Communists and anti-Communists, in perfect agreement on the one thing that matters.
Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis
Hayek, Röpke, and a generation of young European intellectuals read Mises’s Socialism as socialists and finished it as something else. The argument at its heart is not that socialism is unjust or that men are too selfish for it, but that it is impossible: without private ownership there are no prices for the means of production, without prices no economic calculation, and without calculation no way to know whether any productive act has created value or destroyed it.
Around that core Mises builds a survey of extraordinary reach—ownership and the origins of law, marriage and the family, war socialism and syndicalism, Marx’s theory of history and of class, Christianity and asceticism, the ethics of capitalism—and ends with the destructionist policies he watched consume interwar Europe.
This edition closes with the 1947 epilogue “Planned Chaos,” in which Mises turns to interventionism, Soviet experience, Fascism, and Nazism.
Scientific criticism has no nobler task than to shatter false beliefs.
The thief never acquires ownership. Economically, only the having counts.
