Scott Rowland

Right now in the US, part of the Democratic Party has decided to play the "socialist" card. Days before the midterms, DSA candidates are winning primaries and the word isn't taboo anymore. So today I'm going to show you why socialism never works. Not with ideology. With mechanics. Let's start with a dumb question. How much should a loaf of bread cost? You don't know. Neither do I. Nobody does. And that's exactly the point. The price of a loaf of bread is the instant synthesis of millions of pieces of information that no single person holds: the wheat harvest in Kansas, the price of gas for the oven, the baker's wages, the shop's rent, a drought in Argentina, a war on the Black Sea, whether people feel like bread this morning or a bagel. In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published a paper that should have ended the debate. His argument: without private ownership of the means of production, those means are never exchanged. No exchange, no prices. No prices, no economic calculation. The planner can't know whether a steel mill is worth more than a dam or a hospital. He's flying blind. He can't even tell that he's wrong. In 1945, Friedrich Hayek drove the point home in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Useful knowledge is scattered across millions of minds. The baker knows things about his neighborhood that no ministry ever will. Prices are a telecommunications system: when tin becomes scarce somewhere in the world, its price rises, and millions of users economize on it without even knowing why. No committee, no ministry, no plan can replicate that. The market isn't an ideology. It's a distributed information processor. Then Milton Friedman picked up a simple pencil. The wood comes from Washington State, the graphite from South America, the rubber from Malaysia. Thousands of people who don't know each other, don't speak the same language, maybe even hate each other, cooperate to make something none of them could make alone. Nobody gave them orders. Prices were enough. Now run the experiment in reverse. Set the price yourself. Cap rents below market: landlords stop maintaining, stop building, housing disappears. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a man of the left, said rent control is the most efficient technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it. Cap the price of flour: shelves empty, lines form, the black market takes over. Venezuela, 2016. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth, and people standing in line for hours to eat. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans eventually fled. Socialism smashes the thermometer and then acts surprised that the fever keeps rising. And this is where it gets serious. Because when the plan fails, and it always fails, the planner has two options. Admit the plan is wrong. Or blame the people. Saboteurs, speculators, kulaks, enemies of the people. He always picks the second one. Hayek saw it in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter with a chilling title: Why the Worst Get on Top. A central plan requires central power. Central power attracts those who crave power. And when reality resists the plan, reality has to be broken. Which means people have to be broken. Stalin. He collectivizes the land. Output collapses. He blames the peasants and seizes the harvests. The Holodomor, 1932-1933: millions starved to death in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. Add the Gulag, the purges, the deportations. Mao. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962. Backyard furnaces producing useless steel, insane grain quotas, local officials inflating numbers to avoid punishment, and the state requisitioning food based on those fake numbers. The result: the worst famine in human history. Estimates range from 30 to 45 million dead. Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge abolish money, markets, property, and empty the cities. The dream of total planning, carried all the way. In four years, roughly one in four Cambodians dies. Hitler. He sent communists to the camps, but his party called itself National Socialist and the economy answered to the plan and the party. Companies stayed private on paper, but the state decided what to produce, at what price, and for whom. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists of all parties" precisely because he saw the same root: the idea that the state must steer society toward a collective goal, and the individual must step aside. Different eras. Different continents. Different cultures. Same mechanism. Same ending. This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the system. Remove prices and you remove information. Remove information and you remove the ability to correct. And when you can no longer correct through prices, you correct through force. So let me say it plainly. Socialism always starts nice. A rent freeze. Public grocery stores. Make "the rich" pay. Nobody promises the Gulag on day one. But if America truly goes down this road, the rest of the story is already written. The plan will fail. There will need to be culprits. There will need to be power to punish them. And a socialist government holding the American state apparatus, its surveillance capabilities, its technology, its military, wouldn't be a regional tragedy. It could be the greatest tragedy in history. The 20th century paid for this lesson with tens of millions of lives. We don't get to forget it in one generation. Prices aren't the enemy of the people. Prices are the voice of the people.