"The distinction of having first formulated the central problem of socialist economics in such a form as to make it impossible that it should ever again disappear from the discussion belongs to the Austrian economist Professor Ludwig von Mises. In an article on Economic Calculation in a Socialist Community, which appeared in the spring of 1920, he demonstrated that the possibility of rational calculation in our present economic system was based on the fact that prices expressed in money provided the essential condition which made such reckoning possible. The essential point where Professor Mises went far beyond anything done by his predecessors was the detailed demonstration that an economic use of the available resources was only possible if this pricing was applied not only to the final product but also to all the intermediate products and factors of production, and that no other process was conceivable which would take in the same way account of all the relevant facts as did the pricing process of the competitive market."
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F. A. Hayek, "Mises, Max Weber, and Brutzkus," §10 of "The Nature and History of the Problem," ch. 1 of F. A. Hayek (ed.) Collectivist Economic Planning: Critical Studies on the Possibilities of Socialism (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul LTD, 1935), pp. 32–33.
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Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth
"Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth" is an essay by Austrian School economist Ludwig von Mises. Its critique against economic calculation in a planned economy triggered the decades-long economic calculation debate. The article was first published 1920 in German under the title " Die Wirtschaftsrechnung im sozialistischen Gemeinwesen " It is based on a lecture Mises gave in 1919 as a response to a book by Otto Neurath arguing for the feasibility of central planning. Mises argued t
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