Calculation and Socialism

Timothy Terrell revisits Mises’s 1920 bombshell: under socialism, rational economic calculation isn’t just hard—it’s impossible. Without market prices for the means of production, a central planner is blind, unable to tell whether he’s creating wealth or destroying it. Terrell traces the argument from Soviet railroads and steel-bodied fighter jets to a strikingly modern target: the U.S. government’s central planning of the American West.

Recorded at the Mises Institute in Auburn, Alabama, on July 21, 2026.

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