Maybe you'd more apt to believe Mises in his intro to his book on Socialism:
Specifically, a theory of property and property rights will be developed. It will be demonstrated that socialism, by no means an invention of nineteenth century Marxism but much older, must be conceptualized as an institutionalized interference with or aggression against private property and private property claims.
Capitalism, on the other hand, is a social system based on the explicit recognition of private property and of nonaggressive, contractual exchanges between private property owners. Implied in this remark, as will become clear in the course of this treatise, is the belief that there must then exist varying types and degrees of socialism and capitalism, i.e., varying degrees to which private property rights are respected or ig nored. Societies are not simply capitalist or socialist. Indeed, all existing societies are socialist to some extent. (Even the United States, certainly a society that is relatively more capitalist than most others, is, as will become apparent, amazingly socialist and has gradually become more so over time.)
One goal then, is to demonstrate that the overall degree of socialism, i.e., the overall degree of interference with property rights that exists in a given country, explains its overall wealth. The more socialist a country, the more hampered will be the process of production of new and the upkeep of old, existing wealth, and the poorer the country will remain or become.1 The fact that the United States is, by and large, richer than Western Europe, and West Germany much richer than East Germany can be explained by their lesser degree of socialism, as can the fact that Switzerland is more prosperous than Austria, or that England, in the nineteenth
century the richest country in the world, has now fallen to what is aptly called an underdeveloping [p. 3]country.
But the concern here will not be exclusively with the overall wealth effects, nor with the economic side of the problem alone. For one thing, in analyzing different types of socialism for which there exist real, historical examples (examples which, to be sure, very often are not called socialism, but are given a more appealing name2), it is important to explain why, and in what way, every intervention anywhere, big or small, here or there, produces a particular disruptive effect on the social structure which a superficial, theoretically untrainedobserver, blinded by an immediate “positive” consequence of a particular intervention, might not perceive. Yet this negative effect nonetheless exists, and with some delay will cause problems at a different place in the social fabric more numerous or severe than the ones originally solved by the initial act of intervening. Thus, for instance, highly visible positive effects of socialist policies such as “cheap food prices,” “low rents,” “free” this and “free” that, are not just positive things hanging in midair, unconnected to everything else, but rather are phenomena that have to be paid for somehow: by less and lower quality food, by housing shortages, decay and slums, by queuing up and corruption, and, further, by lower living standards, reduced capital-formation, and/or increased capital consumption.
....
And socialism will by no means be analyzed solely from an economic point of view. Of course,socialism, especially its Marxist or so-called “scientific” brand, has always pretended to be an economically superior organization of society (apart from all of its other alleged qualities) compared to the so-called “anarchy of production” of capitalism3. But socialism does not [p. 5] collapse once it is demonstrated that in
fact the opposite is true and it brings impoverishment, not wealth. Certainly, socialism loses much of its attractiveness for most people once this is understood. However, it is definitely not at its argumentative end so long as it can claim—whatever its economic performance may be—that it represents a higher morality, that it is more just, that it has an ethically superior foundation
Hopefully however, by a close analysis of the theory of property implicit in the different versions of socialism, this treatise will make clear that nothing could be farther from the truth. It will be demonstrated that the property theory implicit in socialism does not normally pass even the first decisive test (the necessary if not sufficient condition) required of rules of human conduct which claim to be morally justified or justifiable. This test, as for mulated in the so-called golden rule or, similarly, in the Kantian categorical imperative, requires that in order to be just, a rule must be a general one applicable to every single person in the same way. The rule cannot specify different rights or obligations for different categories of people (one for the red-headed, and one for others, or one for women and a different one for men), as such a “particularistic” rule, naturally, could never, not even in principle, be accepted as a fair rule by everyone. Particularistic rules, however, of the type
“I can hit you, but you are not allowed to hit me,” are, as will become clear in the course of this treatise, at the
very base of all practiced forms of socialism.
....
With this constructive task completed, the argument will have been brought full circle, and the demolition of the intellectual credibility of socialism, morally and economically, should be complete. [p. 7] |
