In the intellectual wasteland of modern political discourse, the most reflexive slur lobbed across the digital battlefield is “Nazi.” It requires no evidence, no logic, and certainly no historical literacy—only a vague sense that one’s opponent should be not just wrong, but morally radioactive. And so the slander is sprayed liberally, hitting libertarians, classical liberals, paleoconservatives, centrists, independents, populists, and even old-school liberals who failed to read the latest Slack message from the Ministry of Acceptable Opinions.
But the most absurd and telling use of the term is aimed at ordinary people who are skeptical of state power: those who question government overreach, who want to keep more of what they earn, who prefer local governance to distant bureaucracies, or who believe that liberty and dignity are better secured by voluntary cooperation than centralized mandates. These are not Nazis. In fact, unless you're advocating for a very specific and terrifying set of state powers, you're probably not even remotely close.
So how did we arrive at this inversion? How did the people most hostile to statism become labeled as its worst historical expression?
The German National Socialist Workers' Party (NSDAP), more commonly known as the Nazi Party, did not rise to power promoting personal liberty or limited government. Their ideology was defined by etatism—the belief that the state is the highest authority and the individual merely its instrument.
A crucial analysis comes from Ludwig von Mises in his monumental work Omnipotent Government. Mises is not just another political economist offering opinions about the 20th century—he is arguably the most qualified person in the modern era to define what Nazism actually was. A Jewish academic from Austria who spent his life studying, critiquing, and narrowly escaping the very regime he warned Europe about, Mises offers not only unmatched scholarly rigor but also firsthand proximity to the rise of totalitarianism.
Mises described Nazism as a distinct and extreme form of etatism, a system in which the state dominates all spheres of life, reducing the individual to a functionary of state aims. He emphasized that etatism includes both socialism and interventionism—two approaches that converge in the constriction of personal liberty and centralization of authority.
Nazism, according to Mises, was not simply another version of socialist planning. It was a virulent strain of it, marked by aggressive nationalism, racial supremacy, and the doctrine of Lebensraum.
Unless you are calling for:
the total subjugation of private industry to government mandates,
the abolition of market pricing in favor of state-directed quotas,
the complete merger of government, media, and business into a propaganda-driven command system,
the use of secret police to eliminate dissent,
or the expansion of national territory by military conquest,
...then you're probably not a Nazi. And calling someone who simply disagrees with you about taxes or vaccine mandates one is not only insane—it's an insult to actual victims of totalitarian regimes.
Whereas Soviet socialism aimed to eliminate class, Nazi socialism aimed to reinforce hierarchy based on race and nation. Mises notes that this was a key distinction—both systems centralized power and abolished individual rights, but the Nazi variant was suffused with mythical nationalism and pseudo-scientific racism.
Extreme Nationalism and Racism: Nazi ideology revolved around Aryan supremacy and the demonization of Jews. This worldview was violently exclusionary and collectivist, in direct contradiction to any ideology that defends universal human rights, voluntary association, or peaceful pluralism.
Striving for Lebensraum: The belief that Germany needed to seize foreign territory to thrive was central to Nazi policy. Anyone who supports non-interventionism, diplomatic engagement, or free trade is miles away from this mindset.
Rejection of Enlightenment Values: Nazis viewed reason, individual liberty, and market cooperation as weaknesses to be replaced with myth, blood, and soil. Anyone who prefers open dialogue to ideological censorship already rejects one of Nazism's foundational pillars.
Zwangswirtschaft: While the Nazis retained nominal private ownership, entrepreneurs were mere agents of the state. The government dictated all prices, production, wages, and resource allocation. There was no real market; there was only managed compliance.
Here's the real kicker: if you were to go down a checklist of actual Nazi-style policies and governing structures, you'd find more in common with today’s technocratic statists than with the people they regularly accuse of fascism.
Do you believe dissenters should be silenced for public safety?
Do you support mass censorship of media under government pressure?
Do you think the government should determine which industries thrive or die?
Do you advocate freezing bank accounts of political protestors?
Do you favor digital surveillance of citizens without warrants?
Because those ideas bear more resemblance to 20th-century totalitarianism than anything resembling a bumper sticker that says "Don't Tread on Me."
Likewise, the sprawling censorship-industrial complex we've seen develop in the past few years—where the federal government outsources its speech-policing to social media platforms, corporate media, and NGOs—bears a disturbing structural similarity to the propaganda machinery of totalitarian regimes. When the White House holds meetings with tech companies about which opinions to suppress or intelligence agencies ghostwrite media narratives, you are venturing into territory far more reminiscent of Zwangswirtschaft than anything proposed by liberty-minded skeptics of state power.
