re: #317 Bill Dalasio

Thanks for the response.

But, residual benefit of assets is not the essence of private property. Control over the disposal of those assets is. A somewhat competent apparatchick in the Soviet Union had the de facto residual benefit of the assets he had control over, but he hardly could be considered to have been operating in a free market system. In both fascist and Nazi political systems, actual control over the means of production rested unremittingly in the hands of the state. That is the essence of socialist economies, is it not?

If Krupp was gonna stay in business, it had to produce what it could sell, and it certainlt couldn’t sell across war lines. So it was restricted to a rather large client, and sold the lion’s share of what it produced to that client. And it produced to order, for such a big customer, kinda like other states were afraid the biology textbook publishers would do for Texas.

Sure, the heads of Krupp would have been skewered on pikes if they’d have said no to the big bad Fuhrer. But coercion wasn’t even necessary; business considerations were sufficient to disctate their actions.

It wasn’t the German Army running those factories, and it wasn’t the Reich government making money off of what they made.