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NOTE Introduction

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Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth by Ludwig von Mises

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Introduction

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There are many socialists who have never come to grips in any way with the problems of economics,

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and who have made no attempt at all to form for themselves any clear conception of the conditions which determine the character of human society.

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There are others who have probed deeply into the economic history of the past and present,

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and striven on this basis to construct a theory of economics of the bourgeois society.

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They have criticized freely enough the economic structure of free society,

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but have consistently neglected to apply to the economics of the disputed socialist state

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the same caustic acumen which they have revealed elsewhere not always with success.

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Economics as such figures all too sparsely in the glamorous pictures painted by the utopians.

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They invariably explain how in the cloud-cuckoo lands of their fancy,

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roast pigeons will in some way fly into the mouths of the comrades,

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but they omit to show how this miracle is to take place.

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Where they do in fact commence to be more explicit in the domain of economics,

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they soon find themselves at a loss.

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Thus, one remembers, for instance, Proudhon's fantastic dreams of an exchange bank, so that

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it is not difficult to point out their logical fallacies.

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When Marxism solemnly forbids its adherents to concern themselves with economic problems

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beyond the expropriation of the expropriators, it adopts no new principle, since the utopians,

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throughout their descriptions, have also neglected all economic considerations and concentrated

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attention solely upon painting lurid pictures of existing conditions and glowing pictures

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of that golden age which is the natural consequence of the new dispensation.

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Whether one regards the coming of socialism as an unavoidable result of human evolution

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or considers the socialization of the means of production as the greatest blessing or

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the worst disaster that can befall mankind, one must at least concede that investigation

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into the conditions of society, organized upon a socialist basis, is of value as something more than

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a good mental exercise and a means of promoting political clearness and consistency of thought.

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In an age in which we are approaching nearer and nearer to socialism, and even in a certain sense

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are dominated by it, research into the problems of the socialist state acquires added significance

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for the explanation of what is going on around us.

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Previous analyses of the exchange economy

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no longer suffice for a proper understanding

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of social phenomena in Germany and its eastern neighbors today.

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Our task in this connection is to embrace within a fairly wide range

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the elements of socialistic society.

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Attempts to achieve clarity on this subject need no further justification.