Ludwig von Mises sat down in 1920 and published a paper that ended the intellectual case for socialism, even if the socialists took another seven decades to notice.

The argument was precise. - Handre@Handre

• Mises showed that without private ownership of the means of production, there are no real prices for capital goods. 
• Without prices, you cannot calculate profit and loss. 
• Without profit and loss, economic planners have no way of knowing whether they are creating value or destroying it. 

They are flying blind, spending real resources with no feedback mechanism telling them whether the factory, the railway, or the grain depot was worth building. 

• Every allocation becomes a guess dressed up as a decree. 

This, he called the Socialist Calculation Problem, and nobody answered it...