fascists running amok at the time was who owned the businesses that the state was working for; in Germany it was wealthy industrialist types, while in Stalinist Russia it was the top-rung apparatchiks. Other than that, not much difference, AFAICT.

If Hitler and Mussonlini had run around and nationalised all those German heavy industry firms, then yeah, they'd've been leftie.

The real point imho is that basing one's political system on strictly economic principles is a fool's errand, and a dangerous one. Despite all of Lenin's and Stalin's fulminations, they were just as capitalist as Krupp and Dornier. The only difference was in the nominal ownership of the capital. In both cases capital formation was accomplished on the backs of slave labour. Both sides of the European mid-20th century coin differed only in how they justified the use of that slave labour to aid the capital formation they needed to build the war machine they wanted.

One of the reasons that the Anglo tradition has been as durable as it has been is because they didn't have a revolution; instead, it's a many centuries working out of power arrangements, with an explicit understanding that some people have more power than others, and will need to be restrained. The mechanism they came up with for that was Law, starting with Magna Carta.

Instead of trying to dream up a perfect market system (ie- either unrestrained capitalism or government by the proletariat) and then shoehorning a political system to fit this idealized market scheme, it was a practical working out with an emphasis on keeping arrangements that made things better. In short, a long term application of the scientific method where you try something to see if it works well, and if it does you keep doing it and if it doesn't you don't.

Personally, as soon as I hear someone say government should be run like a business, they've pretty much lost my vote, because government and business are very different institutions. Oligopoly or monopoly lead toward rent-gathering tendencies and a complete halting of innovation in the market place, but government is all about taking rent (taxes) and using it to do stuff. Some things are not profitable, but are good; for example, basic infrastructure. Things like highways, railways, sewage and water systems, electrical grids, etc, are very hard to make profitable. This is why the grid in the Northeastern US was allowed to degrade as badly as it did when it caused the blackout; since there was no profit to be made in maintaining it, the companies that owned it didn't. So, power generation = profitable, and is suitable for profit making entities, as say are cars, or gasoline. However, telecom grids, power grids, and highways are not, and are better done by having a non-profit entity take care of them.

This usually means government, even if in some cases the government in question is a board of people from a community charged with taking care of that and given the power to collect rents to pay for it, like the Public Utilities Commission here in my hometown. It's a non-profit wholly owned by the city, and the commissioners on the board are elected positions. They don't do the generating; they buy it from profit making entities elsewhere. They just maintain the infrastructure, and are allowed to collect enough money from the rate-payers to build and maintain it.

It has worked very well here for over a century. They are quite capable of going out and finding the best deal they can get on natural gas or electricity, buying in bulk to get volume discounts, and then passing those savings on to the consumers in the community. If someone is being bad in how they run the commission or by taking advantage of it, they end up losing their job when the next election comes around; this is something that has happened in my lifetime, and man was it ever fun to watch;)

But, the real point is that the PUC is a government institution, not a private one. Hence, they are not required to make a profit, but only to make sure that they keep the infrastructure they are responsible for in the city in decent shape.

Anyway, it's late, and I'm rambling. To get back to the original point, neither of those totalitarian systems really say too much about the relative merits of the right or the left ways of organising society and/or market behaviour; instead, they say a great deal about predicating one's politics on economics and an unchecked and unrestrained accumulation of power... just as unrestrained markets concentrate wealth in fewer and fewer hands, unrestrained state apparatus concentrate power in the same way... and these lead to bad results.

Ideologically, the current administration is a lot closer to the approach taken by the fascists, as they are working with the large business entities in their country instead of taking them over. However, they are the same as both the fascists and the communists in that they are attempting to accumulate as much power as they can get away with in a small number of hands. I detect a fairly strong totalitarian streak in these guys, seeing their need and desire to bypass the Law when it doesn't suit them (Law being the restraint on power), as well as the need to gather and know as much as they can so as to be able to both manipulate and dominate the governed, using both the official state machinery as well as unofficial persuasive powers gathered about them by the very concentrated patterns of ownership of mass media and their close ties to the government. The Rovian project of a permanent Republican majority is essentially a totalitarian project, and such things are to be avoided at all costs if a people are to remain free.

There, my $0.02. Cheers!