George Reisman

George Gerald Reisman (born January 13, 1937) is an American economist and political author.

George Reisman

Quotes

• Roy Cohn and Joe McCarthy will be redeemed when the people have taken back their government from the criminal alliance of Communists, Socialists, New Dealers and the Eisenhower-Dewey Republicans.
  • "Opinion: One Enchanted Evening", Time (August 9, 1954)

Capitalism: A Treatise on Economics (1996)

• The green movement, in other words, is the red movement stripped of the veneer of reason and science and bent on the destruction of reason and science rather than take the trouble to learn what reason and science actually are. The green movement is the red movement no longer in its boisterous, arrogant youth, but in its demented old age.

• Like the use of the word 'concupiscence' in an earlier age to describe sexual desire, the use of the word 'pollution' to describe essential aspects of the productive activities of an industrial society represents an attempt to defame an entirely proper human capacity by means of using an evil sounding name for it.

• Whoever claims that economic competition represents "survival of the fittest" in the sense of the law of the jungle, provides the clearest possible evidence of his lack of knowledge of economics.

• The truth is that economic competition is the very opposite of competition in the animal kingdom. It is not a competition in the grabbing off of scarce nature-given supplies, as it is in the animal kingdom. Rather, it is a competition in the positive creation of new and additional wealth.

• The slaves of socialism are slaves, but they are no one's property and therefore no one's loss.

• Under communism (socialism), there is no incentive to supply people with anything they need or want, including safety.

Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian (2005)

“Why Nazism Was Socialism and Why Socialism Is Totalitarian,” lecture delivered at the Mises Institute’s “The Economics of Fascism: Supporters Summit 2005” in Auburn, Alabama (October 8, 2005)

• The identification of Nazi Germany as a socialist state was one of the many great contributions of Ludwig von Mises.

• When one remembers that the word "Nazi" was an abbreviation for "der Nationalsozialistische Deutsche Arbeiters Partei" — in English translation: the National Socialist German Workers' Party — Mises's identification might not appear all that noteworthy. For what should one expect the economic system of a country ruled by a party with "socialist" in its name to be but socialism?

• Private ownership of the means of production existed in name only under the Nazis and that the actual substance of ownership of the means of production resided in the German government. For it was the German government and not the nominal private owners that exercised all of the substantive powers of ownership: it, not the nominal private owners, decided what was to be produced, in what quantity, by what methods, and to whom it was to be distributed, as well as what prices would be charged and what wages would be paid, and what dividends or other income the nominal private owners would be permitted to receive.

• If the individual [in Nazi Germany] is a means to the ends of the State, so too, of course, is his property. Just as he is owned by the State, his property is also owned by the State.

• What specifically established de facto socialism in Nazi Germany was the introduction of price and wage controls in 1936.

• The combination of price controls with this further set of controls constitutes the de facto socialization of the economic system. For it means that the government then exercises all of the substantive powers of ownership.

• The requirements of enforcing a system of price and wage controls shed major light on the totalitarian nature of socialism — most obviously, of course, on that of the German or Nazi variant of socialism, but also on that of Soviet-style socialism as well.

• The enforcement of price controls requires a government similar to that of Hitler's Germany or Stalin's Russia, in which practically anyone might turn out to be a police spy and in which a secret police exists and has the power to arrest and imprison people.

• In any type of socialist state, Nazi or Communist, the government's economic plan is part of the supreme law of the land.

• Nazis generally did not have to kill in order to seize the property of Germans other than Jews. This was because, as we have seen, they established socialism by stealth, through price controls, which served to maintain the outward guise and appearance of private ownership. The private owners were thus deprived of their property without knowing it and thus felt no need to defend it by force.