Socialism, Communism and Fascism

This morning I had a conversation with a friend about the Centralization of our government as it takes its form via the health care law. Of course when I warned about the power government would now have over your life, I was told I was fearing the "boogie man". So I would like to cite Frederick Hayek's 1940s work, The Road To Serfdom. Under Planning and Power Hayek warns about power.

Many socialists have the tragic illusion that by depriving private individuals of the power they possess in an individualist system, and transferring this power to society, they thereby extinguish power. What they overlook is that, by concentrating power so that it can be used in the service of a single plan, it is not merely transformed but infinitely heightened. By uniting in the hands of some single body power formerly exercised independently by many, an amount of power is created infinitely greater than any that existed before, so much more far-reaching as almost to be different in kind. It is entirely fallacious to argue that the great power exercised by a central planning board would be "no greater than the power collectively exercised by private boards of directors." There is, in a competitive society, nobody who can exercise even a fraction of the power which a socialist planning board would possess. To decentralize power is to reduce the absolute amount of power, and the competitive system is the only system designed to minimize the power exercised by man over man. Who can seriously doubt that the power which a millionaire, who may be my employer, has over me is very much less than that which the smallest bureaucrat possesses who wields the coercive power of the state and on whose discretion it depends how I am allowed to live and work?

Now where is the boogie man in Hayek's day? Let me cite Hayek once again concerning Nazism's true foundation...Socialism:

Long before the Nazis, too, the German and Italian socialists were using techniques of which the Nazis and Fascists later made effective use. The idea of a political party which embraces all activities of the individual from the cradle to the grave, which claims to guide his views on everything, was first put into practice by the socialists. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who began to collect children at the tenderest age into political organizations to direct their thinking. It was not the Fascists but the socialists who first thought of organizing sports and games, football and hiking, in party clubs where the members would not be infected by other views. It was the socialists who first insisted that the party member should distinguish himself from others by the modes of greeting and the forms of address. It was they who, by their organization of "cells" and devices for the permanent supervision of private life, created the prototype of the totalitarian party. By the time Hitler came to power, liberalism was dead in Germany. And it was socialism that had killed it. To many who have watched the transition from socialism to fascism at close quarters the connection between the two systems has become increasingly obvious, but in the democracies the majority of people still believe that socialism and freedom can be combined. They do not realize that democratic socialism, the great utopia of the last few generations, is not only unachievable but that to strive for it produces something utterly different - the very destruction of freedom itself. As has been aptly said: "What has always made the state a hell on earth has been precisely that man has tried to make it his heaven.

Hayek notes in other places that Americans, who went to schools in Europe to learn about these different views came back not certain what the real and substantive difference was between them.The reason is simple. They are all the same thing in different forms.

So in conclusion, I was told that if I don't like it here in America, that I should leave to find another country. Isn't that amazing! It used to be said that of those who are Socialists! In fact, I was told that Germany is a great success. Well, if that is so, why doesn't he move there? The truth is, Socialists never want to move to socialist/communistic/fascist countries. Yet they always think the grass is greener on the other side.

I just have to say to Socialists that believe it is so wonderful in Europe. Let me help you pack your bags.