Welcome to Confronting Capitalism.

I'm Melissa Nashek, and I'm here, as always, with Vecchibber,

a professor of sociology at NYU, and the editor of Catalyst, a journal of theory and strategy.

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than listen, you can find transcripts of our episodes by looking up confronting capitalism

on Substack. How's it going, V? Great. A word on the street is you were hiking in Antarctica

last week. Is that right? Do you know how expensive it is to get to Antarctica, actually?

You'd be surprised. I have no idea, so why did you tell me? I only randomly know because my

dad's partner went on a trip recently there, and it's like you have to take like a plane and this like basically private charter to get down there. It's crazy. But they also said it was like the best trip of their life. Yeah, I can't imagine that being true. But I'm going to choose to believe it. What was the average temperature down there when they went? I didn't ask. I'll be honest. But like, wouldn't you want to play with penguins? No, it's the last thing in the world I want to do. Damn.

I'm good with dogs.

Under socialism, everybody's got in good Antarctica. So there's going to be a shortage of penguins,

in other words. Damn, that's dark. Well, speaking of shortages, on our episode today, we're going to talk about the dilemmas of having

a planned economy. This is something that you started to touch on on our previous episode

on market socialism. And it might be kind of counterintuitive to listeners to hear that

you're going to be pretty critical of a planned economy, especially

because, you know, socialists have often equated socialism with a planned economy. Why do

you disagree or take issue with that? The basic reason is that it failed. The basic reason

that we ought to be skeptical, as any rational person ought to be,

when you see something failing over and over and over again, it means that you should at

least consider that there might be intrinsic problems with it, some problems with not just

...