Re:Atlas Shrugged Utopia (Score 1)

squiggleslash, you said, "Look, the most infamous dictatorship in history, the German regime of 1933-1945, supported private ownership."

squiggleslash, I think it all turns on how we define "private ownership." The nazis asserted that anything anyone may have had was lent to them by the state, something that they were responsible for taking care of.

Fancy words but what did it actually mean in practice?

In the mid-thirties they made it a capital crime to remove any property or money from germany. Of course merely leaving germany unapproved itself was a crime. But trying to leave germany and taking say jewelry was something the courts would direct people to be executed for.

So is this private ownership? Or had there been a significant erosion of its meaning?

In the 1930s all farmers were told what to produce and how much to produce and what they would be paid for it, and if a farmer didn't meet these targets the land could be taken from him.

Is this private ownership?

Hermann Goering, Commander-in-Chief of the Luftwaffe, President of the Reichstag, Prime Minister of Prussia and, as Hitler's designated successor, second most powerful man in germany. Where the companies he took private or had they in effect been nationalized?

Here's a quote from the "Jewish Virtual Library" (see http://www.us-israel.org/jsource/Holocaust/goering .html):

"In 1936 his powers were further extended by his appointment as Plenipotentiary for the implementation of the Four Year Plan, which gave him virtually dictatorial controls to direct the German economy. The creation of the state-owned Hermann Goering Works in 1937, a gigantic industrial nexus which employed 700,000 workers and amassed a capital of 400 million marks, enabled him to accumulate a huge fortune."

But wait, if the Hermann Goering Works was state-owned how could Goering be amassing a huge fortune thereby?

Obviously the Jewish Virtual Library feels that Goering is a part of the nazi state, that you can't really separate him from the government and that the confiscated companies that were combined to make the Hermann Goering Works were in effect nationalized. I agree.

The nazi economy was a planned economy. The companies that were not explicitly nationalized were told what to do, what to produce and how much and how and what wages to pay their workers by government ministries.

Is this private ownership?

There's some room for argument, but I argue that private ownership only existed around the edges in nazi germany. That the concept had been severly eroded.

In fact nazi germany was more nationalized, more centrally-controlled, than than the soviet union was at a comparable point in time: 1925.