Brivael - FR makes sense here:

There’s a phrase I love: “I’m communist with my family, socialist with my friends, liberal with my country, and capitalist with the rest of the world.”

This phrase is brilliant because it sums up the number one mistake people make when thinking about economic systems: applying what works on a small scale to a large scale without understanding that the complexity of systems changes everything.

Communism with your family works. You share everything, you don’t keep score, each person gives according to their abilities and receives according to their needs. And it works. Because you’re 4 or 5 people, you know everyone intimately, trust is total, cheating is impossible to hide, and love replaces economic incentives.

Socialism with your friends works too. A group of 20-30 people. You share restaurant bills, you help a buddy move, you lend a hand without keeping count. Reciprocity is natural because you know each person and your reputation is on the line.

But as soon as you scale up to a country, 68 million people, everything falls apart. Why? Because the complexity of systems is non-linear. Organizing 5 people is trivial. Organizing 50 is difficult. Organizing 50 million is a problem of fundamentally different complexity. It’s not just “harder.” It’s qualitatively a different problem.

At large scale, you no longer know the people. Trust disappears. Cheating becomes invisible. Free riders proliferate. The information needed to coordinate 68 million people exceeds the capacity of any central planner. This is the economic calculation problem of Mises (1920) and the dispersed knowledge of Hayek (1945). A central brain can’t process the information that millions of market prices transmit in real time.

That’s exactly why communism produces happy families and dead countries. The model doesn’t scale. Not because people are mean. Because the complexity of systems makes centralized coordination impossible beyond a certain threshold.

And that’s the fundamental judgment error that most people who subscribe to Marxist theses make. They take their experience of sharing in a family or among friends, a model that works for 5-20 people, and they extrapolate it to 68 million people while completely ignoring the emergence of complexity. “If it works at home, it should work for the country.” No. The physics of complex systems says exactly the opposite.

The free market is the only system that scales. Because it doesn’t depend on personal trust, nor on good will, nor on an omniscient planner. It depends on prices that transmit information, incentives that align behaviors, and competition that corrects errors. It’s a system designed to work with strangers, at any scale.

Be communist with your family. Socialist with your friends. And liberal with everything else. Because the size of the system determines the model that works. Not your good intentions.