Langbert To Newsweek: Go Back to France

I noticed Newsweek in the Columbus Circle station of the "1" train. The headline read "We Are All Socialists Now". It reminded me as to why 99.3% of Americans DO NOT read Newsweek. The 0.7% who do are baboons whose knuckles scrape the ground. I wrote the editors the following letter:

Re: your cover "We Are All Socialists Now". In the 1920s Ludwig von Mises showed that informational requirements are too great for a socialist economy to coordinate economic activity efficiently. In the 1930s Oskar Lange, attempting to disprove von Mises, tried to show that market socialism was possible but his argument was circular and failed to account for the possibility of entrepreneurial entry. In the 1940s Schumpeter showed that creative destruction, the entrepreneurial force of capitalism, is absent from socialism so that socialism is a profoundly reactionary system. In the 1940s and 1950s Leontief tried to show that input-output models were a possible avenue for socialist planning, but this idea failed. In the 1940s FA Hayek showed that price is a fundamental requirement for economic coordination, completing von Mises's argument that socialism is inefficient. In the 1980s, the Soviet Union fell for the very reasons that von Mises and Hayek offered.

Socialism is supposed to be an economic system where the public controls the means of production through the state. The current developments in the United States reveal an economic system where Wall Street, commercial bankers and other incompetently run corporations control the state through special interest leveraging. This is not socialism. It is the corrupt brokerage of special interests whereby the US government has become a subsidiary of Citigroup.

I can see why 99.7% of Americans do not read Newsweek. Based on your headline, you are ignorant fools.

Mitchell Langbert, Ph.D.
West Shokan, NY