I think this is a misreading of Mises, one that inappropriately conflates Mises’s calculation problem with Hayek’s knowledge problem. I discussed the former in some detail in my recent review of Cohen’s book. The latter is the idea that planned economies fail because the information the planners need is distributed among society’s actors and therefore not centrally available. These problems are related but not identical. (A simplistic version of Hayek’s position is that that the relevant social data are not “given” to decision makers in the way that the needed facts are “given” in a math problem, but that if they only knew enough, planners could solve the problem. A simplistic version of Mises’s position is that even if the data were “given,” they wouldn’t be in a form that someone could use to solve the problem, nor would there be any way to convert them to a usable form.)

Brennan says, explicitly, that the “Socialist Calculation Problem” and the “Knowledge Problem” refer to the same thing (p. 14). To the contrary, Mises wasn’t saying that the problem with socialism is that no decision maker has all the relevant information. The problem is that even if you give one person, who can be as smart as you like, all that information, it wouldn’t be useful to him because you can’t do the relevant calculations in kind. You need money prices, especially money prices for capital goods. Mises argues that without money prices, planning is not difficult, but impossible. Brennan may think that Mises is wrong, or has drawn a stronger conclusion than is warranted, but Brennan does not make these points in Why Not Capitalism?.

Now, whether Brennan is right or I am right about Mises’s and Hayek’s arguments against socialism is a matter of some contention. (To get a sense for the debate from the side I favor, see Professor Salerno’s “Reply to Leland B. Yeager on ‘Mises and Hayek on Calculation and Knowledge’” and “Mises as Social Rationalist”, pp. 41–54.) I bring it up because Brennan’s position on the feasibility of socialism raises the stakes for his critique of the desirability of socialism and his argument for the desirability of capitalism. On my view, socialism‐​as‐​practiced so often devolving into a bloodbath has a lot to do with the fact that socialism attempts the impossible. Suppose I asked you to draw a square by hand to an inhuman degree of precision. Being only human, you would fail, but your failure would at least be square‐​like. If I had asked you instead to draw a three sided square, you would again fail, but not in a predictable way. Anything might happen, and the harder you tried to make it work the messier things would get. Brennan cannot fall back on this position or something like it. He cannot argue that Cohen is simply being incoherent when Cohen argues that the three‐​sided socialist square would be morally best if we could find a way to make it work. Brennan has to turn the tables on Cohen and make the ethical case for capitalism. Let us turn our attention to the matter of whether Brennan succeeds.

Brennan’s second chapter, “The Mickey Mouse Clubhouse Argument for Capitalism: A Parody,” is a delightful, clever inversion of Cohen’s argument. If Cohen’s characterization of capitalism is grim, Brennan’s parody characterization of socialism is dystopian, even apocalyptic. After Cohen’s sanitized camping trip and his grotesque caricature of the market system, Brennan’s turnabout was refreshing. About the only issue I would raise is that because he is speaking in the context of parody, I was unsure in places whether I was reading Brennan the moral theorist or Brennan the parodist. For example, in a section on how capitalism realizes the ideal of social justice, Brennan writes: