Further, when the government owns all inputs into all the production processes of the economy, the absence of a price mechanism makes it virtually impossible to coordinate the production of various capital goods in the right quantities to allow all the factories to function. Scarcity is the starting point of all economics, and it is not possible to produce unlimited quantities of all inputs; trade‐offs need to be made, so allocating capital, land, and labor to the production of steel must come at the expense of creating more copper.