But here’s where it gets even more absurd: many of the loudest voices labeling others as "Nazis" today are ideological descendants of globalist, technocratic, anti-nationalist movements—precisely the kind of internationalist agenda that Nazi ideology abhorred. Open borders, race-essentialist identity politics, and supranational bureaucratic control over local populations were anathema to National Socialism.
In other words, wokesters aren’t Nazis either. Their ideas may share some authoritarian habits—censorship, central planning, the obsession with ideological purity—but they lack the ethno-nationalist, imperial, and militaristic components that were core to the Nazi worldview. Which is exactly the point: the comparison is stupid.
Calling someone a Nazi has become less about historical accuracy and more about moral panic, a way to justify authoritarian responses to dissent. It’s projection dressed up as indignation, used to dehumanize political opponents and shut down debate.
If anyone in the modern era had the credentials to define Nazism with clarity and authority, it was Ludwig von Mises. A Jewish economist of towering intellect and one of the most rigorous critics of totalitarian systems in the 20th century, Mises didn’t merely study Nazism—he lived through its rise, understood its ideological DNA, and became a personal target of the regime.
He was a respected academic in interwar Austria and a classical liberal in the tradition of individual liberty and economic freedom. When the Nazis came to power, Mises knew exactly what that meant for someone like him: arrest, exile, or worse. He fled to Switzerland in 1934. After the Anschluss in 1938, he could never return. His Vienna apartment was ransacked by the Nazis. His personal library and academic papers were stolen. By 1940, as the Nazi grip expanded across Europe, Mises and his wife escaped to the United States with little more than their lives.
Once in America, Mises continued his mission. He joined New York University with the help of allies like Henry Hazlitt and the Volker Fund. But more importantly, he put into writing what remains the most thorough economic and philosophical diagnosis of fascism and Nazism ever published: Omnipotent Government, Socialism, and Planned Chaos.
These weren’t reactionary screeds or partisan hot takes. They were precise, lucid demolitions of the total state—crafted by a man whose work was so dangerous to National Socialism that the Nazis looted it during their conquest. Mises’s critique of Zwangswirtschaft, the Nazi economic order, was not just theoretical. He had watched the very institutions crumble and mutate into engines of domination.
So, when Mises says that Nazism was built on central planning, state control of the economy, aggressive nationalism, racial collectivism, and total suppression of dissent—he's not guessing. He’s not speculating from the bleachers of academia. He was there. He lived it. He narrowly escaped it.
That’s why his analysis carries more weight than the hashtag historians of today who throw around the word "Nazi" like it’s a trendy insult. Mises knew what it actually meant. And more importantly, he knew what it didn’t mean.
So, if you’re going to accuse your neighbor, your coworker, your political opponent—or anyone who disagrees with you—of being a Nazi, you might want to check with Mises first. Because odds are, he’d say: No, they’re not. Not even close.
The irony is, the people most eager to paint others as Nazis often exhibit the very traits they claim to oppose:
The drive to centralize power
The desire to crush dissent
The willingness to distort history
The belief that their ideological enemies must be silenced, not reasoned with
These are not exactly libertarian impulses. They are the authoritarian instincts of those who worship power but fear debate.
In the end, when everyone becomes a Nazi, no one is. And the people who suffer most are not the slandered, but the culture itself—stripped of historical memory, allergic to nuance, and increasingly unable to distinguish between those who want to rule your life and those who simply want to be left alone.
Calling defenders of liberty "Nazis" doesn't just expose your ignorance. It reveals your contempt for truth.
And that, perhaps, is the most dangerous ideology of all.
Ludwig von Mises, Omnipotent Government: The Rise of the Total State and Total War. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1944.
Ludwig von Mises, Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis. Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 1981 (originally published 1922).
Ludwig von Mises, Planned Chaos. Irvington-on-Hudson: Foundation for Economic Education, 1947.
Ludwig von Mises, Human Action: A Treatise on Economics, Scholar's Edition. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 1998.
Ludwig von Mises, Epistemological Problems of Economics. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2003.
Ralph Raico, "Classical Liberalism and the Austrian School." Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2012.
Ralph Raico, The Struggle for Liberty: Essays and Speeches. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010.
Ralph Raico, The World at War. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute.
Murray N. Rothbard, Strictly Confidential: The Private Volker Fund Memos of Murray N. Rothbard. Auburn: Ludwig von Mises Institute, 2010.
Ron Paul, End the Fed. New York: Grand Central Publishing, 2009.
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