Criticism of socialism

The economic calculation problem is a criticism of central economic planning which exists in some forms of socialism. It was first proposed in 1854 by the Prussian economist Hermann Heinrich Gossen.[8][9][10] It was subsequently expounded in 1902 by the Dutch economist Nicolaas Pierson,[11][12] in 1920 by Ludwig von Mises[2][10] and later by Friedrich Hayek.[13] The problem referred to is that of how to distribute resources rationally in an economy. The free market relies on the price mechanism, wherein people individually have the ability to decide how resources should be distributed based on their willingness to give money for specific goods or services. The price conveys embedded information about the abundance of resources as well as their desirability (supply and demand) which in turn allows—on the basis of individual consensual decisions—corrections that prevent shortages and surpluses. Mises and Hayek argued that this is the only possible solution and without the information provided by market prices socialism lacks a method to rationally allocate resources. Those who agree with this criticism argue it is a refutation of socialism and that it shows that a socialist planned economy could never work. The debate raged in the 1920s and 1930s and that specific period of the debate has come to be known by economic historians as "the Socialist Calculation Debate".[14]

Mises argued in a famous 1920 article "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" that the pricing systems in socialist economies were necessarily deficient because if government owned the means of production, then no prices could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers of goods in a socialist system and not "objects of exchange", unlike final goods, therefore they were unpriced and hence the system would be necessarily inefficient since the central planners would not know how to allocate the available resources efficiently.[14] This led him to declare "that rational economic activity is impossible in a socialist commonwealth".[2] Mises developed his critique of socialism more completely in his 1922 book Socialism, An Economic and Sociological Analysis.[15]

Mises argued that a socialist system based upon a planned economy would not be able to allocate resources effectively due to the lack of price signals. Because the means of production would be controlled by a single entity, approximating prices for capital goods in a planned economy would be impossible. His argument was that socialism must fail economically because of the economic calculation problem—the impossibility of a socialist government being able to make the economic calculations required to organize a complex economy. Mises projected that without a market economy there would be no functional price system which he held essential for achieving rational and efficient allocation of capital goods to their most productive uses. According to Mises, socialism would fail as demand cannot be known without prices. These arguments were elaborated by subsequent Austrian economists such as Hayek[16] and students such as Hans Sennholz. In 1977, Hayek argued that "prices are an instrument of communication and guidance which embody more information than we directly have" and "the whole idea that you can bring about the same order based on the division of labor by simple direction falls to the ground. [...] [I]f you need prices, including the prices of labor, to direct people to go where they are needed, you cannot have another distribution except the one from the market principle".[17]

According to Richard Ebeling, "[t]he heart of Mises' argument against socialism is that central planning by the government destroys the essential tool – competitively formed market prices – by which people in a society make rational economic decisions".[18][19] Hungarian economist János Kornai has written that "the attempt to realize market socialism [...] produces an incoherent system, in which there are elements that repel each other: the dominance of public ownership and the operation of the market are not compatible".[20]

Proponents of laissez-faire capitalism argue that although private monopolies do not have any actual competition, there are many potential competitors watching them and if they were delivering inadequate service, or charging an excessive amount for a good or service, investors would start a competing enterprise.[21][22] The anarcho-capitalist economist Hans-Hermann Hoppe argues that in the absence of prices for the means of production, there is no cost-accounting which would direct labor and resources to the most valuable uses.[23] According to Tibor Machan, "[w]ithout a market in which allocations can be made in obedience to the law of supply and demand, it is difficult or impossible to funnel resources with respect to actual human preferences and goals".[24]

In her book How We Survived Communism and Even Laughed,[25] Slavenka Drakulić claims that a major contributor to the fall of socialist planned economies in the former Soviet bloc was the failure to produce the basic consumer goods that its people desired. She argues that because of the makeup of the leadership of these regimes, the concerns of women got particularly short shrift. She illustrates this in particular by the system's failure to produce washing machines, which she takes to be a "woman's product." If a state-owned industry is able to keep operating with losses, it may continue operating indefinitely producing things that are not in high consumer demand. This is not unlike contemporary capitalism, in which companies owned by wealthy individuals are able to continue operating at a loss indefinitely. If consumer demand is too low to sustain the industry with voluntary payments by consumers, then it is tax-subsidized. This prevents resources (capital and labor) from being applied to satisfying more urgent consumer demands. According to economist Milton Friedman: "The loss part is just as important as the profit part. What distinguishes the private system from a government socialist system is the loss part. If an entrepreneur's project doesn't work, he closes it down. If it had been a government project, it would have been expanded, because there is not the discipline of the profit and loss element".[26]

Proponents of chaos theory argue that it is impossible to make accurate long-term predictions for highly complex systems such as an economy.[27]

