By Mark Jamison
Wednesday, August 19, 2026
Socialism has acquired an appeal that few would have
imagined a decade ago. Bernie Sanders’s near success as a presidential
candidate seemed like a one-off. But now, self-declared socialists are winning
elections.
The appeal isn’t surprising. Americans are experiencing
anxieties about housing, health care, the economy, and technology. Some feel
helpless. Socialists offer a deceptively simple explanation: Powerful
corporations and wealthy Americans have rigged the system. And they offer
equally simple solutions: Take power from the powerful, take their money, and
use government to give people what they want. It’s a hero’s journey worthy of
Hollywood.
But the interesting question isn’t why socialism has
gained momentum, but what kind of world it assumes: Are prosperity and comfort
things government can design from above? Or do they emerge only when people
have the freedom to choose and pursue their own ambitions?
Adam Smith warned us about visions of top-down prosperity
over 250 years ago. In The Theory of Moral Sentiments, Smith called the
would-be planner a “man of system”: someone so confident in his own wisdom and
design for society that he forgets that the people he proposes to direct have
their own minds and purposes. They respond well to incentives, but not to dictates.
Sadly, today’s progressives fail to see themselves in
Smith’s words. Consider Michigan Democratic U.S. Senate nominee Abdul El-Sayed,
who recently declared himself a capitalist and invoked Adam Smith to
explain why. His Smith is chiefly an enemy of monopoly: Concentrated businesses
exploit workers and consumers, requiring governments to restrain them.
El-Sayed isn’t wrong that Smith distrusted businesses
that collude and secure government favors. But he misses Smith’s larger insight
spelled out in The Wealth of Nations: Prosperity depends on liberty and
on institutions that allow both ordinary and extraordinary people to pursue
ideas and plans of their own making.
In his inquiry, Smith finds that economic freedom
coordinates the actions of people who don’t share the same objectives. In
Smith’s telling, the baker wants income. The customer wants bread. The employee
wants wages. The entrepreneur wants to build something. The investor wants a
return. There is no need for an overseer to direct them. Acting freely, their
different purposes and personal energies create cooperation.
Smith’s insight was not about virtue. In a sense, it was
almost the opposite: People with different purposes are incentivized to benefit
each other when everyone is at liberty to choose.
Socialism does the opposite. Instead of allowing millions
of people to direct their lives — and in doing so, coordinate their lives —
political actors decide what is to be produced, who’s to produce it, and who’s
allowed to buy it and at what cost. The mechanism is coercion, not cooperation.
Smith discovered that a successful commercial society
requires three things: security, the rule of law, and economic liberty. People
need to be secure in their person and their property, protected from criminals,
from dishonest businessmen and customers that would break contracts, and from
officials that take property. These basics depend on limited government and an
independent and non-corrupt judiciary, following a system of laws designed to
protect liberty, not favor one person or group over another.
Today’s socialist leaning political actors want to
undermine these fundamentals. Their public statements
spell it out,
calling for large and essential businesses to be owned or controlled by the
government or labor unions. The leaders fail to say what becomes of the life
savings of people who have invested in or built the businesses that suddenly
serve political and labor union interests.
Their political leaders also want to undercut the rule of
law by politicizing courts. Most extreme is the DSA’s proposal to make courts
“subordinate to Congress,” rather than being a third branch of government.
Legal cases would be decided based on political connections, not laws,
precedent, and specific facts. Contracts, whether for labor or business, would
mean nothing. Proposals such as term limits, congressional oversight of ethics, and court packing are less extreme, but they are steps in the
same direction.
This is Smith’s man of system at work. “Very wise in his
own conceit . . . [the planner] seems to imagine that he can arrange the
different members of a great society with as much ease as the hand arranges the
different pieces upon a chessboard,” believing that people “have no other
principle of motion besides that which the hand impresses upon them.” Housing
costs too much? Just mandate lower rents. Health care costs too much? Make it a
human right.
But ignoring economic realities doesn’t make them go
away. Farmers choose what to grow based on what food processors want to buy.
The processors make their choices based on what distributors and retailers
seek. And these are ultimately competing for consumers. Every socialist
experiment has shown that when government chokes these economic incentives,
businesses and laborers work less and consumers do without. As Smith explained,
the pieces on the economic chessboard move themselves.
The socialist error isn’t in wanting people to have good
lives, but in believing too much in their man of system’s visions and
abilities. The problem isn’t confined to the socialist left. Much of today’s
populist right has accepted the same premise: When economic outcomes
disappoint, politicians should rearrange them.
Americans aren’t chess pieces. We have ambitions and
visions for our families’ and communities’ futures. Sometimes we choose
wrongly. But it is only through protecting and exercising liberty that we find
the right ways.
