Hitler was not a socialist. He was a nationalist and a racialist; and in Mein Kampf himself tells how he designed to use social services and equality… - Herman Finer

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Hitler was not a socialist. He was a nationalist and a racialist; and in Mein Kampf himself tells how he designed to use social services and equality for the purpose of the Reich for conquest of the world. The purposes of socialism — equality, prosperity, charity, and international peace — were not the aims of Hitler. He detested all of them. It is irrelevant altogether to quote to us, as Hayek does, a number of obscure economic professors who may have impressed him when he was a student, men who said they were socialists but who characteristically derided Great Britain because she was a nation of merchants, while Germany was a nation of heroes! The writings he refers to were written in the course of World War I and were war polemics.

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About Herman Finer

Herman Finer (February 24, 1898 – March 4, 1969) was a Jewish Romanian-born British political scientist and Fabian socialist.

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Men have no freedom worth mentioning when they have no possibility of exercising their faculties and energy as they feel they must. Freedom in this dynamic sense cannot come to men, in all the abundance potential in our time, unless they collectively manage a large proportion of the social resources and economic equipment. The present economic waste by mismanagement is enormous; it is nothing but lost or unexploited strength; it constitutes a loss of freedom to many.

To get competition among firms with large capital — how is that possible? Only by setting up competitors who have interesting ideas and good projects and yet may not accumulate the necessary capital before they die. This means that to maintain competition the government planner for free-for-all competition must provide or guarantee credit to would-be competitors. To anybody? If he does not take anybody but chooses his particular people, it would set up a rising howl throughout the land; while if he did not choose among them, there would be a great many failures, and charlatans would run the government into bad debts. If he selected the creditors, by what criterion would he choose? It would have to be a guess that they were good competitive material in some particular line of business. And here Hayek's own planner would have to make distinctions between persons jar particular objects — which he said was against natural law. It is to such absurdity that the insensate attachment to unmitigated bigotry is bound to lead.

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No one intends to "plan" or "collectivize" or "socialize" all economic activities, but many do wish to administer solid remedies to an admittedly defective order. Hayek allows no refuge, however, to the moderate person. He does not let you be moderate: it spoils his theory!

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