A couple of days ago, the New York Times published a story about the brutal authoritarian regime of Aleksandr Lukashenko, the leader of Belarus.

Can computers plan a socialist economy? The idea is not new; it first appeared in the debate over economic calculation, which began in 1920 with Ludwig von Mises’s first article on the topic and continued until 1949. This was a time when computers had recently emerged. Computers were not widespread, but their possibilities were evident.

America’s federally sanctioned entitlement programs, Medicare, Medicaid, and Social Security, each face bankruptcy in the next few years. Medicare and Medicaid were created in 1965 as part of President Lyndon Johnson’s Great Society legislation. Social Security was created in 1935 to provide retirement income for Americans who reached the age of sixty-five.

A friend of mine works for the public sector, in transit specifically. When I asked him to tell me what value he saw in “public transit” for society, he replied,

You must be from the stone ages! Public transit fulfills an important function. It provides transportation for folks who can’t afford the private solutions, and also solves the problem of congestion and pollution in crowded cities. And it can do some of this better than private enterprise, especially in regard to poor people far away from jobs.