I understand that this is your point. I am disputing this point. The government can have an enormous effect. For example, the government cannot achieve the eradication of drug use. No amount of controls in place (your Soviets) will achieve this end. That is not to say that the government will fail to curtail drug use through incentive plans (in this case, disincentives). If the government’s goal was to discourage drug use, then it succeeded. We may protest that the results of this discouragement are worse than just letting people use drugs. We may protest that some people will still use drugs. I will agree with both of these: there is no reason to suspect that any specific or group of incentives will guarantee a behavior (or a lack of a behavior), or that if we dislike a behavior that the cure must therefore be better than the disease. But that is not the same thing as saying that the government must fail in all economic policies. This is like saying the government must fail at crime prevention, because all it can do is create disincentives to crime. That is enough to effect an outcome.