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“

I don't think that the way to correct a spin from the left is to try to impart a spin from the right.... [A]n information flow distorted from the right would be just as much a disservice as distortion from the left. What we really should be after... is accurate information. And I don't see what any conservative or anybody else for that matter has to fear from accurate information.

”

-M. Stanton Evans, “Can Conservatives Change the Media?” Heritage Foundation Resource Bank lecture, August 7, 1990

Sandbox

Karl Marx

Karl Heinrich Marx (May 5, 1818 – March 14, 1883) was a bourgeois political pamphleteer, polemicist and propagandist, credited as co-founder (with Friedrich Engels) of communism and specifically of Marxism. According to ex-Marxist economist Thomas Sowell, winner of the National Endowment for the Humanities' National Humanities Medal:

“

[T]he Marxian contribution to economics can be readily summarized as virtually zero. Professional economics as it exists today reflects no indication that Karl Marx ever existed... [T]he development of modern economics has simply ignored Marx. Even economists who are Marxists typically utilize a set of analytical tools to which Marx contributed nothing... In professional economics, Capital was a detour into a blind alley...

”

Nevertheless, Marxists with little understanding of economics spent most of the 20th century in a doomed effort to implement Marx's ideas—in the process killing more people than all the century's wars combined.

Early life

Marx was born "Carl Marx" in the Rhineland city of Trier, then in the Kingdom of Prussia (now in the Federal Republic of Germany), the son of Heinrich Marx and Henriette Pressborck, both the children of rabbis descended from famous Talmudic scholars and sages.

Marx's father was a successful lawyer and owner of several Moselle vineyards. Philosophically, he was a liberal who “knew his Voltaire and Rousseau by heart.” After the Prussian Edict of 1812 effectively banned Jews from public office and the professions, he converted to the Evangelical Church (established in 1817 as the state church of Prussia), changing his name from Hershel Mordechai to Heinrich Marx. In 1824, he had his seven children, including six-year-old Karl, baptized.

Marx the Christian

Marx was confirmed at age 15. As a student at the Royal Frederick William III gymnasium, he was by all appearances a passionate Christian. In an 1835 senior thesis, the 17-year-old Marx wrote:

“

[U]nion with Christ consists in the most intimate, most vital communion with Him, in having Him before our eyes and in our hearts, and being so imbued with the highest love for Him, at the same time we turn our hearts to our brothers whom He has closely bound to us, and for whom also He sacrificed Himself... Therefore union with Christ bestows inner exaltation, consolation in suffering, calm assurance, and a heart which is open to love of mankind, to all that is noble, to all that is great, not out of ambition, not through a desire for fame, but only because of Christ.

”

In another senior thesis written at the same time, Marx wrote:

“

[R]eligion itself teaches us that the ideal being whom all strive to copy sacrificed himself for the sake of mankind, and who would dare to set at nought such judgments?

”

When Marx graduated that September, his diploma read, under the category “Religious knowledge”: “His knowledge of the Christian faith and morals is fairly clear and well grounded; he knows also to some extent the history of the Christian Church.”

Bonn University

However, Marx's Christian education had little lasting impact. Starting the study of law at Bonn University in October 1835, he was not academically successful, and proved to be a disappointment to his parents, confirming his father's opinion “that in your heart egoism is predominant.” After barely a month at university, Marx seems to have embraced atheism; Heinrich disapproved, warning his son:

“

[A] great support for morality is pure faith in God. You know that I am anything but a fanatic. But this faith is a real [require]ment of man sooner or later, and there are moments in life when even the atheist is [involun]tarily drawn to worship the Almighty... for what Newton, Locke and Leibniz believed, everyone can [...] submit to.

”

As a leader of the Trier Tavern Club, a group of students “whose main ambition was to get drunk as frequently and riotously as possible,” Marx began playing cards, getting into drunken brawls, and was even wounded in a duel. He spent 24 hours in jail “for disturbing the peace by rowdiness and drunkenness at night.” His father tried to dissuade the young Marx from such vices, warning his son that “youthful sins in any enjoyment that is immoderate or even harmful in itself meet with frightful punishment.”

His father's warning had no discernible effect. Years later, in London, Marx went on “many a pub crawl.” On one of these, Marx (by then a husband and father himself nearly 40 years old), accompanied by Wilhelm Liebknecht and Edgar Bauer, drank in no less than 18 different pubs. In one of these, Marx's “inebriated comments” that Germany “would yet outclass all other nations” nearly got them, once again, into a fight. They fled into the street where, according to Liebknecht, “we broke four or five street lamps.”