Pierre-Joseph Proudhon raises similar calculational issues in his General Idea of the Revolution in the 19th Century, but he also proposes certain voluntary arrangements which would also require economic calculation.[28] Leon Trotsky, a fierce proponent of decentralized economic planning, argued that centralized economic planning would be "insoluble without the daily experience of millions, without their critical review of their own collective experience, without their expression of their needs and demands and could not be carried out within the confines of the official sanctums" and "[e]ven if the Politburo consisted of seven universal geniuses, of seven Marxes, or seven Lenins, it will still be unable, all on its own, with all its creative imagination, to assert command over the economy of 170 million people".[29] In contrast to the lack of a marketplace, market socialism can be viewed as an alternative to the traditional socialist model. Theoretically, the fundamental difference between a traditional socialist economy and a market socialist economy is the existence of a market for the means of production and capital goods.[30][31][32] Socialist market abolitionists reply that whilst advocates of capitalism and the Austrian School in particular recognize equilibrium prices do not exist, they nonetheless claim that these prices can be used as a rational basis when this is not the case, hence markets are not efficient.[33][34] According to market abolitionists socialists, decentralized planning allows for a spontaneously self-regulating system of stock control (relying solely on calculation in kind) to come about and that in turn decisively overcomes the objections raised by the economic calculation argument that any large scale economy must necessarily resort to a system of market prices.[35]

Central planning is also criticized by elements of the radical left. Libertarian socialist economist Robin Hahnel notes that even if central planning overcame its inherent inhibitions of incentives and innovation, it would nevertheless be unable to maximize economic democracy and self-management, which he believes are concepts that are more intellectually coherent, consistent and just than mainstream notions of economic freedom.[36]

As Hahnel explains: "Combined with a more democratic political system, and redone to closer approximate a best case version, centrally planned economies no doubt would have performed better. But they could never have delivered economic self-management, they would always have been slow to innovate as apathy and frustration took their inevitable toll, and they would always have been susceptible to growing inequities and inefficiencies as the effects of differential economic power grew. Under central planning neither planners, managers, nor workers had incentives to promote the social economic interest. Nor did impending markets for final goods to the planning system enfranchise consumers in meaningful ways. But central planning would have been incompatible with economic democracy even if it had overcome its information and incentive liabilities. And the truth is that it survived as long as it did only because it was propped up by unprecedented totalitarian political power".[36]

Economist Milton Friedman argued that socialism, by which he meant state ownership over the means of production (a position traditionally known as state capitalism, which nearly all socialists hold is a version of capitalism and not socialism), impedes technological progress due to competition being stifled. As evidence, he said that "we need only look to the United States to see where socialism fails" by observing that the "most technologically backward areas are those where government owns the means of production".[6]

Friedman claimed that socialism advocated the abolition of a money- and risk-based reward system, a claim that socialists universally reject as mistaken. Friedman argues that without such a money- and risk-based reward system, many capitalist inventors, whom Friedman holds would nonetheless exist within socialism, would not risk time or capital for research. Friedman believed that this was one of the reasons for the United States patent system and copyright law, arguing:

Socialism has proved no more efficient at home than abroad. What are our most technologically backward areas? The delivery of first class mail, the schools, the judiciary, the legislative system – all mired in outdated technology. No doubt we need socialism for the judicial and legislative systems. We do not for mail or schools, as has been shown by Federal Express and others, and by the ability of many private schools to provide superior education to underprivileged youngsters at half the cost of government schooling. [...]

We all justly complain about the waste, fraud and inefficiency of the military. Why? Because it is a socialist activity – one that there seems no feasible way to privatize. But why should we be any better at running socialist enterprises than the Russians or Chinese?

By extending socialism far beyond the area where it is unavoidable, we have ended up performing essential government functions far less well than is not only possible but than was attained earlier. In a poorer and less socialist era, we produced a nationwide network of roads and bridges and subway systems that were the envy of the world. Today we are unable even to maintain them.[6]

Critics of socialism have argued that in any society where everyone holds equal wealth which is what they believe is the result of socialism, there can be no material incentive to work because one does not receive rewards for a work well done. They further argue that incentives increase productivity for all people and that the loss of those effects would lead to stagnation. Some critics of socialism argue that income sharing reduces individual incentives to work and therefore incomes should be individualized as much as possible.[37]

In The Principles of Political Economy (1848), John Stuart Mill wrote:

It is the common error of Socialists to overlook the natural indolence of mankind; their tendency to be passive, to be the slaves of habit, to persist indefinitely in a course once chosen. Let them once attain any state of existence which they consider tolerable, and the danger to be apprehended is that they will thenceforth stagnate; will not exert themselves to improve, and by letting their faculties rust, will lose even the energy required to preserve them from deterioration. Competition may not be the best conceivable stimulus, but it is at present a necessary one, and no one can foresee the time when it will not be indispensable to progress.[38]

However, Mill later altered his views and adopted a socialist perspective, adding chapters to his Principles of Political Economy in defense of a socialist outlook and defending some socialist causes.[39] Within this revised work, he also made the radical proposal that the whole wage system be abolished in favour of a co-operative wage system. Nonetheless, some of his views on the idea of flat taxation remained, albeit in a slightly toned down form.[40]

Economist John Kenneth Galbraith has criticized socialism (specifically, the Marxist ideal of "From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs") as unrealistic in its assumptions about human motivation:

This hope [that egalitarian reward would lead to a higher level of motivation], one that spread far beyond Marx, has been shown by both history and human experience to be irrelevant. For better or worse, human beings do not rise to such heights. Generations of socialists and socially oriented leaders have learned this to their disappointment and more often to their sorrow. The basic fact is clear: the good society must accept men and women as they are.[41]