Human beings act with purpose.  We choose among alternatives, and we choose based on expectations.  In a complex society, choice requires something more than intention.  It requires calculation.  Without it, we are guessing in the dark.

Calculation isn’t about engineering.  A blueprint can tell you how to assemble an engine, or how to design a bridge.  Technology explains how.  It does not tell us whether the bridge should be built at all, how large it should be, which materials should be used, or which projects should take precedence over others.  Those questions belong to action, not mechanics—and action requires comparison.

Comparison is only possible when goods have prices.  Prices emerge only when property can be owned, traded, and competed over.  The bidding process reveals what society is willing to give up in order to get something else.  It ranks uses from more urgent to less urgent.  Remove property, and this ranking disappears.  Everything becomes guesswork dressed up as planning.

This is where statism slips in.  Once calculation becomes impossible, “experts” step forward to replace it.  They don’t know more, they simply decide in the absence of knowledge.  Economists once believed that value came from labor.  Others shifted the story to “knowledge problems.” But the deeper issue is simpler and more fundamental: without private ownership, there is no genuine exchange, and without exchange there are no real prices.  Without prices, there is nothing to calculate with.

Money is the language of calculation.  It allows the entrepreneur to compare inputs and outputs across time and across industries.  Should he expand production or shut it down?  Should resources move into housing or medicine, farming or electronics?  These questions cannot be answered by intuition, compassion, or technical skill.  They require a common denominator that measures trade-offs.  Crusoe alone on an island doesn’t need it.  Civilization does.

A modern economy isn’t a machine with a single operator.  It is millions of people coordinating plans through voluntary exchange.  The only way those plans align is through property, prices, and profit-and-loss discipline.  Take them away, and even the most brilliant central planner is blind.  The attempt to “manage” society becomes a slow unraveling of coordination, followed by rationing, coercion, and decline.

Private property makes calculation possible.
Calculation makes civilization possible.
Remove property, and civilization begins to unwind—no matter how noble the intentions, or how advanced the technology.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Human Action