Socialism

President Biden announced recently to much fanfare that his administration will transform the US economy through central planning. This does not end well.

Socialists and communists claim to support the rights of "indigenous" peoples. However, that support rings hollow given how the USSR abused the native peoples of Siberia, all while American socialists and communists uncritically supported the Soviet Union.

Economic calculation is not an either-or proposition. Even in so-called market economies like that of the USA, there is plenty of government intervention that distorts market processes.

Progressives have distinguished themselves in the past half century by being against progress. That trend is unlikely to change.

The seventy-fifth-anniversary celebration of the British National Health Service masked the real failures of this system, one that only can become worse over time.

Some are claiming that AI can make socialism workable, but even AI cannot take the place of entrepreneurial economic calculation.

Modern socialism is as disastrous as the older state-planning model.

Following the collapse of the USSR, many socialists pinned their hopes upon the development of a "market socialism" that would be economically efficient and create equality. Marxist philosopher G.A. Cohen wisely dissented.

Recorded at the Mises Institute on 27 July 2023.

“Our civilization is inseparably linked with our methods of economic calculation."