Socialism has never worked anywhere it has been tried, the Soviet Union, Cuba, North Korea, the killing Fields of Cambodia etc. . socialism /collectivism doesn't work

F. A. Hayek had a remarkable career pointing out the flaws in collectivism. One of his keenest insights was that, paradoxically, any collectivist system necessarily depends on one individual (or small group) to make key social and economic decisions. In contrast, a system based on individualism takes advantage of the aggregate, or 'collective,' information of the whole society; through his actions each participant contributes his own particular, if incomplete, knowledge—information that could never be tapped by the individual at the head of a collectivist state.

Hayek's book "The Road to Serfdom" ; is one of the greatest books I have ever read. Also 2 other great books are "Free To Choose" by Milton Friedman and "Atlas Shrugged" by Ayn Rand. If every student read these books we wouldn't have the big government problems and a 3 trillion dollar annual federal budget we have.

China and the U.S.S.R have moved to private companies and now are growing economically.

President Reagan said something like: "Government can’t control the economy without controlling people. It must use force and coercion to achieve this purpose. Outside of the things that shouldn’t be done by the private sector ,Government does nothing as well or as economically as the private sector of the economy."

I agree with President Reagan and Hayek.

The Free Market can produce any need or want people have. And capitalism can do it efficiently, something that government never has done. So what do we need government for ? Only 3 things , military , border security , (law enforcement police and courts). If there is something that people want someone will produce it to make a profit . so we don’t need government for anything except what I listed.

The Power of the Market. Every day each of us uses innumerable goods and services—to eat, to wear, to shelter us from the elements, or simply to enjoy. We take it for granted that they will be available when we want to buy them. We never stop to think how many people have played a part in one way or another in providing those goods and services. We never ask ourselves how it is that the corner grocery store—or nowadays, supermarket—has the items on its shelves that we want to buy, how it is that most of us are able to earn the money to buy those goods.

It is natural to assume that someone must give orders to make sure that the "right" products are produced in the "right" amounts and available at the "right" places. That is one method of coordinating the activities of a large number of people—the method of the army. The general gives orders to the colonel, the colonel to the major, the major to the lieutenant, the lieutenant to the sergeant, and the sergeant to the private.

