Maggie's Farm

I think a more complete concept of libertarianism is the right to act as one wishes so long as those actions do not encroach upon the rights of others.

In terms of the failures of socialism versus what the commentator labels bureaucratic centralism, I believe this has been addressed in the past. Von Mises and Hayek argued that central planning, e.g. socialism, would fail because the economic planners could not acquire and decipher information in a complete or timely manner (a failure of a signaling mechanism) as opposed to a free market which was continuously acting on information (the invisible hand).

In contrast, Oskar Lange argued that while government planners could accumulate the information (inventories of goods would signal whether supply was greater than demand or vice versa), the nature of bureaucracies was that they would not act on it.

The crucial missing element is not so much “information,” as Mises and Hayek argued, as it is the motivation to act on information. What was missing (in a bureaucracy) was the willingness—better yet, the necessity—to respond to the signals of changing inventories. A capitalist firm responds to changing prices because failure to do so will cause it to lose money. A socialist ministry ignores changing inventories because bureaucrats learn that doing something is more likely to get them in trouble than doing nothing, unless doing nothing results in absolute disaster.