It absolutely can. Nazis, like socialists, centralized control of the economy in the state. It's just that they did it in order to further the goals of the so called Aryan nation as a whole. That's why it's called national socialism.
My country's current president had the exact same idea: install socialism in Brazil slowly to get people used to it so they don't launch a counter-revolution.
We are currently a dictatorship of the judiciary and very much en route to become a Venezuela tier country.
People work nearly half a year just to pay taxes and I'm not even accounting for inflation.
The future already seems hopeless and bleak and he hasn't even fully won yet.
> If done carefully while rewarding entrepreneurial initiative and penalizing rent seeking
"Careful" is the understatement of the century. Many a socialist has tried, only to discover they are on the wrong end of the Laffer curve.
Nobody really enjoys being utterly crushed by taxes in order to pay for the welfare of people they couldn't care less about.
Taxes are tolerated because people believe they will indirectly benefit from it. Taxpayers expect taxes to be converted into useful infrastructure and services for everyone, themselves included.
Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive. Quite literally. Very often they find a way to exclude you based on your means. If you're rich or even middle class, it's not for you.
> Socialism in practice is actually just wealth redistribution: taking from productive people to give to the poor and unproductive.
This is wrong. Poor people can be productive. If salary inequality is high, the workers earn bare minimum doing most of the job while managers get their bonuses. Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive. In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
The welfare states of Europe are unlikely to keep working much longer if too many people start moving there in order to benefit from them.
> Poor people can be productive.
I didn't mean to imply they couldn't be. They are distinct groups.
I meant to say that socialism frequently targets the poor with charity, and straight up demands that the unproductive be taken care of. "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs." Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.
Nothing wrong with such charity, provided that people freely choose to engage in it. Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden. It's easy to be the good guy when others are paying for it.
> Landlords may capture significant share of their income despite being absolutely unproductive.
Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?
> In such cases socialist policies may simply minimize inverse redistribution (exploitation).
Minimization of exploitation is just normal regulation, not socialism. I agree that this is necessary. Billionaires are a sign people are exploiting a lack of regulation in some area. Surveillance capitalism is my favorite example.
I'm not proposing everyone to move. :) Besides, immigration crises are costly, but long-term effects of immigration are positive. It's not the migration itself is evil, it's how fast and why people move.
>Socialism demands that you work for others at no benefit to yourself.
Some results of your work will always be owned by others at no benefit to yourself. Socialism is not unique here. It also does not demand that all your work is for others (by definition, working people are supposed to be primary beneficiaries).
>Socialism seeks to force the costs of it upon everyone whether they want it or not, turning it into a burden
It is not unique property of socialism. Only in anarchy this is not happening, all other systems with a government do that. You pay taxes no matter what.
>Are landlords not responsible for the maintenance of the property?
They are incentivized to spend as less as possible on it to maximize profits and they won't spend more than you pay, so effectively they are just redistributing some share of your money towards maintenance.
Businesses provide plenty of benefits in return for the value they capture. I work for well managed companies that let me just show up, do my job, go home and get paid.
Anyone who wants to capture the full value can just start their own company and handle everything by themselves. I've done that too. It's liberating and at the same time a huge pain in the ass.
This is a perfectly good tradeoff to make.
> You pay taxes no matter what.
We pay taxes so the government can build useful infrastructure and handle all the natural monopolies. We want our tax money to be converted into useful services like fire departments and police forces.
We don't want governments literally giving away our money to people in the form of welfare checks. This is just politicians using our money to buy votes.
Where in Western and Central Europe exactly do we have Socialist countries?
If you were a Jewish person of ordinary means, certain engineering paths were completely barred to you in the USSR. Keep in mind, engineering and math were the most prestigious forms of STEM for the Soviets.
So are you trying to claim the Doctor's Plot case, the assasination of Solomon Mikhoels, the rootless cosmopolitan campaign, Soviet "Zionology", that all those just didn't happen? People were around for those you know.
By this I am not negating not Stalin repressions, not the "Doctors affair", not the fact that many gifted people could not realize their potential in a way they could have had otherwise.
Not trying to claim that they're the same at all, especially not in a physical sense. Maybe in a spiritual or cultural sense the consequences could be compared, and maybe Stalin was planning something more (we'll never know). The goals were completely different. As I mentioned somewhere else, the full scope of the Nazis goals were so much worse than most people know.
The only claim here is that Soviets did not have racial laws at all - they essentially did.
This is not to negate the facts, but to put things in perspective.
Yes
Before you compare to American tuition - I'm not talking about the top universities. I'm talking about effectively being completely barred from an entire career path, despite having the talent for it.
Except when they effectively enslaved people on the basis of their ethnicity (the reality of being Soviet German, Crimean Tatar or Chechen in 1940-early 1950s). My German grandfather was taken into Labor Army (forced labor institution) as soon as he turned 16 (in 1952). He obviously wasn’t a Nazi collaborator. He was fully rehabilitated only in 1990.
Soviet communist policies towards ethnic minorities often did involve oppression and almost genocidal treatment. That fact of course should not be used to paint an all-black picture. Late USSR wasn’t bad at all for our family, creating a lot of opportunities.
I never claimed they were equal. Not once.