Time Will Run Back Read Free

“price” system in the U. S. S. R. has always been chaotic. The bases on which prices are determined by the planners seem to be both arbitrary and haphazard. Some Western experts have told us (e. g., in 1962) that there were no fewer than five different price levels or price-fixing systems in the Soviet Union, while others were putting the number at nine. But if the Soviet planners are forced to fix prices on some purely arbitrary basis, they cannot know what the real “profits” or losses are of any individual enterprise. Where there is no private ownership of the means of production there can be no true economic calculation.
    It is no solution to say that prices can be “based on actual costs of production.” This overlooks that costs of production are themselves prices—the prices of raw materials, the wages of labor, etc. It also overlooks that it is precisely the differences between prices and costs of production that are constantly, in a free market regime, redirecting and changing the balance of production as among thousands of different commodities and services. In industries where prices are well above marginal costs of production, there will be a great incentive to increase output, as well as increased means to do it. In industries where prices fall below marginal costs of production, output must shrink. Everywhere supply will keep adjusting itself to demand.
    But in a system only half free—that is, in a system in which every factory was free to decide how much to produce of what, but in which the basic prices, wages, rents, and interest rates were fixed or guessed at by the sole ultimate owner and producer of the means of production, the state—a decentralized system could quickly become even more chaotic than a centralized one. If finished products M, N, O, P, etc. are made from raw materials A, B, C, D, etc. in various combinations and proportions, how can the individual producers of the raw materials know how much of each to produce, and at what rate, unless they know how much the producers of finished products plan to produce of the latter, how much raw materials they are going to need, and just when they are going to need them? And how can the individual producer of raw material A or of finished product M know how much of it to produce unless he knows how much of that raw material or finished product others in his line are planning to produce, as well as relatively how much ultimate consumers are going to want or demand? In a communistic system, centralized or decentralized, there will always be unbalanced and unmatched production, shortages of this and unusable surpluses of that, duplications, time lags, inefficiency, and appalling waste.
    It is only with private property in the means of production that the problem of production becomes solvable. It is only with private property in the means of production that free markets, with consumer freedom of choice and producer freedom of choice, become meaningful and workable. With a private price system and a private profit-seeking system, private actions and decisions determine prices, and prices determine new actions and decisions; and the problem of efficient, balanced, coordinated and synchronized production of the goods and services that consumers really want is solved.
    Yet it is precisely private property in the means of production that Communist governments cannot allow. They are aware of this, and that is why all hopes that the Russian Communists and their satellites are about to revert to capitalism are premature. Only a few months ago the Soviet leader Kosygin told Lord Thomson, the British newspaper publisher: “We have never rejected the great role of profits as a mechanism in economic life.... [But] our underlying principle is inviolate. There are no means of production in private hands.” 3
    The Communist rulers cannot permit private ownership of the means of production not merely because this would mean the surrender of the central