Comments by "Bruce Tucker" (@brucetucker4847) on "Why they don't tell you about Hitler's "Shrinking Markets" problem" video.

  1. Also, arguments from etymology usually lead to nonsense anyway, but they're particularly silly when you get your etymology wrong. Latin "publicum" does not mean "state," it means exactly the same thing as the English "public". "Res publica" was used in Latin to refer to what we would call a state, but, just as in English, there were many uses of the term "public" that were not related to the state - "res publica" was not a synonym for "publicum". Also, the ancient Roman conception of the state was different in many respects from out post-Westphalian conception of the state. I won't try and describe all the differences here - you really need a semester or two in historical political science at a university for that - but suffice it to say that the ancient Romans would have regarded your conflation of the "res publica" with a group of workers murdering their employer and appropriating his factory as both ludicrous and insane.
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  2. At 4:01 you're making the same old mistake here - saying "socialization of the means of production, another way to put it would be the nationalization of the means of production, which is the same thing". But THEY ARE NOT THE SAME THING. And as long as this mistake lies at the heart of your analysis, your analysis that proceeds from this point will be nonsense. Nationalizing the means of production is ONE METHOD to effect socialization of the means of production. But there can be other ways of socializing the means of production that do not involve a national state (anarcho-syndicalism), and there can be nationalization of the means of production that is not socialization of the means of production (military states and kleptocracies are two examples). Until you understand that nationalization and socialization are not the same thing, you can't hope to understand anything about socialism.
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