While there are many conservatives around the world who know of some of the intrinsic flaws in socialism, very few seem to be aware of the economic calculation problem. To summarize, the problem of central planning an economy is determining prices. If the producer isn’t free to charge what he wants for a product and the consumer doesn’t have any input on what is they can afford or what they want to buy, then the central planner doesn’t have the information needed to price things in a manner that distributes goods efficiently. In other words, how many apples is an orange worth?
Since Mises proposed this criticism of socialist central planning in 1920, many dishonest socialists have plugged their ears and sang “la la la” in response, while even fewer have tried to refute it by jumping on the economic illiteracy train and riding it all the way to crazy town station.
The most common “refutation” is the idea that computers can determine prices and run the economy for the socialist central planner and provide all of people’s needs without human involvement. This is preposterous for a few reasons
- socialists would have get a job to afford to use a laptop that doesn’t belong to their mother’s boyfriend
- socialists would have to learn to code beyond figuring out how to copy paste the hammer sickle Unicode
- socialists would then have to determine the values of everyone in society because it’s not just an economic calculation, it’s a human problem
It’s not just a matter of calculating prices, it’s a matter of calculating each individuals preferance.
Many socialists assert that there isn’t enough empirical evidence to prove the calculation problem will cause a centrally planned economy to collapse. Apart from being a shoddy excuse to try socialism again, this poor refutation assumes that it’s only the economic calculation to fail. Socialism can fail for lots of other reasons not least of which being the incompetence of the utopian central planners. It could be a mass murderous purge that causes the socialist hellhole to collapse in on itself. Which brings up the most retarded of all excuses to deny the simplicity of the calculation problem: not knowing that your shitty socialist ideology is always going to be corrupt, violent, authoritarian and incompetent. Many so-called anarcho-communists believe that after they steal everything and murder anyone who resists, they’ll have a “decentralized” socialist economy based on democracy. Mob violence doesn’t somehow magically make a decentralized economy, anyone claiming this should be laughed at or told to flip the burger before it burns. Having a rule by majority vote never results in decentralized economic activity. A bunch of bums voting to get things for free from people who work to produce it would only magnify the calculation problem.
Anyone claiming that communism can work should be reminded that they cannot answer the calculation problem, and that’s probably the very least of their problems.
