Desperate historians try to defend the Nazi privatization myth

My Patron, John Weatherby, has said, "...sorry, not a real question, just more of a discussion about a paper I found." That's fine, history lies in the heart of the debate after all. This is on Piketty's website, so you can expect some slant. And I will leave the link in the description if anyone wants to read the full thing. The paper was vague, just saying that Nazi Germany transcends economics. Of course, that it did Socialism is more than just economics, but a whole social structure. Anyway, there is an important point to it. And, he quotes from the paper, Paragraph 48 of the Law of the Reichsbudget, Reichshaushaltsordnung, RHO, together with Paragraph 60 of the Regulations concerning the Financial and Economic Behaviour of the Reich, Wirtschaftsbestimmungen für die Reichsbehörden, RWB, permitted entrepreneurial engagements of the Reich only when important interests of the Reich were not attainable otherwise and only with the consent of the Reich's Finance Minister. These decrees, originating in the Weimar Republic, were never repealed during the Third Reich, and thus placed the more liberally-minded bureaucracy of the Reich Ministry of Finance in a strong position. It insisted that all institutions of the Reich had to strictly apply those regulations. Otherwise, it would not agree to any such industrial engagement of the Reich, with the result that it would be unlawful. Just to point out here before we go on, that the Weimar Constitution, set up by the Social Democratic Party of Germany, the SPD, was never abolished. It remained the constitution of the Third Reich as well, all the way up until 1945. The Reichstag Fire Decree did suspend a few articles of the constitution, including private property rights, under Articles 115 and 153, but the rest of the constitution remained. Further quotes and sources relating to this point see the prioritization section of the Hitler's Socialism video. And, as the previous quote from the article shows, many other Weimar decrees and regulations remained in force too. "...they make a false case that because the other parts of the government had to bow to the liberal Reich's ministry, this meant some kind of autonomy. What I think is important is that it shows that the Reich wanted nationalized industries unless there was no option, not we will only nationalize if we have to. I find it amazing they say we should take Socialists in the name as propaganda, but we should take what they called privatization at face value for what the word means." So I did some digging, and I discovered that the term privatization was not coined by the Nazis in the Nazi era, as many Marxists and Socialists have falsely claimed. According to Bell, one of the authors they like to quote from, it was actually a British magazine called The Economist, which was and is a Keynesian Central Banker publication, that coined the term. And the best part is, they coined this term on the 1st of August 1936 in reference to just three German banks that they said had been re-privatized. The same magazine then clarified in 1937… "...the Deutsche Deskonto Bank announces that it is now fully re-privatized. The DD Bank's re-privatization was in part financed by sale to the Reich of the former Deskonto Bank's central offices. The re-privatization of the Kommers- und Privatbank is not yet complete." Now, obviously, what we're going to do is take The Economist and Bell at face value, and not do any additional reading or research, and therefore conclude that the Keynesians are right. Oh wait, no we're not! The crisis of 1931 had left the Reich with a controlling stake in all three of the major national banks, Deutsche Bank, Dresdner Bank, and Kommersbank. If some of the spokesmen of the Nazi Left had had their way, there might even have been a wholesale nationalization of the banking system. But Hjalmar Schacht saw to it that this radicalism came to nothing. Instead, the moment of crisis was turned into an opportunity for managerial reform and tighter oversight by the central bank. So note, they weren't going to nationalize them outright, but they also weren't going to privatize them either. Because it's not private if the central bank has the power to regulate and alter the running of these businesses to its liking. The policy wasn't privatization or nationalization. It was Gleichschaltung. Synchronization. As in, synchronization in with the state. The German Socialists, all of them, not just the Nazis, didn't want Zwang-Wirtschaft, outright nationalization, because they saw what had happened in Russia and didn't want their economy to collapse. The German Socialists therefore developed an alternative model of socialism called Gleichschaltung. "...under the slogan of the strong state, the ministerial bureaucracy fashioned a new national structure of economic regulation. We worked and governed with incredible elan. We really ruled. For the bureaucrats of the ministry, the contrast to the Weimar Republic was stark. Party chatter in the Reichstag was no longer heard. The language of the bureaucracy was rid of the paralyzing formula. Technically right, but politically impossible." So, if this was the case, what happened to the three banks they supposedly privatized? "...the end result was a draft law that gave the Reichsbank extensive powers of oversight. To prevent a repeat of the financial scandals of the early 1930s, limits were imposed on the level of loans that banks were permitted to provide to any one private borrower. For the first time, the Reichsbank was given the power to define basic reserve requirements and to fully regulate the development of private banking assets. The great banks of Berlin were thus saved from nationalization." Saved from nationalization, but synchronized into the state. They bowed to the state, and were thus controlled by the state. They were, therefore, socialized by the policy of Gleichschaltung. But, back to the article, John says "...the