civics: “And in economics, there are really only two worldviews”
Let’s start with the only question that matters: what makes a political system work or fail? To a very large extent, it’s the economy. A country that produces wealth, that lets its citizens create, trade and build, stays standing. A country that destroys that collapses, no matter how beautiful its slogans are.
And in economics, there are really only two worldviews.
The first is collectivism. The idea that the State knows better than you. That it must plan production, set prices, run companies, decide what you earn, what you buy, and eventually what you think. The individual is just a cog serving a grand collective project: the class, the nation, the race, the people.
The second is freedom. Capitalism, property, individual liberty, individual responsibility. The idea that millions of people creating value for one another produce infinitely more prosperity than an office of planners, however brilliant they may be.
Now look at the list of the great totalitarian regimes of the 20th century. Stalin: total planning, forced collectivization, millions dead. Mao: the Great Leap Forward and the deadliest famine in human history. Pol Pot: money abolished, cities emptied, nearly a quarter of Cambodia’s population exterminated. Mussolini, the man who coined the word fascism: “Everything within the State, nothing outside the State, nothing against the State.” And Hitler, leader of the National Socialist German Workers’ Party, whose program proclaimed “the common good before individual good.” He subjected the entire German economy to State plans: the Four-Year Plan, frozen prices and wages, unions dissolved into a single state labor front, industrialists producing whatever the regime decided.
Their flags were different. Their designated enemies were different. But the machinery was the same: the individual doesn’t exist, only the collective matters, and the State decides everything.
Why does it always end in totalitarianism? Because collectivism doesn’t work. And when a system doesn’t work, it has only two options: admit failure or force people. They always choose force.
Ludwig von Mises proved it as early as 1920: without free prices, without a market, a planner simply cannot know what to produce, how much, or at what cost. He is flying blind. A planned economy isn’t a less efficient version of the market. It’s an impossibility.
