Capitalism sells itself as a system of production that exacts severe social and personal costs in the name of rewarding efficiency, economic rationality, and the production of value above all else. But while the costs are real, the rewards are illusory. From contemporary mutualist author Kevin Carson, this booklet examines how capitalism fails to produce even on its own terms — how diseconomies of scale and pervasive knowledge problems cause highly centralized firms constantly divert resources, hobble efficiency, and destroy value while manufacturing managerial waste and hierarchical social control. The Calculation Problem pioneered by laissez-faire economists like Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek in fact reveals the inefficiency all forms of bureaucratic consolidation — not only that of state central planners, but also of corporate bosses and gatekeepers propped up by government power. The only way for markets to become more efficient is for them to become more humane — by allowing irrational centralization to collapse under its own weight, and to be replaced by disintermediation, bottom-up diffusion of economic power and decentralized worker ownership of the means of production. Continue reading →