2) Socialism DOESN’T WORK
Socialism can’t work because it removes the only reliable mechanism for signaling what needs to be produced — market prices. The market economy sends signals to producers endlessly, day in and day out, based on an intersection of what price people are willing to pay for goods and what price at which producers are willing to sell them. That is why every single actual socialist experiment has failed. AND PLEASE STOP REFERRING TO THE NORWEGIAN NATIONS AS EXAMPLES OF THIS FAILED IDEOLOGY ACTUALLY WORKING! Every single one of them, including all the European nations usually referred to as “socialist,” are all mixed market economies. None of them are actually socialist.
From the Ludwig von Mises Institute:
Ludwig von Mises made the strongest case against socialism. With private ownership of the means of production, entrepreneurs hire laborers and purchase capital and natural resources based on their contribution to the productive process as measured by consumers’ willingness to pay for the final output. Anticipated revenues from the sale of output guide production and investment decisions. Any deviation from the consumers’ wishes results in lower profits or even losses.
Under socialism, in which the private ownership of the means of production is abolished, there can be no meaningful prices of the inputs to production processes. Production decisions are merely “groping in the dark,” as Mises put it in Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Mises showed that there is no forward-looking way to compare anticipated revenues to the costs of production and there is no way to retrospectively measure the success of any production process. Economic calculation, essential to any growing and flourishing market economy, is impossible.
Socialism, then, must result in the participants’ wants and needs going unsatisfied. This is another rhetorically strong argument, and it is especially fortified by the observed tragic failure of every socialist “experiment” (if you can call the deaths of millions of people something so mundane).
