Socialism

The socialist calculation problem isn't a museum piece from 1920s Moscow. It's the Bureau of Land Management, this year. Timothy Terrell on why bureaucrats are still groping in the dark.

The problem with socialism was never the wrong people in charge. It was socialism.

Bob sits down with the managing editor of the Libertarian Institute, Keith Knight, to sample arguments from his recent four-hour video cataloguing sixty-four problems with democratic socialism.

Since abandoning socialism 30 years ago, Poland’s economy has grown, as one would expect with a market economy. However, there could be more economic freedom there that easily would translate into a booming economy.

How German “anti-Marxism,” including national (anti-Marxian) socialism, absorbed the very Marxian ideas it claimed to oppose, with Werner Sombart as the case study of a thinker Marxist and anti-Marxist by turns.

The central essay: interventionism as a supposed economic system, the real nature of intervention, and how price ceilings, minimum wages, and similar measures defeat their own aims—leaving only a choice between the free market and socialism.

Hans F. Sennholz, the translator, lays out Mises’s target—the belief in a “third system” of a hampered market economy standing between capitalism and socialism—and why that middle way cannot hold.

Socialists claim that US billionaires are “running the country” by influencing politicians with their money, and the “solution” is to confiscate most of their wealth. But their wealth is not the problem; predatory government is.

Since abandoning socialism 30 years ago, Poland’s economy has grown, as one would expect with a market economy. However, there could be more economic freedom there that easily would translate into a booming economy.

Democratic socialist candidates are becoming a serious political challenge in Democratic Party primaries. Have Americans suddenly become convinced by the arguments in favor of command economies, or is there something deeper going on?