Young Marx's student revels seem to have been extravagantly expensive; at this time emerged what was to become a dominant theme of his life: his economic incompetence. On this score, Marx's father's letters tell a sorry tale:

• “Your accounts, dear Karl, are... disconnected and inconclusive. If only they had been shorter and more precise, and the figures properly set out in columns, the operation would have been very simple. One expects order even from a scholar, and especially from a practical lawyer.... I enclose a money order for 50 talers...”
• “I sent... 50 talers. With what you took with you, that makes 160 talers.... I am convinced that it is possible to manage with less... But no more under any condition... I enclose a draft on... the lottery office in the university building; you will get money there, as m[uch as] you need.”
• “You are receiving 100 talers herewith and, if you ask for it, you will receive the rest... You have not kept your word to me—you remember your promise... At the moment I could not send you any more. In the next few days you will probably receive 20 talers through Rabe.”
• “Please, dear Karl, write at once, but write frankly, without reserve and truthfully. Calm me and your dear, kind mother, and we will soon forget the little monetary sacrifice.”
• “For the time being I am sending you herewith 50 talers. You must at present be able to estimate approximately the amount you absolutely need each year, and that is what I should like to know.”
• “Enclosed a money order for 50 talers. If you prefer me to look for a firm there to make an arrangement with you, you must tell me approximately the monthly sum I should fix for you. By now you must be able to say what it amounts to with one thing and another.”
• “I enclose herewith a letter of credit. It is for a higher amount than you yourself asked, but I did not want to have it altered, because now I trust you not to use more than is necessary.”
• "Only one thing more my Herr Son will still allow me, namely, to express my surprise that I have still not received any request for money! Or do you perhaps want already now to make up for it from the too great amount taken?"
• "As if we were men of wealth, my Herr Son disposed in one year of almost 700 talers contrary to all agreement, contrary to all usage, whereas the richest spend less than 500."
• "...we are now in the fourth month of the law year and you have already drawn 280 talers. I have not yet earned that much this winter."

Fascism and the New Deal

“The word 'Fascism' has now no meaning except in so far as it signifies ‘something not desirable’," wrote George Orwell in the wake of World War II. He asked, “Since you don't know what Fascism is, how can you struggle against Fascism?” Almost a decade earlier, he had written prophetically that "Socialism, in the form in which it is now presented, appeals chiefly to unsatisfactory or even inhuman types," including, among others, "the astute young social-literary climbers who are Communists now, as they will be Fascists five years hence, because it is all the go."

Corporativist ideas had been popular with British socialists and Fabians, as well as American progressives such as Herbert Croly, Edward Bellamy and Colonel House, since the late 19th century.

Mussolini was a Marxist who took over the Italian Socialist Party at the Congress of Reggio Emilia in 1912, expelling his opponents and espousing doctrinaire Marxism, prompting Lenin to write, “the party of the Italian socialist proletariat has taken the right path.”

In 1917, Lenin took over Russia, the following year imposing socialism (“War Communism”); it quickly and spectacularly failed, resulting in mass famine and economic collapse. In response to this failure, communists like Oskar Lange and Georges Sorel theorized about a “third way” between capitalism and socialism; Lange called his theory “market socialism”; Sorel meanwhile adopted “syndicalism,” a type of guild socialism.

While Lenin's “New Economic Policy” (1921-28) followed Lange, Mussolini's Fascism followed Sorel; National Socialism, emerging from the shattered remains of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, promised yet another a “third way” between capitalism and communism, uniting proletarian and bourgeois to fight for the state and race. It was in this atmosphere that the New Deal took shape. According to Amity Schlaes, author of The Forgotten Man, "Both Stalin's Russia and Mussolini's Italy influenced the New Deal enormously."

"[T]he New Deal was often compared with Fascism," according to cultural historian Wolfgang Schivelbusch. "Italy had several years earlier begun the transition from a liberal free-market system to a state-run or corporatist one." “The slogan into which the Nazis condensed their economic philosophy, Gemeinnutz geht vor Eigennutz (i.e., the commonweal ranks above private profit) is likewise the idea underlying the American New Deal,” wrote Ludwig von Mises.

