Re: Letters, Christoper Lucero, “The Myth of Pure Capitalism,” June 29. I’m on the right. Why? Because I believe that the “right” stands for the individual, and the “left” stands for the collective. That’s why there are no “pure” capitalist or communist systems in the world. All political systems are “mixed,” because at some point we all want some things in common. The question is, “How much freedom do we have in our lives ?” and, “How much can a government, perhaps one we didn’t vote for, demand of us?” Regarding Mr. Lucero’s letter: After World War I, Benito Mussolini, an ardent Italian socialist who wrote for the socialist newspaper Avante, left the Italian Socialist Party because he saw them as weak. He was a Marxist but thought to use nationalism as an organizing tool instead of class warfare, and so invented the Fascist party. He used the ancient Roman symbol of a bundle of sticks (representing the people) lashed to an ax (the state), the symbol called in Italian the Fasci. Franklin Roosevelt so liked the government model, he used it to recruit thousands of unemployed Americans to build state projects, including Hoover Dam, and the symbol was preserved, until modern times, on the back of the Roosevelt dime. Adolf Hitler also admired Mussolini’s rise to power and sought to emulate it, this time using racism as a means to organize the German state under the banner, “National Socialist German Workers Party.” Nazi propagandist Joseph Goebbels said: “We are not a charitable institution but a party of revolutionary socialists,” and, “Money is the curse of mankind. It smothers the seed of everything great and good.”  These and other statements show the hate Nazis had for capitalism and free enterprise. To those who argue that Nazis were on the right because they fought the communists, remember, communist Russia in the 1930s was committing the “Holodomor” in the Ukraine, killing millions of Christian Ukrainians and raising fear across Europe. It’s clear from history that Fascism and Nazism are both creatures of the left. Statists. No one can argue that Germany had a free, capitalist economy where the government ruled trade unions and ordered all  business to comply with government edicts. Given this, I can’t understand Mr. Lucero’s comment that we can see “disturbing parallels between what happened a century ago in Germany and our current experiences of today’s right-wing search for power – Jan. 6 vis-à-vis the Beer Hall Putsch as one example.”   His thinking seems backward. Richard LaMotte Valencia The post Richard LaMotte | The Individual vs. the Collective appeared first on Santa Clarita Valley Signal.