By Walter B. Block

In the view of Tunku Varadarajan, Hitler is the worst man who ever lived. He asks: “On a scale of 10 -1, 1 being Christ, 10, being Hitler” where would we rank generalissimo Franco?”

This ranking means, if it means anything, that Hitler was the worst person who ever trod the planet. But this is unfair to the Fuhrer. He only murdered 11 million people. According to most historians, this consisted of 6 million Jews and 5 million others, including Gypsies, gays, black and other non-Aryans in good stead. But Adolf is far from taking the cake in this panoply of evil. Stalin beats him by a country mile, weighing in at an astounding 20 million, due to a great degree to contrived starvation emanating from agricultural central planning; that plus the killing camps in Siberia. But Mao puts both of these despicable mass murderers entirely in the shade, weighing in at some 60 million resulting from his communist cultural revolution. Pol Pot was a piker in terms of absolute numbers; but on the basis of percentages of his countrymen killed, he amasses a record of roughly one third of the entire population.

Why is it that the communists are much more effective at mass murder than are the fascists? (Mussolini hardly gains any traction in these sweepstakes).

Part of the explanation might well be because communism is a far worse economic system than fascism. According to the former, at least in its idealized format, the government owns all means of production outright. Yes, you can keep your toothbrush and your underwear, but pretty much everything else is part of the public sector. Bicycles, roller-skates, cars, trucks, can all be interpreted at least upon occasion as capital goods, and thus, in the Platonic form of communism we are now contemplating, cannot be owned privately.

In contrast, in very sharp contrast, Hitler’s governmental outright ownership of the means of production was practically non-existent. BMW, Volksagon, Stuka, Messerschmidt, were all in private hands. To be sure, there were regulations placed upon them, heavy ones, but there was no total control over everything as took place in Russia and China under communism. Hitler wanted guns, tanks and planes and other such military hardware; but, given these orders, he left it to a great degree to these private concerns to build them. He had relatively little control, or even interest in, the exact superficial specifications of these products.

In other words, the communistic economic system was further removed from laissez faire economics, the most effective economic arrangement ever invented, than is fascism.  What does this have to do with mass murder? Consider that tried and true aphorism, “wealthier is healthier.” As a result the fascists were, ceteris paribus, richer than the communists. Hence, again other things equal, fewer of the citizenry would perish.

Which is closer to the libertarian philosophy, the one that, pragmatically, leads to the most prosperity, and justice as well: left liberals or right conservatives? From an economic point of view, the answer is clear: the right takes the cake in this regard. However, there is more to political philosophy than economics. There is also personal liberty. And when it comes to these considerations, the libertarians more greatly overlap with the left.

Consider drug legalization. The right has been dragged by the left, kicking and screaming almost all of the way, into legalization, first of alcohol, and, more recently, of marijuana. There is only one state that has ever gone so far as to have at least for a time de-criminalized cocaine. And that is Oregon, clearly a blue state. Neither Texas nor Florida, red states, have ever even come close to protecting liberty in any such manner. Nevada, another blue state, has legalized prostitution. It cannot be denied that there are leftist feminists (a redundancy) who oppose such a step. (Whatever happened to “a woman, her choice?” does this only apply to abortion but nothing else?). But on the whole, conservatives are closer to the freedom philosophy on economics, while the same is true for liberals on personal liberties.

Overall, the blue states are certainly more receptive to these freedom oriented institutional arrangements than are the bible-thumping conservatives. Ditto for gambling, homosexuality, mixed marriages, and all the rest of these controversial issues.

The one exception is gun control. Here, the right is far more libertarian than the left, which would all but prohibit such self-defense. When in power they would have done it too, were it not for the continual pull of the Second Amendment.

On the other hand, there is one institution on the right which reflects a true partnership between libertarians and conservatives: the Federalist Society. On the other, other hand, there was the Peace and Freedom Party which protested the Viet Nam war. It comprised roughly 49% Progressive Labor, an outright communist group, 49% Trotskyites a more moderate organization of socialists, and at most, 2% libertarians. That, too, was a true partnership.

In the early days of his career, Murray Rothbard sided with the left, for example, with Peace and Freedom. Later on, with the right, the John Randolph club. He befriended allies wherever he could find them, as long as they as much as tolerated libertarians. He thought this policy would be most likely to promote liberty, and, accomplish tasks where there was some overlap with libertarianism and followers of other viewpoints. Here is further evidence for this collaboration; his first scholarly journal was named by him Left and Right; neither one at the expense of the other.

Related posts:

Honest Money, Honest Men Libertarian Delusions and the Machinery of Empire: Welfare as Alibi, Not Engine Why the British Ruling Class Needs a Chinese Enemy

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