RT Handre van Heerden (@Handrev)In 1920s Soviet Union, planners decided Moscow needed more nails. So they ordered factories to produce tons of nails—literally. Clever factory managers made huge, heavy nails to hit their weight targets with minimal effort. When planners caught on and switched to counting nails by quantity, factories cranked out thousands of tiny, useless pins.This wasn't incompetence—it was inevitable. Without market prices, socialist planners had no way to know what people actually wanted o ...

RT Handre van Heerden (@Handrev)In 1920, Mises dropped an intellectual atom bomb on socialism with a simple question: "How do you know what anything costs without market prices?"While Soviet planners were drowning in millions of arbitrary calculations, trying to set prices for everything from bread to bulldozers by committee, Mises had already proven it impossible. As Rothbard later quipped: "Socialist calculation is like trying to play chess blindfolded while your opponent keeps moving the board."Today's c ...