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.
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Famous quotes containing the words criticism of, criticism and/or socialism:
“However intense my experience, I am conscious of the presence and criticism of a part of me, which, as it were, is not a part of me, but a spectator, sharing no experience, but taking note of it, and that is no more I than it is you. When the play, it may be the tragedy, of life is over, the spectator goes his way. It was a kind of fiction, a work of the imagination only, so far as he was concerned.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)
“I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.”
—Ezra Pound (1885–1972)
“If Socialism can only be realized when the intellectual development of all the people permits it, then we shall not see Socialism for at least five hundred years.”
—Vladimir Ilyich Lenin (1870–1924)