History is often written by the winners of wars and political contests, and those winners can end up being more controlling of their own people than the side that lost. Communism has always sounded appealing on paper. Karl Marx described a classless society free of exploitation that seems like it ought to make most people happier. In practice it has always required a dominant ruling party trying to run the entire economy from the center. That runs straight into a basic problem that never goes away.
Ludwig von Mises pointed it out more than a hundred years ago. In a normal market, people own the factories, the machines, the land, and the tools, and they buy and sell them. The prices that come out of those exchanges carry a huge amount of information. They tell you how scarce something really is and how much people value it compared with everything else. An entrepreneur can look at those prices and figure out whether a project is worth doing. When you abolish private ownership of the means of production, those prices disappear. Planners can still count tons of steel or bushels of wheat, but they have no way to know the real opportunity cost of using those resources one way instead of another. Without prices there is no rational economic calculation.
Hayek later added that a lot of the knowledge that matters is local and hard to put into a report. Workers, managers, and consumers know things they cannot fully explain. Market prices pull that scattered knowledge together. A planning board cannot. So resources get pushed into the projects the political leadership cares about while ordinary consumer goods and food production get neglected. Managers hit their numerical targets even if the products are poorly made. Failing enterprises are kept alive because letting them close would look like the plan failed. When something unexpected happens, the system is slow to adjust because everything has to wait for new orders from above. Black markets and corruption show up because people still need to get what the official system is not providing.
You see the same pattern over and over. Soviet collectivization brought on the Holodomor and years of shortages and stagnation. China’s Great Leap Forward produced a famine that killed tens of millions. The Khmer Rouge wiped out about a quarter of Cambodia’s population while trying to erase money and private property overnight. North Korea’s famine in the 1990s and its ongoing problems stand in obvious contrast to South Korea. Vietnam, Eastern Europe, Cuba, and more recently Venezuela all ran into the same wall of misallocation, scarcity, and eventual pressure to allow more market activity just to keep things from falling apart completely.
In the last decade or so a lot of academic and media discussion has softened this record. The failures get treated as the result of bad leaders or incomplete efforts rather than the natural result of trying to run an economy without market prices. The 2026 election made it clear how widely that softer version has spread among younger people. Popular culture often presents some version of “the needs of the many outweigh the needs of the few” as a high moral principle without looking at what happens when that idea is turned into actual institutions.
The better path is still the older set of principles. People have rights that do not come from the government, including the right to own property and trade it freely. Property lets individuals use the knowledge they actually have and live with the results of their choices. Voluntary exchange and market prices coordinate economic life far better than commands from the center. Government needs to stay limited because the same power that can direct an entire economy can also crush ordinary life. People need the room to succeed or fail without a permanent class of managers deciding what security means for everyone.
These ideas do not create a perfect world. They have simply produced higher living standards, more innovation, and more personal freedom than systems that tried to put everything under central direction. The evidence is consistent. When you remove independent economic decision-making, the power of those who remain tends to grow while the results for ordinary people get worse.
If we want younger people to see this clearly, education has to change. History classes need to include the actual demographic and economic outcomes of the major command systems instead of skipping over them. Economics classes need to teach how prices carry information and what happens when those prices are eliminated. Students should be able to tell the difference between people freely helping each other and a system that forces collectivism. Schools and universities that claim to care about truth ought to make students face both the human costs and the institutional reasons behind them.
A society that treats the repeated failures of central planning as minor details is setting itself up to repeat them. Market prices and private ownership are not just preferences. They are the conditions that make economic calculation possible in the first place. Understanding that is the necessary starting point.
Loren Jay Chassels, DO, MST, FAAIM, FAWM
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