Freedom also means the ability to allow evil to be free. And that’s not a good thing in a war.

Socialism ultimately relies on compulsion whereas capitalism harnesses the impulse for material improvement for the good of all, in a way that socialism cannot.

http://www.amazon.com/Mises-Last-Knight-Liberalism-LvMI-ebook/dp/B0034KYSP6/ref=sr_1_1?s=books&ie=UTF8&qid=1419826634&sr=1-1

You might also like to access some classical liberals on the subject. There is of course Milton Friedman and his “Free to Choose” is excellent. Of course you can go to youtube and search for him there. No one frames an argument in quite the manner as does Friedman.

Also Donald Boudreaux has a web site called Cafe Hayek. Loads of insights on a daily basis are there. Some consider him a modern day Frederic Bastiat who framed the basic arguments against socialism in the mid 1800’s. Google Bastiat’s “The Law”. You will be all the smarter for it.

The disagreement has to do with the somewhat obscure topic of fractional reserve banking (taking in a deposit and then loaning a portion of it back out at a different time scale than the deposit). Mises thought fractional reserve banking needed to be abolished. Friedman thought it could work with an active central bank that produced new currency when needed – now called “Quantitative Easing”.

Mises thought such a system would lead to catastrophe. His thoughts on this topic are most aggressively now promoted on a financial site called “Zero Hedge”. I’m with Friedman on this topic – but as Mises himself pointed out, its pretty much baked into the cake, so we will find out what happens eventually.

That is enough for me.

http://neoneocon.com/2014/12/27/ludwig-von-mises-has-some-things-to-tell-us-part-i/

How wonderful to make this discovery, neo!
Ludwig Von Mises and the debate over “economic calculation under socialism” (ie, state ownership of the means of production), is the central debate in grasping the course of the 20th century, defined by the rise and fall of communism and the ending of the Cold War.

I remember attending a cocktail party in 1995 hosted by the libertarian publishers Liberty Press/Liberty Fund (largely funded by the B. F Goodrich Foundation) at a history conference. I told them that nether the Republican Revolution of 1994 nor the Fall of Communism were secure unless and until the truth about the socialist calculation debate made it into the history textbooks for the young, innocent to understand, or else doomed will believe lies.

It didn’t happened – the young go to school and graduate High School – and enough go to college and do not have any idea why communism failed. Thus, they proved essential to electing the first Marxist President – twice (cf, Paul Kengor’s “The Communist,” his biography of Obama’s mentor and CPUSA member Frank Marshall Davis).

This truth is simple: without prices, markets cannot coordinated exchange between producers and consumers. The problem of socialism lies in abolishing (or crippling) private property rights. Mises “market test” is also simple and direct: if ownership of company shares can be traded on a public exchange, then the economy is still fundamentally capitalist. If it can’t, it is socialist.

Those who do not know the mistakes of their past are condemned to repeat them – indeed.

I have searched arduously to find the best and most up-to-date account of the history of this debate and Mises insights. Here are the best, I think:
Before the socialist economist Robert Heilbroner died, he wrote this short reference entry on socialism, acknowledging that ‘Mises was right’ (a line that originally appeared in “The New Yorker” in 1990). SEE “Socialism” here http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/Socialism.html This econlib piece also appears in “The Fortune Encyclopedia of Economics,” 1993.)

But for a pretty penny per page, the very best account is found in an early chapter from “The Clash of Economic Ideas: The Great Policy Debates and Experiments of The Last Hundred Years,” by monetary and economic historian, Lawrence H. White, (2012, CUP). over 30-some pages, White skillfully weaves political history into economic debates through over three decades, beginning with “The Bolshevik Revolution and The Socialist Calculation Debate.”

The single most important documentary for all students to see on this subject, whether in High School or College, is based on Daniel Yergin’s too turgid tome, “The Commanding Heights” (a title ripped off from line by Lenin), of 1998. It became a three part PBS series, the first of which covers the most essential intellectual groundwork originally problematized by Mises: “The Commanding Heights: The Battle for Ideas, Part 1” 2002.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=w9ms2WOZi74

The companion PBS website
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/commandingheights/shared/minitext/tr_show01.html

The only deficit in this documentary is its serious neglect Mises in the debate over socialist calculation. But Yergkin’s turgid excess is remedied and refocused in a spritely book I believe to be inspired by it, “Keynes/Hayek: The Conflict That Defined Modern Economics,” by Nicholas Wapshot.

Ludwig Von Mises, brief biography
http://www.econlib.org/library/Enc/bios/Mises.html
(This web sight is run by Liberty Fund)

Mises “Socialism:And Economic and Sociaological Analysis,” a lengthy albeit lucid book,
is available free, online here
http://www.econlib.org/library/Mises/msS.html