paper even points out that private investment was less than two-thirds in 1928 than in 1938. They explain it away as risk from a rearmament bubble, not that the investment was controlled by the state." Yes, here's the full quote. Only about 40% of industrial investment in 1938 was private, in the sense that it was not directed by the state towards armaments and autarky-related products. Although profitability of companies in 1938 was four times higher than in 1928, private investment of industry at most reached two-thirds of the level of 1928. And they explain this away by saying, this was due at least partly to the fact that entrepreneurs reckoned with the eventual collapse of the armament boom, potentially leading to high over-capacities, which they wanted to avoid under all circumstances. So, apart from the fact that they've just admitted that state intervention creates the booms that then lead to the busts we call recessions and depressions, according to their own statistics, private investment had collapsed as a result of National Socialism. Yet, somehow, all this is classed as privatization. They then excuse this collapse in private investment privatization by saying that investors were scared of a bubble. Except, we're currently living in the greatest economic bubble that has ever been inflated. And instead of stepping back from the everything bubble, investors are double, triple, and even quadrupling down on the bubble. Why? Because of profit. They don't care about the eventual collapse. They just want to make profit today, even if that profit comes at the expense of bankruptcy tomorrow and the collapse of the entire world economy. And you can thank our Gleichschaltung centrally planned Keynesian central banks and states for that. Investors, especially those closer to the printing press, are very short-sighted, so they don't care if it's an armaments bubble. They'll just buy into it to make a quick profit. It turns out that the German Stock Exchange continued to operate in the 1930s under Nazi rule, but as a shell of its former self. Gunther Reimann, in his primary source work The Vampire Economy, explains that the Berlin Stock Exchange was heavily regulated by the state and its Reichskommissar, a guy called Martini. This was during a period of currency inflation and the persecution of the Jews, many of whom had formerly participated in the stock market. What took place on the Stock Exchange was entirely state-driven, while private speculation had to occur outside the official sphere. Martini tried to crack down and outlaw these private transactions, but was powerless to stop them, partly because they occurred behind closed doors, but partly because people were flooding from the official channels to the black market. "...the interest in private investments has increased, not as a result of greater confidence in them, but due to the loss of confidence in state guarantees, and as a result of the desire to escape state control, inflation, and measures of expropriation by the totalitarian state." What's even better is that Reimann actually mentions one of the so-called privatized banks that the desperate historians mentioned before. His version of what happened is dramatically different from their deceptive conclusion. "...the Dresdner Bank, for instance, sold the bulk of its own stock, 120 million marks, which had been owned by the state, to the public. This was easily arranged through the bank's 165 branches. The clients obviously preferred the stock of a private corporation to state bonds. The result of this transaction was that the government obtained funds of private investors, and yet did not lose control over the privately owned Dresdner Bank. For the state has organized and rigorously maintained supervision of all security issues, and in general of the credit policies of the banks. In other words, it was under state control. They were nationalized, not privatized, under a policy of synchronization." There you go. A primary source document, by a German Marxist nonetheless, telling you point-blank that the banks that the Central Banker and Keynesian-run Economist magazine claimed were privatized, were in fact not privatized at all because the state still retained control over them. I mean, what other proof do you need that these historians are deceiving people into believing their socialist agendas? In my videos, I've provided numerous primary sources. I've provided numerous secondary sources. I have explained it all in extreme detail. And yet, somehow, I'm the idiot. Somehow, I'm the one who's wrong. Somehow, I'm the one who needs to read a book. Somehow, just like every other video I've made in the past on this topic, there will be people in the comments coming up with excuses, refusing to listen, and otherwise just being complete morons because their faith in Socialism is blinding them to the truth that Socialism isn't what they thought it was. But, as frustrating as these fanatics can be, I am glad that I'm getting through to some of them. In John's case, he's able to read the sources with a critical eye, and has obviously read around the subject a little, or at least, listened to my videos on it. And he's not the only one. The majority have done that too. Slowly, people are coming around to the idea, so I do hope that this video gets through to some more people as well, and isn't just dismissed. Anyway, John continues with his chastising of the article. They tried to explain away Reichswerker Hermann Goering, saying that it was because there was no profit in low-quality iron ore, and was not the State trying to nationalize the steel industry. Yes, and they even say that there were few State-run enterprises, with the exception being Reichswerker Hermann Goering. Well, what they fail to say is that by 1941, Reichswerker Hermann Goering was the largest economic enterprise in Europe. For the Soviet Union, Goering wanted all industry to be nationalized into the Reichswerker, and was in the process of doing that in the 