Socialism by Ludwig von Mises (3)

No seguimento de Socialism by Ludwig von Mises (2), To Build a Better Can Opener por Jeffrey Tucker:

Leave goods and services to the market and voila, we get something out of nothing. And then the idea spreads and improves everything, provided there are no artificial barriers .. government intervention slows down the progress of history.

All of this happened while I was reading a book that takes creativity to new level. It was written in 1922 by Ludwig von Mises. I came across this passage:

“The creative spirit innovates necessarily. It must press forward. It must destroy the old and set the new in its place. It could not conceivably be relieved of this burden. If it were it would cease to be a pioneer. Progress cannot be organized…. Society can do nothing to aid progress. If it does not load the individual with quiet unbreakable chains, if it does not surround the prison in which it encloses him with quite unsurmountable walls, it has done all that can be expected of it. Genius will soon find a way to win its own freedom.”

Beautiful. Perfect. The book is Socialism by Ludwig von Mises, a book that relentlessly demonstrates that government intervention not only makes innovation impossible; it creates economic chaos that ends in demolishing civilization. Piecemeal socialism does this bit by bit. All-at-once socialism creates a bloody catastrophe ..

Note that Mises’ argument is value free. It doesn’t say that collectivism is good or bad. It doesn’t rely on the old argument concerning incentives, an argument that is true enough, but seems to rely on certain postulates concerning the nature of man. Mises’ core point concerns something more objective. In a world of scarcity, we need to allocate rationally. We need measures to assess the economic merits of our choices. We need standards by which our forecasts can be declared successful or not. Socialism provides none of that.