But that command method can be the exclusive or even principal method of organization only in a very small group. Not even the most autocratic head of a family can control every act of other family members entirely by order. No sizable army can really be run entirely by command. The general cannot conceivably have the information necessary to direct every movement of the lowliest private. At every step in the chain of command, the soldier, whether officer or private, must have discretion to take into account information about specific circumstances that his commanding officer could not have. Commands must be supplemented by voluntary cooperation—a less obvious and more subtle, but far more fundamental, technique of coordinating the activities of large numbers of people. Russia is the standard example of a large economy that is supposed to be organized by command—a centrally planned econ- 9 10 FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement omy. But that is more fiction than fact. At every level of the economy, voluntary cooperation enters to supplement central planning or to offset its rigidities—sometimes legally, sometimes illegally.' In agriculture, full-time workers on government farms are permitted to grow food and raise animals on small private plots in their spare time for their own use or to sell in relatively free markets. These plots account for less than 1 percent of the agricultural land in the country, yet they are said to provide nearly a third of total farm output in the Soviet Union (are "said to" because it is likely that some products of government farms are clandestinely marketed as if from private plots). In the labor market individuals are seldom ordered to work at specific jobs; there is little actual direction of labor in this sense. Rather, wages are offered for various jobs, and individuals apply for them—much as in capitalist countries. Once hired, they may subsequently be fired or may leave for jobs they prefer. Numerous restrictions affect who may work where, and, of course, the laws prohibit anyone from setting up as an employer—although numerous clandestine workshops serve the extensive black market. Allocation of workers on a large scale primarily by compulsion is just not feasible; and neither, apparently, is complete suppression of private entrepreneurial activity. The attractiveness of different jobs in the Soviet Union often depends on the opportunities they offer for extralegal or illegal moonlighting. A resident of Moscow whose household equipment fails may have to wait months to have it repaired if he calls the state repair office. Instead, he may hire a moonlighter—very likely someone who works for the state repair office. The householder gets his equipment repaired promptly; the moonlighter gets some extra income. Both are happy. These voluntary market elements flourish despite their inconsistency with official Marxist ideology because the cost of eliminating them would be too high. Private plots could be forbidden— but the famines of the 1930s are a stark reminder of the cost. The Soviet economy is hardly a model of efficiency now. Without the voluntary elements it would operate at an even lower level of effectiveness. Recent experience in Cambodia tragically illustrates the cost of trying to do without the market entirely. The Power of the Market 11 Just as no society operates entirely on the command principle, so none operates entirely through voluntary cooperation. Every society has some command elements. These take many forms. They may be as straightforward as military conscription or forbidding the purchase and sale of heroin or cyclamates or court orders to named defendants to desist from or perform specified actions. Or, at the other extreme, they may be as subtle as imposing a heavy tax on cigarettes to discourage smoking—a hint, if not a command, by some of us to others of us. It makes a vast difference what the mix is—whether voluntary exchange is primarily a clandestine activity that flourishes because of the rigidities of a dominant command element, or whether voluntary exchange is the dominant principle of organization, supplemented to a smaller or larger extent by command elements. Clandestine voluntary exchange may prevent a command economy from collapsing, may enable it to creak along and even achieve some progress. It can do little to undermine the tyranny on which a predominantly command economy rests. A predominantly voluntary exchange economy, on the other hand, has within it the potential to promote both prosperity and human freedom. It may not achieve its potential in either respect, but we know of no society that has ever achieved prosperity and freedom unless voluntary exchange has been its dominant principle of organization. We hasten to add that voluntary exchange is not a sufficient condition for prosperity and freedom. That, at least, is the lesson of history to date. Many societies organized predominantly by voluntary exchange have not achieved either prosperity or freedom, though they have achieved a far greater measure of both than authoritarian societies. But voluntary exchange is a necessary condition for both prosperity and freedom. COOPERATION THROUGH VOLUNTARY EXCHANGE A delightful story called "I, Pencil: My Family Tree as Told to Leonard E. Read" 2 dramatizes vividly how voluntary exchange enables millions of people to cooperate with one another. Mr. Read, in the voice of the "Lead Pencil—the ordinary wooden pencil familiar to all boys and girls and adults who can read and write," starts his story with the fantastic statement that "not a 12 FREE TO CHOOSE: A Personal Statement single person . . . knows how to make me." Then he proceeds to tell about all the things that go into the making of a pencil. First, the wood comes from a tree, "a cedar of straight grain that grows in Northern California and Oregon." To cut down the tree and cart the logs to the railroad siding requires "saws and trucks and rope and . . . countless other gear." Many persons and numberless skills are involved in their fabrication: in "the mining of ore, the making of steel and its refinement into saws, axes, motors; the growing of hemp and bringing it through all the stages to heavy and strong rope; the logging camps with their beds and mess halls, . . . untold thousands of persons had a hand in every cup of coffee the loggers drink!" And so Mr. Read goes on to the bringing of the logs to the mill, the millwork involved in converting the logs to slats, and the transportation of the slats from California to Wilkes-Barre, where the particular pencil that tells the story was manufactured. And so far we have only the outside wood of the pencil. The "lead" center is not really lead at all. It starts as graphite mined in Ceylon. After many complicated processes it ends up as the lead in the center of the pencil. The bit of metal—the ferrule—near the top of the pencil is brass. "Think of all the persons," he says, "who mine zinc and copper and those who have the skills to make shiny sheet brass from these products of nature." What we call the eraser is known in the trade as "the plug. " It is thought to be rubber. But Mr. Read tells us the rubber is only for binding purposes. The erasing is actually done by "Factice," a rubberlike product made by reacting rape seed oil from the Dutch East Indies (now Indonesia) with sulfur chloride. After all of this, says the pencil, "Does anyone wish to challenge my earlier assertion that no single person on the face of this earth knows how to make me?" None of the thousands of persons involved in producing

Also see my "Wisdom of the crowds" post I made. Socialism is a complete failure. On my first fast reading of your distributionist system it seems to me to be some sick mixture of capitalism and socialism? If so then it requires the individual in some regulatory government agency mentioned by Hayek to make economic decisions at some level.

But as we have seen this individual cannot be as efficient as free market capitalism because of several reasons among them .

1. Hayek's statement above. 2. "wisdom of the Crowds" theory. 3. an individual is more careful with his own money than a government idiot spending someone else's money.4. Socialism has never worked. 5.government agencies and programs are not efficient

You take these factors all together and you can see that government or a mixed system is never as efficient as free market capitalism.

It is against Freedom to force me to file a tax return which will enrich government and that is so complex to file that it may incriminate me. Ask Scooter Libby or the Duke lacrosse players if government can’t indict you for any techicality.

Democrats think they own the fruits of our labor and so our lives. They say that government politicians know how to better use our money (fruits of our labor) for “solving” made up problems like Global warming.