Most socialists are not misguided about how to have a prosperous economy, for that is not their goal.

Original Article: "Socialism Isn’t about Creating Economies. It Is about Amassing Political Power"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Collusion was a way of life with state-chartered enterprises. Little has changed, as firms with political connections still gain profits from their collusion with the state.

Original Article: "The Theory and Practice of Conspiracy"
This Audio Mises Wire is generously sponsored by Christopher Condon.

Ludwig von Mises wrote Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, a small book published in 1922, which demonstrated that economic calculation in a socialist commonwealth is impossible. Of course, Mises assumed that the purpose of an economy, even a socialist one, was supposed to produce goods and services, which determined its success or failure.
Alain Besançon wasn’t an Austrian or a Misesian, but he wrote Anatomie d’un spectre: l’Économie politique du socialisme réel, also a small book the size of Mises’s own Socialism, in which he also observed that the Soviet economy couldn’t perform economic calculation; thus, the Soviet economy performed poorly, very poorly by Western standards.
The Soviet economy was wasteful and chaotic. Besançon believed that economic planning induced

Adam Smith published The Wealth of Nations in 1776, at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution. The book was the result of twenty years of observation of human action and identification of the mechanisms and processes that lead to economic efficiency and to our well-being.
The book was written at a time when guilds had not yet completely disappeared, even though it was already known that the guild system was a brake on innovation and freedom of trade, that guilds were a limitation of economic freedom. This is precisely why Smith wrote:
Meetings of people in the same trade ought not to be facilitated, people of the same trade seldom meet together, even for merriment and diversion, but the conversation ends in a conspiracy against the public, or in some contrivance to raise prices. It is