Regardless of the Fact That It Holds Power, Socialism Must Still Keep Trying to appear as an Oppressed and Persecuted Sect

Socialism has only one way out of this position. Regardless of the fact that it holds power, it must still keep trying to appear as an oppressed and persecuted sect, impeded by hostile powers from pushing through the essential parts of its program, and so shift onto others the responsibility for the nonappearance of the prophesied state of happiness. Along with that, however, the struggle against these enemies of general salvation becomes an unavoidable necessity for the socialist commonwealth. It must bloodily persecute the bourgeoisie at home; it must take the offensive against foreign countries that are not yet socialist. It cannot wait until the foreigners must turn to socialism voluntarily. Since it can explain the failure of socialism only by the machinations of foreign capitalism, it necessarily arrives at a new concept of the offensive socialist international. Socialism can be realized only if the whole world becomes socialist; an isolated socialism of one single nation is said to be impossible. Therefore, every socialist government must immediately concern itself with the extension of socialism abroad.

--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), 174.

Free Competition Pitilessly Culls Out All Less-Productive Enterprises; the Private Entrepreneur Ruthlessly Abandons Enterprises That No Longer Pay

Most Social Democratic writers are quite silent on this point; others touch on it only incidentally. Thus, Kautsky names two methods that the future state will use for raising production. The first is the concentration of all production in the most efficient firms and the shutting down of all other, less high-ranking, firms. That this is a means of raising production cannot be disputed. But this method is in best operation precisely under the rule of free competition. Free competition pitilessly culls out all less-productive enterprises and firms. Precisely that it does so is again and again used as a reproach against it by the affected parties; precisely for that reason do the weaker enterprises demand state subsidies and special consideration in sales to public agencies, in short, limitation of free competition in every possible way. That the trusts organized on a private-enterprise basis work in the highest degree with these methods for achieving higher productivity must be admitted even by Kautsky, since he actually cites them as models for the social revolution. It is more than doubtful whether the socialist state will also feel the same urgency to carry out such improvements in production. Will it not continue a firm that is less profitable in order to avoid local disadvantages from its abandonment? The private entrepreneur ruthlessly abandons enterprises that no longer pay; he thereby makes it necessary for the workers to move, perhaps also to change their occupations. That is doubtless
harmful above all for the persons affected, but an advantage for the whole, since it makes possible cheaper and better supply of the markets. Will the socialist state also do that? Will it not, precisely on the contrary, out of political considerations, try to avoid local discontent? In the Austrian state railroads, all reforms of this kind were wrecked because people sought to avoid the damage to particular localities that would have resulted from abandonment of superfluous administrative offices, workshops, and heating plants. Even the Army administration ran into parliamentary difficulties when, for military reasons, it wanted to withdraw the garrison from a locality.

--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), 155-156.

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.