I’m not sure what I make of this, but it’s an interesting thing to noodle on a Friday morning in the summertime. From a reader:

Hi Jonah,
Do you think there’s any truth to the proposition that the existence of capitalism somewhere in the world enabled Soviet communism to survive for as long as it did? The reasoning is thus: without a market, no one knows how much anything should cost. The government may establish cost by ukase, but that will inevitably lead to either a shortage or a bubble, and eventually the laws of economics will force a correction. While prices were established in the United States, the old Soviet government had some guide for setting its own prices. Without market economies in the free world, the Soviet economy would have collapsed sooner than it did because its architects would have been engaging in blind guesswork.
By the same reasoning, Europeans may be sowing the seeds of the destruction of their own socialist economies by encouraging the US to follow their lead. The UK health service has a rough idea of how to price drugs by observing their price in the US; drugs can also be purchased more cheaply in the UK because pharma companies make up the difference in the American market. If the US imitates the UK, there will be a shortage of drugs where the manufacturer isn’t politically well connected, and there will be bubbles for drugs whose makers are well connected. Worldwide, socialism won’t last long if the US jettisons the market as a means of determining price. (I recognize that we currently have an imperfect market in healthcare, but it’s still more accurate than a single payer system.)
The government can delay economic corrections, but it cannot prevent them altogether. Companies that are too big to fail will fail, one way or another.