The debate over socialist calculation has been twisted beyond recognition.  The narrative is that Mises dealt with property, while Hayek dealt with knowledge.  True enough, but misleading.  Mises saw both.  He identified the knowledge problem before Hayek ever wrote on it, but he grounded the impossibility of socialism in the absence of private property.  Without property, there are no genuine prices.  Without prices, no calculation.  Without calculation, no rational economy.

Mises wrote that “the mind of one man alone—be it ever so cunning, is too weak to grasp the importance of any single one among the countlessly many goods of a higher order.” No planner, no committee, no bureau could ever weigh all the options, compare all the uses, and decide what should be produced and in what quantity.  Even if they somehow acquired knowledge of every process, they would still lack the means to compare inputs to outputs.  The link is property, not just information.

Hayek made the problem appear softer than it really was.  His focus on knowledge left the door open to the idea that if only a clever enough group could collect the information, planning might work.  Mises slammed that door shut.  Calculation is impossible without private property.  That is the difference.  Every step away from property is a step toward disorder, toward the irrational economy.

This is why socialism is not merely inefficient—it’s impossible.  The socialist response was laughable: the state would “play market,” pretending to mimic prices.  Imitation prices aren’t real prices.  They don’t arise from the exchange of private property.  They’re arbitrary commands dressed up as signals.  The entire “solution” is a sham, worse than their evasions on the incentive problem.

Hayek, in the end, was no uncompromising defender of freedom.  He believed coercion could be justified if it was regular and expected.  To him, the price system itself was a form of coercion.  Mises saw through the illusion: property is the foundation of calculation, and calculation is the foundation of civilization.  Without it, there is only chaos.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth