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Chet McAteer · The Impossibility of Modern Socialist Proposals: Lessons from Hayek and Mises Modern socialist politicians like Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (AOC) and Zohran Mamdani promise economic justice, affordability, and equity through ambitious government interventions—such as AOC’s Green New Deal for universal job guarantees and fossil fuel phase-outs, Medicare for All, and 70% marginal tax rates on the wealthy, or Mamdani’s calls for city-owned grocery stores, rent freezes, free public transit, and a $30/hour minimum wage by 2030. These policies, they claim, would alleviate inequality, combat climate change, and lower living costs without sacrificing prosperity. However, as Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises demonstrated, such centralized planning is inherently impossible due to the knowledge problem and economic calculation failures, rendering these promises unattainable and likely counterproductive. Hayek’s insight in The Use of Knowledge in Society (1945) reveals why: effective economic coordination relies on dispersed, tacit knowledge—local insights into needs, resources, and innovations—that no central authority can aggregate. AOC’s Green New Deal, for instance, envisions top-down mandates to transition to 100% renewable energy by 2030, but without market prices to signal true costs (e.g., the intermittency of solar vs. reliable baseload power), planners cannot rationally allocate trillions in resources, leading to shortages, blackouts, and inflated energy bills, as seen in subsidized green initiatives in California that have driven up electricity rates without proportional emissions reductions. Similarly, Mamdani’s city-run grocery stores ignore Hayek’s point that bureaucrats lack the dynamic price signals from competitive markets to gauge demand for perishable goods or supply chain efficiencies, resulting in waste and empty shelves akin to Venezuela’s state food programs. These interventions distort signals, misallocating capital away from productive uses and stifling the innovation that lowers costs organically. Mises’ calculation problem, outlined in Socialism (1922), compounds this: without private property and free exchange generating prices for capital goods, rational planning collapses. AOC’s wealth taxes and Mamdani’s rent controls or wage hikes exemplify this—high marginal rates discourage investment, as entrepreneurs cannot calculate returns amid arbitrary confiscation, while rent freezes suppress housing supply (evident in New York City’s chronic shortages) and $30 minimums inflate labor costs, pricing out low-skill jobs and fueling inflation without boosting real wages, much like Seattle’s wage hikes correlated with restaurant closures. Far from delivering equity, these policies erode prosperity: they promise abundance but deliver scarcity, as central control overrides individual incentives, echoing the Soviet Union’s failed five-year plans. In essence, these politicians’ visions founder on the impossibility of simulating the market’s spontaneous order, turning aspirational claims into pathways of unintended economic distress. -cmcateer