Socialism will always encounter two big problems when regimes attempt to implement it: 1) the impossibility of economic calculation without true market prices, and 2) the lack of an incentive to produce only what consumers actually want. 

On 22 May 2019, British Steel announced that they had become insolvent and the company entered receivership with the UK. The explanation provided for this failure is that British Steel is a victim of the UK’s decision to exit the European Union’s bureaucratic fold . On the surface, this appears to be true, as the company stated that orders from the continent have declined due to uncertainty over the exit process that the UK Parliament has dragged out over the past three years.

When Britain decided to leave the European Union on June 23, 2016, shockwaves undoubtedly went through Brussels and Europe in general. The EU has, of course, been going through many crises over the last decades, and especially in the years of the euro crisis, dissatisfaction was high in many member states. But the fact that one of the largest and most important member states decided to leave the project outright was a precedent.

The socialist regimes of the 20th century that succeeded in comprehensively imposing their designs and central plans on the societies over which they ruled attempted to abolish any and all of the preceding institutions of civil society. Edward Shils noted this in his 1991 essay “The Virtue of Civil Society,” explaining how such regimes went to great lengths to replace civil society with the omnipotence of the state in all things. Indeed, as Shils said, “Marxist-Leninists declared themselves to be enemies of civil society.”

Individuals from all corners of the political spectrum have been stirred up by the recent banning of various figures including Alex Jones and Louis Farrakhan. Some have praised these bans for providing good constraints on what they deem “fake news” or “hate speech.” Others have attacked these bans for being influenced by nefarious motives that are contra free speech. The debate regarding the extent to which social media sites may regulate speech has been going on for years now. Perhaps it is time for a reassessment.

The influence of the economics of Michal Kalecki on Modern Monetary Theory (MMT) is hard to ignore. With its roots in the Neo-Marxist macroeconomic theory of Michal Kalecki, MMT carries with it the heritage of the labor theory of value and the Marxist state and class analysis. As a Marxist, Kalecki views the economy through the lens that capitalism is a class society. For him, two classes operate in the economy: the capitalists (the bourgeoisie) and the workers (the proletariat).

[Adapted from “Protected Lying: How the Legal Doctrine of ‘Absolute Immunity’ Has Created a ‘Lemons Problem’ in American Criminal Courts” in the Spring 2018 issue of the Quarterly Journal of Austrian Economics.]

For most experts, deflation is bad news since it generates expectations for a decline in prices. Because of this, it is held, consumers postpone their buying of goods at present since they expect to buy these goods at lower prices in the future. Consequently, this weakens the overall flow of current spending and this in turn weakens the economy.

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