In 1944, Ludwig von Mises published one of his least-known masterworks: Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. Drawing on his prewar experience in Vienna, watching the rise of the national socialists in Germany (the Nazis), who would eventually take over his own homeland, he set out to draw parallels between the Russian and German experience with socialism. It was common in those days, as it is in ours, to identify the Communists as leftist and the Nazis as rightists, as if they stood on opposite ends of the ideological spectrum. But Mises knew differently. They...