Marx believed that capitalism allowed overproduction to occur, which in turn created unemployment because production would cease in order to get rid of the surpluses.  Collier’s Encyclopedia reads, “By accumulating capital to the point that it is unprofitable to invest further, a capitalist system causes mass unemployment repeatedly to occur even though basic personal and social needs remain widely unmet”(V. 7).  Marx in turn believed that if government controlled production and prices, just enough products could be made and not wasted.  The products would also be affordable enough to for each person to purchase.  Free markets create an upper class, a lower class, and a large gap in between them.  With a planned economy, each person was given just enough to live off of, which cut the gap out of the class system. If it were perfectly implemented, each person would be equal.  

    One thing that I find fault in what Marx wrote was that a planned economy is, “the public ownership of the means of production” (Encyclopedia Americana, V. 9), which I believe is wrong because only the government had control over production, it was the public that had to deal with it. Another idea was that,  “In it’s extreme form, economic planning is designed to replace the interplay of supply and demand of the capitalistic  marketplace with state-dictated policy.  This was the approach of the five-year plans of the former Soviet Union” (Academic American Encyclopedia, V. 7).  Even though the system was very clever in it’s idea, actual implementation failed in the end.  The free market system is the one that is flourishing and even former soviet countries are working to create a capitalistic system. 

    The reality to this system was that even though a surplus did not occur, not enough products were being produced.  The public was forced to stand in long lines just to be able to get a loaf of bread or a roll of toilet paper.  In the end, only the bare minimum was produced, the products were affordable, there just wasn’t enough to go around.  That was part of the reason that led to the downfall of socialism.  Just like what we are learning in class that western legal theory dominates, it’s capitalistic economy is the most efficient.  It can be seen that the planned economy in the end was not as prosperous or as efficient as is a free market economy, and that non-western systems will have to conform in order to survive in the end.       
 

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