Reddit reviews The Problem with Socialism

Thomas J. Dilorenzo literally says that socialism also includes whenever the government does stuff like in the US with social security, the post office, and fire departments! He literally misunderstands why the USSR at one point had to have capitalist sectors of its agricultural economy as it was transitioning from feudalism to capitalism to socialism and claims it was because, "Socialism couldn't provide food for the Soviet people during Stalin's regime!"

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Dilorezo also appeared on Fox News to promote his book!

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The worst part about it is this is that Thomas J. DiLorenzo is a professor of economics at Loyola University and a senior fellow at the Ludwig von Mises Institute! He literally is so ignorant he somehow got a professorship in economics but he doesn't even fundamentally understand anything about socialism and communism! I doubt Dilorezo even read any Marxist literature at all!

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Here's the book! You can listen to the audiobook too!

Force all your lefty friends to read this

https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Socialism-Thomas-DiLorenzo/dp/1621575896

Yeah read it about 10 years ago dude. Its a 600 page book, kinda hard to go through 600 pages on a reddit comment. If you are pressed for time however, read Mises' 90 page essay "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Common Wealth," or listen to Dr. Joepsh Salerno's lecture "Calculation and Socialism."

Mises' primary argument involves calculation of the price system however. He described the nature of the price system under capitalism and described how individual subjective values are translated into the objective information (prices) necessary for the rational allocation of resources. Mises argued that the pricing systems in socialist economies are deficient because if a public entity owned all the means of production, no rational economic inputs could be obtained for capital goods as they were merely internal transfers and not “objects of exchange.” As socialized industries have no genuine economic inputs – that is to say, no objective money prices as determined voluntarily on the open market established by how much individuals are willing to pay for such “services” – government is unable to properly discern, relative to demand, if what it is engaged in is of overall benefit to society. Systems of private property and voluntary exchange however, enable consumers to compare – via a medium of exchange (money) – the costs of goods and services without having to obtain knowledge of their underlying factors of production.

As consumers rely on their own personal cost-benefit analysis – prices develop – which are contingent on how much voluntary paying consumers are willing to pay. The resulting price system therefore, promotes the economically efficient deployment of resources relative to demand. This is called the signalling function of prices, as well as the rationing function which prevents over-use of any resource. Without this market process to fulfill such comparisons, Mises argued, there is no way to compare different goods and services and/or rationally calculate profits and losses. Absent this feedback, socialized industries like policing lack the means to relate consumer satisfaction to economic activity – which ultimately leads to surpluses and shortages and disables governments ability to properly ascertain how to deploy resources optimally.

Also read Hayek's essay "The Use Of Knowledge In Society" for information on the "knowledge problem" relating to socialism. His primary argument is that while in centrally planned economies an individual or a select group of individuals must determine the distribution of resources, these planners will never have enough information to carry out the allocation reliably. Within capitalism, the overall plan for production is composed of individual plans from capitalists in large and small enterprises. Since capitalists purchase labor and capital out of the same common pool of available, but scarce labor and capital, it is essential that their plans fit together in at least a semi-coherent fashion.

Hayek defined an efficient planning process as one where all decision makers form plans that contain relevant data from the plans from others. Entrepreneurs acquire data on the plans from others through the price system which forms an indispensable communications network for plan coordination among entrepreneurs. Increases and decreases in prices inform entrepreneurs about the general economic situation, to which they must adjust their own plans. Hayek asserted that a centrally planned industry could never match the efficiency of the open market because any individual knows only a small fraction of all which is known collectively. A decentralized economy thus complements the dispersed nature of information spread throughout society.

Government planners simply do not have the information available to the them to successfully determine how to deploy resources without price signals. To illustrate this, imagine a gas shortage. When gas is in short supply, prices go up. In these situations, entrepreneurs are quickly derided by government as “price gougers.” The state then usually steps in and fixes prices, disabling the price mechanism from properly functioning. This has disastrous effects. The aforementioned rationing function of prices that serve to preserve scarce resources has now been interfered with – meaning shortages of gas are likely on the way. When the government sets the price of gas, you don’t get cheap gas, you get no gas.
Bureaucrats simply do not posses the collective information contained within the market economy. Instead, they must rely on mere whim in determining how to deploy resources.

Thoms Dilorenzo has put together a good couple hundred pages that includes Mises and Hayeks primary arguments, as well as others in his new book "The Problem With Socialism." If pressed for time, check out his recent lecture, Ten Things Millennials Should Know About Socialism.

Here are some I suggest for you!

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Some of Mises' work on this topic would perhaps be more informative, but for something shorter/simpler, consider the following: [Tom DiLorenzo's The Problem With Socialism]
(https://www.amazon.com/Problem-Socialism-Thomas-DiLorenzo/dp/1621575896/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1475195162&sr=1-1&keywords=the+problem+with+socialism)

The Problem with Socialism
By Thomas DiLorenzo

I was a hardcore Bernie fan and this book opened my eyes and I eventually became a conservative. Very nice and short book that everyone should read. No fluff just substance.

The Problem with Socialism https://www.amazon.com/dp/1621575896/ref=cm_sw_r_cp_api_HukQAbXC2HMK5