In 1920, Ludwig von Mises asked one question that broke the whole model. If the state owns the steel mills, then nobody is buying steel and nobody is selling it. No buying, no selling, no price. So now you’re running a country. A shipment of steel comes in. Hospital? Bridge? Tank? And if it’s a hospital, which city? Built by which workers, who would otherwise have been building what? A price is what squeezes all of that into one number you can actually use. Take it away and the planner is guessing. Smart, well meaning, and guessing, with a country. That’s where the shortages came from. Not bad luck. Not the wrong man in charge. So when someone tells you socialism just needs better people, ask them who sets the price of steel. Better people still have to answer that.

"But one of the first and most leading principles on which the commonwealth and the laws are consecrated is, lest the temporary possessors and life-renters in it, unmindful of what they have received from their ancestors or of what is due to their posterity, should act as if they were the entire masters, that they should not think it among their rights to cut off the entail or commit waste on the inheritance by destroying at their pleasure the whole original fabric of their society, hazarding to leave to those who come after them a ruin instead of an habitation—and teaching these successors as little to respect their contrivances as they had themselves respected the institutions of their forefathers."