"Dictatorial powers"

Roosevelt presented the New Deal in militaristic terms of "discipline," sacrificing individual rights to life and property in the name of "leadership" promising a greater good. His first inaugural address contained an exhortation that could have been made by Mussolini or Hitler:

“

If we are to go forward we must move as a trained and loyal army willing to sacrifice for the good of a common discipline, because, without such discipline, no progress is made, no leadership becomes effective. We are, I know, ready and willing to submit our lives and property to such discipline because it makes possible a leadership which aims at a larger good.

”

Meanwhile, First Lady Eleanor Roosevelt “lamented that the nation lacked a benevolent dictator to force through reforms." Soviet intelligence source Walter Lippmann told Roosevelt, "The situation is critical, Franklin. You may have no alternative but to assume dictatorial powers"; in his influential column, Lippmann added that the use of "'dictatorial powers,' if that is the name for it—is essential." The New York Herald Tribune approved the inauguration with the headline "FOR DICTATORSHIP IF NECESSARY." Liberal A Hollywood movie was released about a President of the United States who "revokes the Constitution, becomes a reigning dictator," and employs "brown-shirted storm troopers," by means of whom he not only "declares martial law," but “dissolves Congress, creates an army of the unemployed, and lines up his enemies before a firing squad.” This movie was made not by a conservative such as Frank Capra, but by Walter Wanger, a "liberal Hollywood mogul." However, in this film, the dictator ("an FDR lookalike") is not the villain, but the hero, who by such means "solves all of the nation's problems." Most chilling, FDR wrote that he thought this movie “would help the country.”

Contemporary reporting and commentary

The mood in Washington at FDR's inauguration was “strangely reminiscent of Rome in the first weeks after the march of the Blackshirts, of Moscow at the beginning of the Five-Year Plan” reported The New York Times. “America today literally asks for orders.” The Roosevelt administration, reported the Times, “envisages a federation of industry, labor and government after the fashion of the corporative State as it exists in Italy.” George Soule, editor of the pro-Roosevelt New Republic magazine, wrote, "We are trying out the economics of Fascism without having suffered all its social or political ravages." In the North American Review, the progressive writer Roger Shaw described the New Deal as “Fascist means to gain liberal ends.” "We in America,” wrote liberal journalist Mauritz Hallgren, “are being forced rapidly and definitely into Fascism..."

Fascists on the New Deal

Mussolini was convinced that the New Deal was copying Fascist economic policies. "Reminiscent of Fascism is the principle that the state no longer leaves the economy to its own devices," wrote Mussolini in a review of FDR's book Looking Forward. "Without question, the mood accompanying this sea-change is reminiscent of Fascism." Mussolini wrote that the book New Frontiers, by FDR's Secretary of Agriculture Henry Wallace, was "just as 'corporativistic' as the individual solutions put forth in it... The book leaves no doubt that it is on the road to corporatism..."

Nazi Minister of Economics Hjalmar Schacht declared that Roosevelt had the same economic idea as Hitler and Mussolini; the official Nazi Party organ, Völkischer Beobachter, applauded “Roosevelt’s adoption of National Socialist strains of thought in his economic and social policies,” commenting, "Many passages in [Roosevelt's] book Looking Forward could have been written by a National Socialist."

Hitler himself admired FDR’s approach, saying, “I have sympathy with President Roosevelt because he marches straight toward his objective over Congress, over lobbies, over stubborn bureaucracies.” Hitler likewise congratulated Roosevelt for "his heroic effort in the interest of the American People." He added:

“

The President's successful struggle against economic distress is being followed by the entire German People with interest and admiration. The Reich Chancellor is in accord with the President that the virtues of sense of duty, readiness for sacrifice, and discipline must be the supreme rule of the whole Nation. This moral demand, which the President is addressing to every single citizen, is also the quintessence of German philosophy of the State, expressed in its motto "The public weal before private gain."

”

New Dealers on fascism

Roosevelt was a secret admirer of Mussolini, writing to his friend John Lawrence, "I don't mind telling you in confidence, that I am keeping in fairly close touch with that admirable Italian gentleman." FDR also wrote to U.S. Ambassador to Italy Breckinridge Long about Mussolini, "I am much interested and deeply impressed by what he has accomplished and by his evidenced honest purpose of restoring Italy and seeking to prevent general European trouble." FDR privately acknowledged that “what we were doing in this country were some of the things that were being done in Russia and even some of the things that were being done under Hitler in Germany. But we were doing them in an orderly way.”

