Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920 with one devastating insight: "Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation." The socialists spent the next century pretending this problem didn't exist while their economies collapsed around them.
And yet here we are, watching politicians promise they can "fix" healthcare, housing, and energy markets through central planning. They can't even calculate the cost of their own programs correctly — how exactly are they going to allocate resources across an entire economy?
Every Venezuelan breadline, every Soviet grain shortage, every Chinese famine was just Mises being proven right in the most brutal way possible. But sure, let's try democratic socialism this time. What could go wrong?
This is exactly right. Honestly one of the reasons socialism/communism has survived so long is because free market advocates can’t effectively articulate the glaring flaw of centrally planned economies properly.
The demand for goods and services isn’t static, it changes all the time. If I were to ask you how many metric tons of polyester we should produce, no one would be able to give me a good answer. In a centrally planned economy, someone has to decide that figure. And it will invariably be wrong. Even if it is correct, it won’t be in a month when people’s wants and needs change.
By instead having a free market, the incentives constantly change such that we produce/provide as much of a good/service is demanded. Surpluses and shortages will be short-lived as the incentives push supply to converge with the demand at all times.
Academics and intellectuals are drawn to the idea that they have the answer to everything. But until someone can tell me exactly how many 8mm screws we need to produce in the United States next year, the free market will remain the best system to best economic system.
> Mises obliterated the entire socialist project in 1920
Nonsense, you are posting pseudo-factual slop.
Mises in 1920 was not impactful. Price did not get much academic attention until twenty-five years later with Hayek's "The Use of Knowledge in Society," published in the American Economic Review in September 1945.
There was no detectable deterrence of socialism in 1920. National Socialists took over Germany in 1933. Great Britain began nationalizing industry in 1946 and its WW2 price controls persisted until 1953.
It would be fair to say that politicians and the public largely ignored both Mises and Hayek and only learned lessons against central planning and price controls the hard way, through trial and failure.
The only policy decision in history informed by Mises and Hayek was when economist Ludwig Erhard, West Germany's first Minister of Economic Affairs, in June 1948 audaciously defied his allied overseers and unilaterally abolished price controls and rationing. This soon led to Wirtschaftswunder (German economic miracle). The British, though having won the war, remained mired in the economic hardships of socialism until Thatcher in 1979.
Leftists always want to keep trying it as they can prey on envy and use fake virtue to allocate more money to governments so they can control it to give it to themselves and their friends.
The benevolent person in government that can perfectly hand out the wealth and centrally plan perfectly and not steal it all for them and their friends does not exist.
All humans work in self interest. Period. Always. Which is why private enterprise and capitalism works because in order to gain wealth you have to create something for people to receive it in return. When governments can just confiscate it from you by force, there is just an implicit promise to give you something in return but no requirement. So it’s easy and beyond temptation to just keep vast amounts for them and their friends.
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