See on Scoop.it – Politics and Business
Five years after the Bolshevik Revolution, Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises predicted that the Soviet project was doomed to fail. In his classic work Socialism, Mises explained that the attempt to replace the market system with central economic planning could not succeed, because the planners could not possibly have the information necessary to make all the decisions which, in a market economy, are made by individuals whose needs and desires are reflected in prices: “The problem of economic calculation is the fundamental problem of Socialism.”
How true this is; yet still there are those young fools who were not, as the article mentions, even born when the Berlin wall came down, as we watched in stunned silence with tears of joy streaming down, who refuse to believe history and clamour for a “do-over” so they can have their opportunity to prove communism to be ultimately good. As Chinese pragmatism edges ever closer to capitalism, due to the fact that the communist system simply could not and cannot successfully feed that many people well, well-fed, well-educated young fools in the west work to destroy the very thing that has fed and educated them so well.
“Undeterred by Mises’ criticism, the Soviet Union spent the next seven decades proving his prediction correct. By the time the Communist utopia collapsed in bankruptcy and disgrace, it seemed that everyone with two eyes and a brain understood the lesson: The Marxist-Leninist project was a complete failure and, as historians documented in The Black Book of Communism, tens of millions of people had died for this mistake, deliberately starved or slaughtered by totalitarian Communist governments.”