Roosevelt’s economic adviser, Rexford Tugwell, the “most prominent of the Brain Trusters and the man often considered the chief ideologist of the 'first New Deal' (roughly, 1933–34),” said, “I find Italy doing many of the things which seem to me necessary…. Mussolini certainly has the same people opposed to him as FDR has. But he has the press controlled so that they cannot scream lies at him daily.” Tugwell, "the most left-wing member of Roosevelt's brain trust" was "open in his respect for Mussolini's economic policies." Of the Fascist system he wrote, "It's the cleanest, neatnest [sic], most efficiently operating piece of social machinery I've ever seen. It makes me envious."

Eleanor Roosevelt's close friend Lorena Hickok, a federal official hired by Harry Hopkins on Mrs. Roosevelt's recommendation, wrote, "If I were 20 years younger and weighed 75 pounds less, I think I'd start out to be the Joan of Arc of the Fascist Movement of the United States."

National Recovery Administration

Ambassador Long, in turn, reported to Tugwell regarding Fascist economics, “Your mind runs along these lines … It may have some bearing on the code work under N.R.A.” He was referring to the centerpiece of the New Deal, the National Recovery Administration (NRA), “the New Deal’s attempt to bring to America the substance of Mussolini’s corporativism.” The NRA was established by the National Industrial Recovery Act of 1933, which was “similar to experiments being carried out by the fascist dictator Benito Mussolini in Italy and by the Nazis in Adolf Hitler's Germany,” according to John A. Garraty, president of the Society of American Historians. As one NRA study concluded, “The Fascist principles are very similar to those which have been evolving in America and so are of particular interest at this time.”

"There was hardly a commentator who failed to see elements of Italian corporatism in Roosevelt's managed economy under the National Recovery Administration, the institution formed in 1933 to maintain mandatory production and price 'codes' for American industry," wrote Schivelbusch. Even "intellectual observers of economics and social policies who were otherwise Roosevelt allies... saw a Fascist element at the core of the New Deal."

The Italian Fascist Party journal of political theory Gerarchia (Leadership) characterized the NRA as "bearing a Fascist signature" and as "corporatism without the corporations." Progressive journalist Robert Shaw agreed, "The NRA... was plainly an American adaptation of the Italian corporate state." When Roosevelt referred to the industrial cartels established by the NRA as "modern guilds," writes Schivelbusch, he was making "reference to the corporatist system associated with Fascism." FDR's own economics instructor at Harvard concurred, identifying the NRA as "essentially fascistic."

Just as Mussolini “organized each trade or industrial group or professional group into a state supervised trade association” that “operated under state supervision and could plan production, quality, prices, distribution, labor standards, etc.,” the NRA “forced virtually all American industry, manufacturing, and retail business into cartels possessing the power to set prices and wages, and to dictate the levels of production.”

Hugh Johnson

As head of the NRA and thus “FDR’s leading bureaucrat,” the President appointed General Hugh Johnson, who was granted “almost unlimited powers over industry.” According to economist Thayer Watkins (who teaches economic history at California’s San José State University), Johnson was “an admirer of Mussolini’s National Corporatist system in Italy and he drew upon the Italian experience in formulating the New Deal.” Walker F. Todd, research fellow at the American Institute for Economic Research, agrees that Johnson “did admire greatly what Mussolini appeared to have done,” identifying the NRA as a “thoroughly corporativist” idea.

According to Jonah Goldberg, Johnson displayed a portrait of Il Duce in his NRA office and actually “distributed a memo at the Democratic Convention proposing that FDR become a Mussolini-like dictator.” In his retirement speech, Johnson invoked what he called the “shining name” of Mussolini. Johnson was said to carry around with him a copy of Raffaello Viglione’s pro-Mussolini book, The Corporate State, even presenting a copy to Secretary of Labor Frances Perkins.

Keynsianism

Perkins commented that, "Combined with the relief program and with public works," the NRA "constituted an effective demonstration of the theories which John Maynard Keynes had been preaching and urging upon the English government," adding:

“

[Keynes] pointed out that the combination of relief, public works, raising wages by NRA codes, distributing moneys to farmers under agricultural adjustment, was doing exactly what his theory would indicate as correct procedure. He was full of faith that we in the United States would prove to the world that this was the answer.

