In a great article – but not a simple read – economist Lew Rockwell explains Mises’s illustration of the failure of socialism and how Obama is taking the US down the path to barbarism. Worth the time to read. Following are some excerpts:
We find ourselves facing the horror of what has always been the Achilles’ Heel of the left wing: its abysmal ignorance of economic science. The ideological tendency has gone from Keynesianism to outright socialism in a matter of a few weeks.
bad policy leads to bad results that are addressed through bad policy, and so on, straight down the fast track to serfdom
Socialism crushes human rights, builds the state, impinges on the liberty of conscience, and breeds social, cultural, and economic degeneration.
Ludwig von Mises in 1920, however, added something special and new to the critique of socialism. He said that socialism in all its forms cannot accommodate any economic development beyond the hunter-gatherer stage.
No socialist has ever been able to provide an answer to Mises’s devastating point.
Mises’s illustration of the failure of socialism provides a fantastic means to discover what is right about markets and wrong about all forms of collectivized economic planning. It shows what happens when you nationalize banks and credit.
And look: it’s not as if socialism is a new idea. It was tried in the 20th century. It produced economic stagnation and despair. In its purest form, it extinguished more than one hundred million people.
Take this seriously: it is where the Obama tendency is leading us.
Dagny's Desk 