Marx ... And His Errand Boy

The Dialectic of Destruction - Murray N. Rothbard - Mises Daily: "And, as we have indicated, in the "beyond-communism" stage, the stage of universal no-ownership and therefore of no action and no use of resources, death for the entire human race would swiftly ensue.

Marx and his followers have never demonstrated any awareness of the vital importance of the problem of allocation of scarce resources. Their vision of communism is that all such economic problems are trivial, requiring neither entrepreneurship nor a price system nor genuine economic calculation — that all problems could be quickly solved by mere accounting or recording. The classic absurdity on this matter was laid down by Lenin, who accurately expressed Marx's view in declaring that the functions of entrepreneurship and of allocation of resources have been "simplified by capitalism to the utmost" to mere matters of accounting and to "the extraordinarily simple operations of watching, recording, and issuing receipts, within the reach of anybody who can read and write and knows the first four rules of arithmetic." Ludwig von Mises wryly and justly comments that Marxists and other socialists have had "no greater perception of the essentials of economic life than the errand boy, whose only idea of the work of the entrepreneur is that he covers pieces of paper with letters and figures."[9]"