Although Mises acknowledged that workarounds might be developed to identify appropriate prices for consumer goods, he argued in an infl uential 1920 article that state own ership would render the construction, or even the simulation, of a competitive market for production goods impossible. In the absence of such a market, there was no way to determine how to allocate resources effi ciently. “There is only groping in the dark,” he wrote. “Socialism is the abolition of rational economy.”

Angus Burgin, The Great Persuasion, loc. 61