Criticism of Socialism
Economic liberals and pro-capitalist libertarians see private ownership of the means of production and the market exchange as natural entities or moral rights, which are central to their conceptions of freedom and liberty; they therefore perceive public ownership of the means of production, cooperatives and economic planning as infringements upon liberty. Some of the primary criticisms of socialism are claims that it creates distorted or absent price signals, results in reduced incentives, causes reduced prosperity, has low feasibility, and that it has negative social and political effects.
Critics from the neoclassical school of economics criticise state-ownership and centralisation of capital on the grounds that there is a lack of incentive in state institutions to act on information as efficiently as capitalist firms do because they lack hard budget constraints, resulting in reduced overall economic welfare for society. Economists of the Austrian school argue that socialist systems based on economic planning are unfeasible because they lack the information to perform economic calculation in the first place, due to a lack of price signals and a free price system, which they argue are required for rational economic calculation.
Read more about this topic: Socialism
Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism and/or socialism:
“The critic lives at second hand. He writes about. The poem, the novel, or the play must be given to him; criticism exists by the grace of other men’s genius. By virtue of style, criticism can itself become literature. But usually this occurs only when the writer is acting as critic of his own work or as outrider to his own poetics, when the criticism of Coleridge is work in progress or that of T.S. Eliot propaganda.”
—George Steiner (b. 1929)
“I am opposed to writing about the private lives of living authors and psychoanalyzing them while they are alive. Criticism is getting all mixed up with a combination of the Junior F.B.I.- men, discards from Freud and Jung and a sort of Columnist peep- hole and missing laundry list school.... Every young English professor sees gold in them dirty sheets now. Imagine what they can do with the soiled sheets of four legal beds by the same writer and you can see why their tongues are slavering.”
—Ernest Hemingway (1899–1961)
“To make men Socialists is nothing, but to make Socialism human is a great thing.”
—Oscar Wilde (1854–1900)