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Comment by TomOfTTB | Hacker News Reader

I'm sorry but that just isn't correct. I'm absolutely not saying all socialists are Nazis but the Nazi party was an extreme example of the socialist philosophy. That philosophy being that the Government should use its power to socially engineer a better world (the opposite of which being the libertarian philosophy that the Government should exist to protect people against social engineering by allowing them to do what they want even if those actions are detrimental).

Obviously it's all a sliding scale but to say OstiaAntica is flat out wrong is not accurate.

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The Nazis were facists, which is to say that there was "private property", but the state could tell you what you had to do with "your" property. In socialism, the state owns the property. It's a distinction without much of a difference, the main one being that socialism is a little more honest.

Spoken like a true 5 minute dabbler with an extremely cursory knowledge of the topic at hand. Bravo!

Actually, the "state owning the property" is not a core idea of socialism --it was only a "feature" of "really existing socialism", and even USSR had things like the NEP. Except for the backward places where "really existing socialism" developed, extremely few europeans (or american for that matter) socialists believed that it was a proper socialism at all.

As in, there are several types of socialism. Things americans complain about and deny as "socialism" (universal health care, for one), are proposed by even right-wing parties in Europe.

I'm sorry, but a cursory glance at one book or a documentary, or something heard from a friend of a friend, won't do. In order to intelligently discuss matters of world politics one has to do a little research. And it would be better if that research was impartial. Buy some books from both sides of the argument, and from both sides of the atlantic (and even the pacific).

The average opinion even on this matters, even on a site like "Hacker News" is often little better than what creationists know about evolution.

I highly recommend the Political Compass:

http://www.politicalcompass.org/

It changed my 1 dimensional thinking about the sliding scale between left and right and I feel richer for it.

The main problem with nazism(and probably communism) is that it isn't democratic, not that it's socialistic.

Social engineering can be a good thing, in the right quantities. just look at sweden. but it's very hard to achieve this right quantity under a dictatorship, not to talk about the awfull people that usually lead dictatorships.

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