Is There Room For Compromise With Socialism?

By Ludwig Von Mises

 

Private ownership of the means of production (market economy or capitalism) and public ownership of the means of production (socialism or communism or "planning") can be neatly distinguished. Each of these two systems of society's economic organization is open to a precise and unambiguous description and definition. They can never be confounded with one another; they cannot be mixed or combined; no gradual transition leads from one of them to the other; their obversion is contradictory. With regard to the same factors of production, there can only exist private control or public control.

 

If in the frame of a system of social cooperation only some means of production are subject to public ownership while the rest are controlled by private individuals, this does not make for a mixed system combining socialism and private ownership. The system remains a market society, provided the socialized sector does not become entirely separated from the nonsocialized sector and lead a strictly autarkic existence. (In this latter case there are two systems independently coexisting side by side — a capitalist and a socialist.)

 

Publicly owned enterprises, operating within a system in which there are privately owned enterprises and a market, and socialized countries, exchanging goods and services with nonsocialist countries, are integrated into a system of market economy. They are subject to the law of the market and have the opportunity of resorting to economic calculation.

 

If one considers the idea of placing by the side of these two systems…

 

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Source: Mises.org