<blockquote>'..collectivization ideas [are actually] unconstitutional and completely counterproductive.'
- Angela Merkel (
Source, June 14, 2012)</blockquote>
'..The USSR would be a test case for socialism. Weber warned that this would cause untold misery..'<blockquote>'Felix Somary records in his autobiography a discussion he had with the economist Joseph Schumpeter and the sociologist Max Weber in 1918. Schumpeter was an Austrian economist who was not an Austrian School economist. He later wrote the most influential monograph on the history of economic thought. Weber was the most prestigious academic social scientist in the world until he died in 1920.
Schumpeter expressed happiness regarding the Russian Revolution. The USSR would be a test case for socialism. Weber warned that this would cause untold misery. Schumpeter replied, "That may well be, but it would be a good laboratory." Weber responded, "A laboratory heaped with human corpses!" Schumpeter retorted, "Every anatomy classroom is the same thing."<a href="[
mises.org];[1]</a>
Schumpeter was a moral monster. Let us not mince words. He was a highly sophisticated man, but he was at bottom a moral monster. Anyone who could dismiss the deaths of millions like this is a moral monster. Weber stormed out of the room. I don't blame him.
Weber died in 1920. That was the year in which Mises's essay appeared:
Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth. Weber gave it a footnote in his masterpiece, published posthumously as
<a href="[www.amazon.com] and Society</a> (p. 107). Weber understood its importance as soon as he read it. Academic economists did not. Even today, there are few references to it.
Mises explained analytically why the socialist system is irrational: no capital markets. No one knows what anything should cost. He said that the systems would either violate the commitment to total planning or else fail totally. He has never been forgiven for this breach of etiquette. He was right, and the intellectuals were wrong. The socialist commonwealths have collapsed, except for North Korea and Cuba. Worse, he was right in terms of simple market theory that any intelligent person can understand. That article is a testimony to the West's intellectuals: "There are none so blind as those who refuse to see." '
- Gary North,
Socialism in Practice: The Lethal Laboratory, June 11, 2012 ('
..torturers, sadists and criminals .. need to be exposed.')</blockquote>
Context '..ethics in particular..'<blockquote>
'..the theorem of the economic impossibility of socialism .. is fully applicable to central banks..'Mises - Money and Credit - '..the recession was a problem of under-saving, and over-consumption..'Banking Reform'What other central banks have been doing must be reversed..' - Angela Merkel</blockquote>