Only capitalism works.  Everything else survives on slogans, moralizing, and force.  Capitalism needs no propaganda because it delivers results.  Goods appear.  Services improve.  Needs are met.  Where capitalism exists, production answers demand.  Where it doesn’t, excuses multiply.

Under capitalism, failure is informative.  An entrepreneur who misjudges consumer wants suffers losses or disappears.  This isn’t cruelty.  It is discipline.  Resources are scarce.  They must be directed by those who bear the consequences of being wrong.  Under capitalism, planning exists everywhere—but it’s decentralized.  Individuals plan with their own knowledge, their own risk, and their own capital.

Statism doesn’t eliminate planning.  It centralizes it.  A small group plans for millions they can’t possibly understand.  The question is never “plan or no plan.” The question is always: who plans, and who pays for the errors?

In a market, consumers rule.  Demand guides production.  Prices communicate information no committee can replicate.  Profit signals unmet demand.  High profits indicate value creation, not exploitation.  They attract competitors.  Competition erodes excess profit and improves quality.  What propagandists label “unconscionable profits” are simply invitations for others to serve consumers better.  The market corrects itself precisely because no one is shielded from reality.

Statism severs this feedback loop.  Production responds to political preference, bureaucratic incentives, and ideological fashion.  Losses are hidden.  Failure is rebranded.  Scarcity becomes a moral failing of the public rather than a structural consequence of central control.  The consumer is no longer sovereign.  He is managed.

This system persists only through compliance.  Each regulation, mandate, and decree requires obedience to function.  Statism doesn’t fade through cooperation.  It expands.  Resistance is redefined as pathology.  Dissent becomes a disorder.  Noncompliance becomes “antisocial.” Language is adjusted so that submission sounds therapeutic.

These ideas are rarely examined.  They are absorbed by repetition.  The entrepreneur disappears under statism—not by name, but by function.  Initiative survives only as a slogan.  Economics has already demonstrated this impossibility.  Calculation without prices fails.  Planning without ownership collapses.  History merely supplies the corpses.

States become efficient killing machines once resistance is neutralized.  Disarmament is never incidental.  It is prerequisite.  Power consolidates where opposition is rendered helpless.

Statism always wears costumes.  Progressivism.  Liberalism.  Managerial expertise.  The labels change.  The structure doesn’t.  Central control requires mass consent.  Eliminate that consent and the system weakens.  Étienne de la Boétie stated the principle plainly: “They are great only because we are on our knees.”

Servitude is never imposed fully formed.  It is assembled through small permissions.  The totalitarian doesn’t demand everything at once.  He takes what is offered.  Civilization survives only where individuals retain the right—and the responsibility—to plan their own lives.

Reference

Ludwig von Mises; Selected Writings, Vol. 2