”

As a leading Fascist propagandist noted (in a book with a preface by Mussolini):

"Fascism entirely agrees with Mr. Maynard Keynes, despite the latter’s prominent position as a Liberal. In fact, Mr. Keynes’ excellent little book, The End of Laissez-Faire (l926) might, so far as it goes, serve as a useful introduction to fascist economics. There is scarcely anything to object to in it and there is much to applaud."

Agricultural Adjustment Administration

Roosevelt appointed Johnson’s former business partner George Peek to head the Agricultural Adjustment Administration (AAA). Both men had “worked with the War Industries Board, the agency that regulated American production during World War I, and they believed their experience of managing an economy almost totally sealed off from the world market would suit the country now.” They had long advocated a policy of expanding tariffs to keep foreign agricultural products out of the United States, a policy that would have again rendered the U.S. economy “almost totally sealed off from the world market”—a fair approximation of “autarky,” an economic policy particularly but not exclusively “associated with Nazi economic organization.”

Civilian Conservation Corps

"The German Labor Service (Reichsarbeitsdienst—RAD) arose from a party organization set up in 1931 and known as the NS-Arbeitsdienst for the purpose of easing unemployment," "like its New Deal equivalent, the Civilian Conservation Corps," which would be established in 1933. According to Garraty, both

“

were essentially designed to keep young men out of the labor market. Roosevelt described work camps as a means for getting youth ‘off the city street corners,’ Hitler as a way of keeping them from ‘rotting helplessly in the streets.' In both countries much was made of the beneficial social results of mixing thousands of young people from different walks of life in the camps. Furthermore, both were organized on semimilitary lines with the subsidiary purposes of improving the physical fitness of potential soldiers and stimulating public commitment to national service in an emergency.

”

"Friendly Fascism"

Even some New Dealers have come to see the essential similarities between their ideology and fascism. For example, according to Friendly Fascism, by left-wing political science professor Bertram Gross, a leading architect of liberal social policy under presidents Roosevelt, Truman and Carter:

“

I sought solutions for America's ills... through more power in the hands of central government.... In this I was not alone. Almost all my fellow planners, reformers, social scientists, and urbanists presumed the benevolence of more concentrated government power. Big Business-Big Government partnerships ..., were the central facts behind the power structures of old fascism in the days of Mussolini, Hitler and the Japanese empire builders.... I see Big Business and Big Government as a joint danger.... Anyone looking for black shirts, mass parties or men on horseback will miss the telltale clues of this creeping fascism.... In America, it would be supermodern and multiethnic—as American as Madison Avenue, executive luncheons, credit cards and apple pie. It would be fascism with a smile.

”

While writing his book, Gross dreamed that he was searching through a huge, empty house for "friendly fascists."

“

I flung open one of the doors," Gross writes. "And there sitting at a typewriter and smiling back at me, I saw myself."

”

Myths

Several myths have formed around both the New Deal and fascism. Among these are the myth that the New Deal ended the Great Depression, that Nazism was a plot by big business rather than a mass movement, and that fascism espoused laissez faire economics and "corporativism" was the rule of corporations over the state, rather than the rule of the state over corporations.

Did the New Deal end the Great Depression?

One study found that New Deal policies actually prolonged the depression by about seven years. In fact, Americans' personal consumption did not rebound to 1929 levels until 1941. "[T]he consensus among historians today," writes Schivelbusch, is "that the United States completely emerged from the Depression only with its entry into World War II." (Some economists challenge this consensus, notably Robert Higgs.)

Was Nazism a capitalist plot?

David Schoenbaum notes that the Nazi Party census found the single largest category of Party members was “Workers” (30.3%); the second-largest category was “White collar,” (19.4%), of which 59.1% were in sales; the third-largest category, “Independent”/“Self-Employed” made up 19%, the largest group of whom were in “handicraft” (43.7%). Schoenbaum adds that of the two exhibits most often trotted out in defense of the Naziism-as-capitalist-plot thesis—Fritz Thyssen and the Krupps—that Thyssen eventually had to flee Nazi Germany for Switzerland, while even the Krupps “did not finance Hitler before 1933,” when his victory had become a fait accompli. Moreover, some business people likewise supported FDR's policies (e.g., "Although I'm a capitalist, I happen to believe in [Roosevelt's] program"). Even Ronald Reagan was a New Dealer, back when he was a liberal Democrat and a Roosevelt man (although he later saw the light, saying, "Fascism was really the basis of the New Deal").