1941-1942 period. Richard Over explains that the only country in Axis Europe that Goering's national corporation didn't have its grubby hands in was Romania, although they were trying to gain influence over it. And it wasn't just producing iron ore. It was producing iron ore, pig iron, steel, steel products, coal, lignite, and armaments too. Goering was the head of the Four-Year Plan office, and was also massively influential in other areas of the economy, including food, rubber, explosives, oil, petroleum production. So to dismiss this as just a minor thing, and nothing to do with nationalizing the steel industry, is simply ridiculous. And when they said that there were few enterprises that were State-run, well yeah, because nationalization, by definition, is just one giant corporation. So, of course, there's not going to be many State firms. That's the whole point of nationalization, to condense the number of firms. In fact, there were only 13 giant corporations permitted in the Reich, and this was because it was easier for the State to control 13 corporations than thousands of little businesses. But again, they're not going to tell you this because it's not part of their socialist agenda. They want to keep their readers in the dark, and so they're not going to give them all the facts. They even contradict themselves in the same sentences. There's numerous examples I could give, but I'll just give one. 4. Despite extensive regulatory activity by an interventionist public administration, which is a violation of private property rights, because if you don't control it, you don't own it. So massive State intervention in your firm means that you haven't got ownership of it, because if you had, you would kick out the State commissars and run your own business the way you see fit. Thus, the first part of this sentence is confirmation that private property rights had been abolished under the Reichstag-5 decree, as several sources including Ryman have confirmed. But then, in direct contradiction of this, they say firms preserved a good deal of their autonomy, even under the Nazi regime. How? If the State is intervening and dictating to them what they can and cannot do, what autonomy do they have? A mere glance at Gunther Ryman's The Vampire Economy will show you that the business leaders became State managers, and that they had little autonomy under the totalitarian State. Some broke the law, or others fought back in their own little ways, but they were completely under the thumb of the Nazi regime, hence the term totalitarian. The State had total control. So the second part of this sentence contradicts the first. They then go on. As a rule, freedom of contract, that important corollary of private property rights, was not abolished during the Third Reich, even in dealings with State agencies. B.S. Ryman explains that businesses had to create an entire new industry of paper-pushers to draw up various State-regulated contracts. There's no way you can call it freedom of contract. Ryman shows, numerous times in fact, that the State attempted to control prices which is a private contract. They had to backtrack, despite all attempts by the Price Commissar to implement price controls, because they got a lesson in basic economics. Socialism doesn't work. But they tried to implement it, and their regulations killed the idea of private contracts. So, not only does the first sentence contradict itself, but other primary and secondary sources show that the second sentence is also wrong. John continues. Still, I find the fact those Weimar laws not being repealed being key. The Reich's ministry had to approve any entrepreneurship. If we can't take Socialisms in the name as evidence of anything, then why should we believe the public speeches and internal meetings with industry captains promoting entrepreneurship seriously? The authors want to take these statements at face value, but not the I am a Socialist statements. Correct. This source is full of contradictions, holes, and doesn't use sufficient or even decent sources to back up its claims. I could spend all day ripping it apart, and while some of you might enjoy that, I won't overstay my welcome. What I will do is point to my 5 hour Hitler Socialism video and say, watch that. But I know not everyone has watched it or is willing to spend 5 hours watching that video, even though it's backed by over a hundred sources and 350 direct references in the video itself, and I haven't had time to make a shorter condensed version. But we are in luck, because there was a recent article on Mises.org which basically summed up some of the arguments I made in that video. I will link to it below. It will take you 5 minutes to read it, and while it doesn't mention every point I brought up in the 5 hours, or provide sufficient citations for my liking, it does a good job of giving a cliff-notes version. So all you doubters out there, don't have an excuse now. I have no direct proof that this guy has watched my video, but I'm fairly certain he did, because not only did he use the exact same quotes and lay out the exact same arguments, but he also used the exact same sources. Bar one. And one of the sources he used is a little too coincidental. I randomly picked up a book on Auschwitz to do videos on the Holocaust, and since I had it, I thought I may as well use it for the Hitler Socialism video. But the author just so happened to have used this exact same random book for his article. Yes, of all the books he could have picked up on Auschwitz, he just so happened to have picked up that particular one, and used the same quote I did. Really. So this strongly suggests that he has watched my video. But I'm just glad that the information is getting out there, and if anyone from Mises.org wants to link to my work, reference it, or anything like that in the future, you have my permission. Anyway, for more videos on the Nazi economy or National Socialist Ideology, check out these videos here. Thanks for watching, bye for now.