"A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society."
— Ludwig von Mises
A Society That Chooses Between Capitalism
A society that chooses between capitalism and socialism does not choose between two social systems; it chooses between social cooperation and the disintegration of society.
About this quote
From Human Action (1949). Mises was arguing that socialism's failure is not merely practical but structural: a socialist economy cannot perform economic calculation because without private ownership of capital goods there are no genuine market prices for them, and without prices, rational allocation of resources is impossible. He first developed this argument in his 1920 paper "Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth," which initiated the decades-long Socialist Calculation Debate.
Source
Human Action (1949)