Wittgenstein famously said, "whatever can be said, can be said clearly"; but does this apply to economics? Callahan, like his great predecessor, Henry Hazlitt, shows that it does. If the theme of Hazlitt's Economics in One Lesson is the indirect effects of intervention in the economy, Callahan's dominant thread is the role of monetary calculation in making possible cooperative activity on a vast scale.

...neatly explains why socialist central planning must inevitably result in failure because the abolition of private property, market competition, and money prices eliminates the institutional prerequisites for economic calculation, without which the central planner is left with no rational method to determine whether or not the resources under his control are being applied in an efficient manner.