Path to Socialism

I’m not a journalist, therefore I feel compelled to give my own input on this matter. But as a human being who feels compelled to give each argument a fair evaluation regardless of possible personal affiliations that may fall into contradiction, I will first mention exactly what happened.

Recently, Hugo Chavez, the newly reelected Venezuelan president called for a socialist revolution in the United States. A reporting on this incident can be found here:
http://www.bloomberg.com/apps/news?pid=20601086&sid=aB6yw1ihGZ2k&refer=latin_america
This post is simple in nature. I will offer an argument (in the purest philosophically-styled format) against the practicality of socialism. What exactly do I mean by practicality? I will define an economic transaction as practical if and only if it achieves a statistically significant level of efficiency.

Argument Against the Practicality of Socialism
Premise 1: An industry is efficient only if it entails a profit motive.
Premise 2: Any socialized industry will necessarily eliminate any profit motive.
Conclusion: Therefore, any socialized industry will not be performing efficiently.

The argument above is transitively valid. It consists of the form:
A --> B
C --> ~B
Therefore, C --> ~A. by Law of Contraposition we know this inference to be truth-preserving.
If one wants to refute the argument above, they will have to attack either Premise 1 or Premise 2. Any economist will affirm the truth of the first premise. The second premise may be most commonly inspected on grounds of suspicion. Therefore, let me make its argument. Socialism, by definition, is the theory or system of social organization that advocates the vesting of the ownership and control of the means of production and distribution, of capital, land, and labor in the community as a whole. However, each community member is, by human nature, concerned with his or her own best interest and not with the community's at large. Therefore, each individual will work to maximize his or her own benefit at the expense of the aggregate. What you are left with is a loss of profit incentive and consequent systematic disorder and chaos. If one wants to contest this further, I would strongly suggest one first read an economic-philosophical paradox which is said to have instantiated capitalism into existence: The Tragedy of the Commons.
What Friedman suggested at one point with respect to socialism, is where anyone will find the angels willing to work without any profit incentive. Sure enough, on paper the theory works well. In practice, however, failure or extreme inefficiencies will result. And if the inefficiencies do not show up immediately in the industry per se, they will necessarily surface in the aggregate economy in one form or another through the payment of unnecessarily high taxes and resulting deadweight loss – such as chronic high unemployment, high inflation, wage rigidity, and many other negative features attributed to socialist endorsing nation-states. We can see such instances in countries such as France and Germany whose natural level of unemployment gravitates at around 8-12%.

Sorry Hugo, but socialism just doesn’t work in the non-imaginative world, beyond its oversimplifying theoretical limitations.