The (Classical) Liberal Thinks That the Socialist Society Will Always Decide for the Shorter Production Period and Will Consume the Means of Production

In the individualistic society the individual, not society, accumulates. Capital accumulation takes place by saving; the saver has the incentive of receiving income from the saved capital as the reward of saving. In the communist society, society as such will receive the income that today flows to the capitalists alone; it will then distribute this income equally to all members or otherwise use it for the good of the whole. Will that alone be a sufficient incentive for saving? To be able to answer this question, one must imagine that the society of the socialist state will be faced every day with the choice whether it should devote itself more to the production of consumer goods or more to that of capital goods, whether it should choose productive processes that do indeed take a shorter time but correspondingly yield less output or choose ones that take more time but then also bring greater output. The liberal thinks that the socialist society will always decide for the shorter production period, that it will prefer to produce consumer goods instead of capital goods, that it will consume the means of production it will have taken over as heir of the liberal society or at best maintain them but in no case increase them.

--Ludwig von Mises, Nation, State, and Economy: Contributions to the Politics and History of Our Time, trans. Leland B. Yeager, ed. Bettina Bien Greaves (Indianapolis: Liberty Fund, 2006), 157.