A few days ago I talked with my friends Armstrong and Getty about why socialism tends inherently toward totalitarianism. I mentioned Ludwig von Mises's classic explanation of how if you try to control the price of butter, you inevitably have to control the price of everything else. We also talked about law and courts and stuff like that there. If you missed it, you can listen here.
And don't miss this excellent tidbit from Anthony de Jasay:
Socialism in its undiluted, genuine version implies a command economy. There is nothing pejorative in this term: it is factually descriptive. It means that all significant production and distribution decisions are taken by “social choice” and backed by the sovereign power vested in it. They are broken down by central planning into detailed instructions concerning factor inputs, product outputs, incomes, and prices. The instructions are meant to be coherent and capable of being executed by agents of “society” from managers down to workers. Coherence ex ante, if it is achieved, does not secure coherence ex post, because the system is necessarily rigid yet exposed to random shocks, shortfalls, and stoppages. Any variable not subject to a specific instruction or target backed by adequate sanctions, has a natural propensity to follow the line of least resistance and take on the “wrong” value; inputs, prices, wages, and investment expenditures will be too high for given outputs, outputs will be too low for given inputs, labor productivity too low for a given equipment, quality too low for a given price, and so on. This tendency necessitates an ever finer breakdown of targets and constraints, and runs counter to attempts at simplifying and decentralizing the system by one ingenious reform after another. The agents of the political authority owe it obedience, but the more exacting are their orders and the greater is their complexity, the stronger will be the likelihood of laxism in execution and dissimulation of failures. For these and other reasons, the nature of the genuinely socialist economic mechanism demands severe enforcement in order to perform anywhere near as intended—yet severe enforcement is costly. However, the innocent belief that the corresponding “Stalinist” features of socialist systems are merely residual effects of the personal proclivities of the individual of the same name, seems nevertheless ineradicable from much public discourse.
Comments policy