In fact, much of Nazism was borrowed from American progressives and Democrats—eugenics and "racial hygiene," for example. As Robert Nisbet observed:

“

the West's first real experience with totalitarianism—political absolutism extended into every possible area of culture and society, education, religion, industry, the arts, local community and family included, with a kind of terror always waiting in the wings—came with the American war state under Woodrow Wilson."

”

Did fascism espouse laissez faire economics?

Regarding the myth that “corporativism” represented rule by corporations: “The programme of the Fascists, as drafted in 1919, was vehemently anti-capitalistic,” wrote Ludwig von Mises. “The most radical New Dealers and even communists could agree with it.” It demanded “Suppression of incorporated joint-stock companies, industrial or financial. Suppression of all speculation by banks and stock exchanges,” and “Control and taxation of private wealth. Confiscation of unproductive income.” The Fascists called this economic system corporativismo (corporativism). As UCLA international relations and political science professor Herbert Steiner observed in 1938, “So substantial are the limitations under which private property and capital are exercised in Italy, that the conception of ‘capitalism’ is avowedly destroyed and replaced by corporativismo.”

Likewise, Nazi "domestic policies were remarkably friendly toward the German lower classes, soaking the wealthy and redistributing the burdens of wartime to the benefit of the underprivileged," including "transferring the tax burden to corporations."

Along with its well-known anti-Semitic and expansionist planks, the Nazi Party program included a number of less-remembered demands that were (and are still) considered “progressive.” For example: “the State shall above all undertake to ensure that every citizen shall have the possibility of living decently and earning a livelihood”, “a generous increase in old-age pensions”, “specially talented children of poor parents, whatever their station or occupation, be educated at the expense of the State”, “help raise the standard of national health” by “providing maternity welfare centers, banning child labor, increasing physical fitness through the introduction of compulsory games and gymnastics, and by the greatest possible encouragement of associations concerned with the physical education of the young,” etc.

The Nazi platform attacked the concept of economic freedom, asserting that the “first duty of every citizen must be to work mentally or physically”, that “all unearned income, and all income that does not arise from work, be abolished... breaking of the tyranny of interest”, that “usurers, profiteers, etc., are to be punished with death, regardless of creed or race”, “total confiscation of all war profits”, “nationalization of all trusts that have gone public [i.e., publicly-traded companies]”, “profit-sharing in large industries”, “ immediate communalization of large stores”, “enactment of a law to expropriate the owners without compensation of any land needed for the common purpose... abolition of ground rents, and the prohibition of all speculation in land”, etc. (Nazi newspapers ran frequent polemics against landlords.)

As against individualism and the free market, the Nazis demanded “creation of a strong central authority in the State”, “COMMON GOOD BEFORE INDIVIDUAL GOOD” [Capitalization in original], that “No individual shall do any work that offends against the interest of the community to the benefit of all”, that “ruthless war be waged against those who work to the injury of the common welfare”, etc.

Finally, the Nazis wiped out free speech and religious freedom, demanding “a legal campaign against those who propagate deliberate political lies and disseminate them through the press”, that “Newspapers transgressing against the common welfare shall be suppressed”, disingenuously promising freedom for all religious faiths “in the state, insofar as they do not endanger its existence” or “offend the moral and ethical sense” of the Germanic race. The Party statutes of May 22, 1926, state of these points: "This program is unalterable." "Architect of the Holocaust" Adolf Eichmann wrote in his memoirs, "My political sympathies inclined towards the left and emphasized socialist aspects every bit as much as nationalist ones.” He and his comrades, said Eichmann, viewed Nazism and Communism as “quasi-siblings." Likewise, in a 1944 article titled "Our Socialism," Nazi Propaganda Minister Josef Goebbels boasted that “We alone [the Nazis] have the best social welfare measures.” In contrast, he wrote, "The Jews are the incarnation of capitalism.” (Even in this antisemitism, the Nazis were following Marx, who wrote, "Let us not look for the secret of the Jew in his religion, but let us look for the secret of his religion in the real Jew. What is the secular basis of Judaism? Practical need, self-interest. What is the worldly religion of the Jew? Huckstering. What is his worldly God? Money.")

By confiscating and redistributing the property of Jews, the Nazis sought what they called “a truly socialist division of personal assets.” To this end, the Nazis enacted price controls, rent controls, exorbitant corporate taxes, farm subsidies and harsh taxes on capital gains, which Hitler denounced as “effortless income.”