Siemens, whose work included electronics and communication also using slave labor, along with many other big businesses. In 1933 Hitler signed the Reichstag Fire Decree, which suspended the constitutional guarantees protecting private property from arbitrary confiscation. The state dictated production quotas, prices, and material allocations to serve the military needs. He nationalized the major companies. Those that he could not he bought and installed new leadership. He also used taxes to make it unaffordable to conduct their business and made it easier to assume control and then install new leadership. He ordered Ferdinand Porsche to design a car that was affordable for most people and called it the Volkswagen, the people’s car. That is what socialism is: the ownership or control of the means of production.
Socialists want to control or own the means of production. This pops up in all the speeches of all the Socialists, including Zohran Mamdani, the current mayor of New York. Marx used the terms communism and socialism interchangeably. It was an Austrian economist, Ludwig von Mises, who predicted in the 1920’s that all these “isms” are doomed to fail. As he said, “Every step that takes us away from private ownership of the means of production and from the use of money also takes us away from rational economics.” Economics depends on knowing what people want and need and how to make and deliver what will satisfy the consumer. The “Central Committee” makes poorly guided decisions because it lacks the data that is automatic in a free market, and its ill-guided guesses are often far from the mark. That is why the state-owned grocery stores in Moscow often did not have enough potatoes or other produce. The population often shopped at the black market that could supply the necessities. People complained about the prices of goods to the black-market providers. Their response was always, “Well, then get it at the state grocery.” The consumer came back with, “They ran out of that yesterday.” That is because the “Central Committee” does not keep close tabs on the market, nor can they. That is why communism/socialism always has and always will fail.
Communists and Socialists have quirky rules to govern the masses. They make rules which are not overseen by checks and balances of a Congress and a Supreme Court. The executive branch, the dictator, decides what will be the rule of the land. That brings frequent horrendous injustices, mass genocidal murders of large swaths of the population like the Holocaust, and the Holodomor that combined has killed well over 10,000,000 people. I speak from personal knowledge. My father, who was the public health director of Romania, was sentenced by Stalin’s courts to be executed for vaccinating Romanians against common diseases and treating polluted water, as they saw it as a waste of time and spending unnecessary money. He became “an enemy of the people.” He escaped Stalin’s clutches. Since he escaped, the next of kin was to be punished. Katerina, his mother, spent thirteen years in Stalin’s Gulags in Siberia. That is an example of Communist jurisprudence without checks and balances that we take for granted in a democracy. It was Khrushchev who released her when the Stalin era ended.
The Socialists always have a comeback: “we will do it better.” But they don’t. Our founding fathers knew that humans need checks and balances. We need the Congress to craft the laws, and we need a judiciary to oversee those laws and listen to appeals. Our forefathers knew the flaws of human behavior.
My parents escaped from Communism but from the frying pan into the fire. They wound up in the National Socialism of annexed Austria by Hitler, a Nazi, the shortened nickname for “National Socialist.” And they created the Holocaust. 6,000,000 people died as a consequence. My father had to carry an identification card, the Ahnenpaẞ, that proved “racial purity”, which he purchased from a priest of the catholic church to prove he was Aryan, not exactly the actual fact, but it saved his life!
Socialism is a failed theory of government. Capitalism has had flaws, which have mostly been fixed, but it has never failed. Our founding fathers knew the flaws of humanity. They created a clever system that grew out of the Age of Enlightenment and provided checks and balances. We the people, in order to create a more perfect union, developed a system that overcomes many of the human frailties that undercut justice for all, deny freedom of speech, and prevent the pursuit of happiness for segments of our population. That is why we need three branches of government to give us those protections. Eliminating Congress, the Supreme Court, and the presidency is a bad idea. Socialists also have ideas like eliminating police and jails. This is not new. Hitler and Stalin also eliminated jails and the police. The police were militarized into the SS or the KGB. It was an easy switch to incorporate the functions into protecting dangers from within and from the outside. The gulags and the concentration camps, were highly secret and were hidden from the general population, in Siberia for example. The judicial system was also converted to secret political courts that conducted their business away from public scrutiny. Communists and Nazis cast a wide net to catch all the “enemies of the state,” not only Jews. People with physical or mental disabilities, gay people, individuals with genetic diseases, Slavic people, Romani people, and gypsies also saw the death camps. Socialism of all flavors has failed again and again because it depends on the rule of an autocratic dictatorship that depends on a single person, which has been a disaster in the past with Hitler and Stalin calling the shots, with weak or no checks and balances. How many times do we need to prove that?