 Longerberger, the Ohio-based manufacturer of iconic picnic baskets, has put its company headquarters up for sale. The problem is, the building is shaped like a giant picnic basket. Nobody wants to buy it. The headquarters was constructed in 1997 for $32 million. It's now in the market for $5 million down from the original listing price of $7.5 million. Longerberger's problems in selling its corporate headquarters illustrates the point that in a complex modern economy, resources are complex and specific. In other words, productive assets like land, labor, capital, and machines tend to be highly specialized where they're more valuable in some uses than in others. A skilled surgeon cannot immediately become an auto mechanic if the demand for surgery should fall. A combine harvester cannot be used to provide taxi services without substantial cost. Of course, some resources are less specific, unskilled labor, desks and chairs, maybe delivery trucks. Even office buildings, however, can be specialized or specific to particular uses or users if they're designed in a particular way. Why does this matter? You need entrepreneurs acting in a free market to figure out what resources to produce and how to use these complex specialized and heterogeneous resources in a way that best satisfies the consumers, that produces the products that consumers want at the lowest possible prices. In his famous critique of socialism, Ludwig von Mises explained that it's impossible to allocate productive resources to their most valuable uses without private property, free markets, and prices. There are many ways, for example, to produce a mousetrap. What's the most cost-effective way? How many mousetraps should be built? What features should mousetraps have? In a free market economy, entrepreneurs are free to experiment, to try different combinations of resources to produce products in the most effective way. To experiment with different features and qualities of products to change the quantities to produce more or to produce less. Entrepreneurs receive feedback from the market. They have profit and loss information to tell them when their experiments have been successful. Under socialism, the government owns all the resources. Resources have no prices, there are no profits and losses, so production is chaotic and ineffective. There's simply no way without private property and free markets for resources to know how resources should be used to produce goods and services that people want. This is especially important when resources are complex and specific, when they aren't perfectly substitutable among productive tasks. The Soviet Union and more recently countries like Venezuela are famous for their idle and misused land, machines, buildings and workforces. Socialist planners don't have prices for complex and heterogeneous assets, so they have no way to use those resources in the most effective manner. Even in a market system, there's the risk that government regulation will prevent entrepreneurs from trying these different combinations of complex and specialized resources. Regulations in capital and labor markets, a heavy taxation of corporate profits, bailouts and subsidies for favored firms, and other interventions make it harder for entrepreneurs to produce, to price and to use specialized resources in the most effective way. We don't want a system like this. We want a free market system. Otherwise, we might end up like the Soviet Union or Venezuela with our own economic basket case.