Besides, Socialism and Fascism are merely variations of the same evil.
In certain basic respects - a totalitarian state structure, a single party, a leader, a secret police, a hatred of political, cultural and intellectual freedom - fascism and communism are clearly more like each other than they are like anything in between. Arthur M. Schlesinger
In both socialism and fascism, the gov’t controls the means of production and distribution,
but under the working definition of socialism, the gov’t actually visibly OWNS the means of production and distribution.
Fascism is the tyrant’s coward’s way. They get total control, but when that inevitably and invariably fails, they can blame the private business owner for the hardships.
Now, socialist apologists will try to say that pure socialism entails “the workers” owning the means of production and distribution. But how are decisions made? Some centralized authority still, and that would be a government, and that would invariably mean there is no “socialism” as they define it. Only communism.
The burden of The Road to Serfdom is just that NAZIism and Communism are birds of a feather. Reading it put me in mind of a movie I had seen on TV (but failed in my effort to Google it up) in which two counselors to the Sultan are walking together, and two teenagers are belaboring each other. One counselor remarks to the other, “They fight as only half-brothers can.” And so it was between the Third Reich and the USSR.Serfdom was written before the Holocaust was known, yet FA Hayek predicted - on the basis of the similarities between Communism and Fascism - that dark evil things would be found done by the NAZIs in analogy to the Soviet Gulag, which was publicly known of before the war (if not by that name). For example, Will Rodgers went to the USSR, and wrote about seeing a trainload of people being dispatched to Siberia “. . . and nobody had a ticket back but the engineer."