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Instead of left and right or liberal versus conservative, a better schema is to locate movements on a spectrum that runs from tyranny to liberty. Fascism embodies many elements of the socialist’s state control of society. For libertarian icon Friedrich Hayek, Hitler’s National Socialism “was indeed socialist in concept and execution,” while H. Pierre Secher, biographer of one of Austria’s leading socialists, Bruno Kreisky, wrote of the striking similarities between the leftists and the fascists in that country: “Ideologically, the distinction between the ‘Sozis’ (Socialists) and Commies on the one hand and Nazis on the other, was probably only the internationalism of the Marxists and the nationalism of the Nazis. In every other respect they agreed on the evils of capitalism.” The connection of Jews with capitalism helped fuel the anti-Semitism of the Nazis.

Mussolini’s claim that in a fascist regime there was to be “everything within the state, nothing outside the state, nothing against the state” is of course the totalitarian opposite of the libertarian ideal. Mussolini was long involved with the socialist movement in Italy, breaking with it because of personal ambition and because his socialist brethren would not support Italy’s entry into the First World War. Once in power, he inaugurated a major extension of welfare spending and public works projects. Mussolini’s insistence that his fascist deputies take seats on the far right of the Italian Constituent Assembly may have led some observers to wrongly conclude that fascism was right wing.