Hi Scout,
t's a circle. If you follow it far enough, Stalin and Hitler are neighbors.
that assumes that Hitler was "right wing" which was a tag that Stalin applied to anyone who disagreed with him.
If you look at Adolf one bollock's history, prior to finding Drexler and Roehm's Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiterpartei (National Socialist German Worker's Party, NSDAP, frequently abbreviated in English to Nazi Party),
the young Adolf Schicklgruber, as he tried to sell his hand painted postcards, and got rejected entry into the art school, was heavily influenced by the big spending and ruthlessly populist mayor of Vienna, Dr. Karl Lueger
After WWi he briefly took part in one of the many soviets that sprang up in the collapsed Germany.
The NSDAP that he joined and was later to seize the leadership of, was rabidly anti capitalist (and Roehm's SA was overtly homosexual) at the time he joined, Adolf was cool joining that party. I don't think that there is evidence for Hitler ever having passed through a phase of laissez faire liberalism on his path from member of a marxist soviet, to Fuhrer of the rigidly centrally planned Third Reich.
Benito Mussolini is probably a clearer example. His father (like Hitler, and unlike Marx, Engels, Lenin, Trotsky, Stalin... Mussolini was born to humble proletarian parents) was village blacksmith, and part of the price of having him shoe a mule or mend a broken tool, was to listen to him preaching Marx at you.
Benito Mussolini was a pretty consistent Marxoid international socialist, up until wwi and the surge in nationalism and grievances between nationalities that it caused. Amongst his Marxoid credentials are organising and leading a strike amongst Italian migrant workers in Switzerland, which was how he earned the title of il duce (the leader), and publishing his own marxist newspaper.
His reputation for "making the trains run on time" came from after WWi, when his fascist thugs broke the marxist's general strike and by 10am on the morning of the first day of the general strike, the trains were once more running on time.
Following the outbreak of WWi, Mussolini and his pals set to, and created a nationally based rather than an international socialism. Amongst the brains behind this, was Mussolini's mistress and partner in the Marxist news sheet, Margherita Sarfati, who's home even to her death, still had framed red hammer and sickle art work hanging on the walls. She never ceased being a marxist. incidentally, she was also Jewish.
Mussolini's summary of Fascism was "All within the state, none outside the state, none against the state." Hardly a laissez-faire, free market position.
Mussolini, maintained mutual correspondence with Vladimir Lenin and Leon Trotsky up until their respective deaths. Following Lenin's death, Trotsky began to favour Mussolini's brand of socialism more and more openly, as being (to his mind) a more successful social experiment than his own.
Incidentally, the warm references to the social experiments going on in Italy, that were made at the end of HG Wells' sci fi novel, The Time Machine, were not meant to be ironic, Wells was a fan, as were many in Hollywood, and Mussolini starred in cameo role in a fawning Hollywood bio-pic.
Again, there is little evidence of passing through a spectrum from left to right for Mussolini and Trotsky, despite what Stalin claimed about them being "right wing".
Within both the fascists and the NSDAP, reds were seen as potential recruits, classical liberals were not.
Hitlery is an interesting one in that same respect, Wall street are amongst her biggest campaign donors, but her college thesis was on Saul Alinsky,
Won't you just end up with a law of the jungle kind of situation where who ever is the best bully gets to do what they want and everyone else just has to do their best to survive?
isn't that what we have now?
except we are conned into participating
and gaslit into thinking that when things go wrong, we should have voted for better people, so it's our fault.
The modern centralised state is a very recent phenomenon. It has taken centuries of gas lighting and creeping centralisation to get it to where we are today.
The
law of the jungle kind of situation
is part of the Hobbesian myth, that without a monopolist of violence to rule us justly, we'd exist in a state of a war of all upon all, in which human life would be nasty short and brutish...
Hobbes got it exactly backwards - look at what the candidates are doing, they're trying to frighten their constituencies with hyped up threats about what the other constituency will do to them - and they are offering to re distribute what the other constituencies have, to their own constituency.
It also assumes that there is at least one good or service which cannot be provided on the market, but can only be provided coercively by a monopoly (monopolies cannot exist without coercion - and coercion implies the credible threat of violence) - the good or service of defense/security
this is demonstrably incorrect - defence/security can be provided in greater quantity, higher quality, and at lower cost on the free market by freely competing providers, than it can by a coercive monopoly. - the same is true of every other good or service.
There are approximately three to four times as many privately employed security providers in America than there are of the chubby, blue clad abusers with shiny badges. Whether they are the lowly guys working in the malls and doing night watch at construction sites, or the high level people who find people and stuff that the fat blue whine can not, or any level in between.
Politics, predatory pricing, gaslighting and outright violence by the state sector cops usually keeps the private sector guys from the streets that the gangs calling themselves governments claim as their turf.
Places like Detroit, where the monopoly can't even maintain the fiction of a service, there are peacefully competing private providers using the profits from the premium services they provide to wealthy people and neighbourhoods, to help fund their services in poor areas.
Even without any practice before hand, in places like Ferguson (and virtually everywhere else that there are riots), locals and protestors, spontaneously organised to peacefully protect businesses from looters, while the cops variously stood by, lobbed cs canisters into back yards and gassed and beat up journalists and film crews. This is something that, if Hobbes were correct - could never happen.
As regards laws and courts for peacefully resolving disputes - one account of a customary law system without kings or government, that most people are likely to have in their possession, is the book of Judges in the Bible. True, it's hardly libertarian, but it's vastly superior to the two hundred years of warfare that followed the Israelites accepting a king to lead them into battle.
foreign wars and entangling alliances anyone?
