So I’ve been pondering about something for a while now and well I thought I’d get some of your opinions. If everyone in the private sector were to join the State, do you think the State would eventually collapse into itself due to no way of being a parasite leeching off the no longer private sector?
Does seem like an interesting idea.
That already happened, it was called the Soviet Union and it did collapse.
Also, that was very unorthadox use of the verb collapse. Maybe capsizing would have been another option.
Yes! This has been proved by Ludwig von Mises himself, and already in 1920. See:
However, the problem for the total state is FAR WORSE than loosing its ability to parasite! The total state must ultimately abandon specialization of work altogether and degenerate backwards to stone age-styled individually self sufficent householding. And even worse, the culturally aqcuired ability of human beings to think rationally may be destroyed for ever, absent of markets!
The proof for this, as I understand it, is based on the simple observation that humans choose their actions by ranking alternatives of actions against each other. But our mind is limited to consider only a few rather uncomplicated options at a time. A free market is “intellectual division of labour” because millions and billions of humans make such trade offs continuously and trade with each others accordingly by using prices in terms of a standardized money unit. So you don’t need to know what resources and work in what combinations are needed in order to make an icecream. Thousands and thousands of people involved in its production have already thought all that through, each one of them have taken care of one small aspect of that very complicated problem. You just need to “feel” if you want the icecream more than you want the money which represents its price. This our primitive minds are easily capable of.
Mises contrasts this with socialism, defined as state control over all means of production. Then there exists no prices on means of production. Then there exists no “intellectual division of labour” when it comes to weighing alternative actions against each other. So no production can take place beyond what one persion is capable of understanding, with his stone age brain. And even manufacturing a pencil is far beyond that. Abolishing of market prices would necessarily sabotage cooperation between human beings and lead to a return to the instinctive hunting and gathering society of many thousand years ago.