Doug MacKenzie says: <Even commited socialists had their Austrian moments. Here is a little gem from Dickinson- "the attempt to check irresponsibility will tie up managers of socialist enterprises with so much red tape and bureaucratic regulation that they will lose all initiative and independence. In this case the chief advantages of the price system will be lost -- managers would be simply bureaucratic officials taking their orders from the supreme planning authority -- they would never be in a position to make independent economic judgments, to exercise choice between different markets or sources of supply, and what is worse, they would have no financial responsibility for success or failure." (Dicknson 1939 p214) Mises made the same exact argument- same idea, different words. > Not really; and, the incentives aspect was a minor one in Mises' critique of socialism. Mises main critique is that socialist systems will lack the basis for economic calculation because such systems lack markets for higher order goods (capital goods, raw materials and other intermediate goods in neoclassical lingo). The absence of such markets means the absence of prices that are formed by profit-seeking individuals and that consequently reflect the relative scarcity of resources, as perceived by the best-informed actors. Without such prices, there will be no means of engaging in economic calculation--the calculation of profit and loss that drives a market system to rationalize the use of resources through time. This means that decisions in socialist economies will be arbitrary and the ability to coordinate the production of all goods will be absent. It will be, as Mises termed it, a "planned chaos." Sam Bostaph