Bill Maher’s Category Error on Socialism

By Marian L. Tupy

Wednesday, May 13, 2026

 

On last Friday’s episode of Real Time with Bill Maher, Pennsylvania Senator John Fetterman warned that socialism has moved from slur to badge of honor among some Democrats, and that some candidates now go as far as to speak positively about communism — a political and economic system responsible for some 100 million deaths in the last century. Maher’s glib reply was that America, like other Western democracies, is already “quasi-socialist,” because of Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid.

 

That answer sounds moderate. It is actually a category error.

 

Socialism is not any government program. Nor is it any tax. Nor is it a disability check, a school voucher, or a police department. Socialism, properly understood, means public rather than private ownership or control of property, natural resources, and the means of production. Encyclopedia Britannica defines it as a doctrine calling for public rather than private ownership or control of property and natural resources. Merriam-Webster similarly defines it as collective or governmental ownership and administration of the means of production and distribution.

 

That distinction matters. A safety net inside a market economy, however inefficient, is one thing. Government command over production, prices, wages, capital, housing, health care, energy, and investment is another. Maher blurs the two and thereby gives socialists the rhetorical gift they most desire. If Medicare is socialism, then why not government medicine? If Social Security is socialism, then why not government pensions, housing, childcare, college, energy, and food? If all Western democracies are already socialist, then the remaining argument is only about dosage.

 

But socialism is not wrong because it is unfashionable among those who remember the horrors of the 20th century. It is wrong because it rests on a false moral premise and fails for a practical reason.

 

Socialism’s moral premise is that “society” has a superior claim on an individual’s labor and property. In practice, “society” always means politicians, regulators, committees, and favored constituencies. The worker earns, the entrepreneur risks, the saver defers consumption, and the state arrives with a theory of justice that just happens to require other people’s money. There is room in a decent society for charity, mutual aid, insurance, and limited public assistance. There is no moral case for treating productive citizens as state property.

 

The practical problem is even harder for socialists to escape. Markets are not merely channels for the expression of human greed. They are information systems. Prices tell millions of people what is scarce, what is abundant, what should be conserved, what should be produced, and where labor and capital should move. Friedrich Hayek’s point was that knowledge is dispersed across society, and prices help coordinate the separate plans of millions of people who do not know one another.

 

Ludwig von Mises similarly argued that when the state abolishes private ownership in the means of production, it destroys the market prices needed for rational economic calculation. Without prices for land, labor, capital, machinery, risk, and time, planners cannot know whether they are creating value or burning it. They can issue orders. They can print plans. They can punish dissent. What they cannot do is calculate as well as free people trading under private property.

 

That is why socialism keeps producing shortages, queues, rationing, black markets, declining quality, and repression. The repression is not an accident. When the plan fails, the planner does not blame the plan. He blames hoarders, wreckers, speculators, profiteers, foreigners, landlords, doctors, farmers, and shopkeepers. Economic failure becomes a search for enemies.

 

Maher’s favorite examples do not rescue his case. Social Security and Medicare are not proof that socialism works. They are proof that even popular entitlement programs become fiscally strained when politics promises more than math can deliver. The 2025 trustees’ report projected that Social Security’s Old-Age and Survivors Insurance Trust Fund can pay full scheduled benefits only until 2033, after which continuing income would cover 77 percent of scheduled benefits. The combined Social Security trust funds are projected to cover full benefits until 2034, after which income would cover 81 percent. Medicare’s Hospital Insurance Trust Fund is projected to pay full benefits until 2033, after which income would cover 89 percent.

 

Nor is American health care an example of unrestrained capitalism begging for socialism. It is already a maze of subsidies, tax distortions, public payment formulas, mandates, licensing rules, third-party payment, and political bargaining. The U.S. Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services reports that national health expenditures reached $5.3 trillion in 2024, or 18 percent of GDP. Medicare accounted for 21 percent of total national health spending, Medicaid for 18 percent, private insurance for 31 percent, and out-of-pocket spending for only 11 percent. That is not a libertarian paradise. It is what happens when consumers, providers, insurers, employers, and government all face distorted incentives.

 

The tax debate is similarly confused. When Senator Bernie Sanders talks about “millionaires and billionaires,” he erases the difference between a retired couple with a paid-off house and a tech founder with a private jet. And speaking of the latter, there is no shame in having lots of money by creating value — like Jeff Bezos, Elon Musk, and other captains of industry have done. Nor is it clear that the government can spend Bezos’s and Musk’s money better than they can by plowing their earnings into innovation and business expansion. When politicians say the rich do not pay their “fair share,” they should at least admit the current burden. IRS-based summaries show that in 2023, the top 1 percent paid 38.4 percent of federal income taxes while earning 20.6 percent of adjusted gross income. The top 10 percent paid 70.5 percent.

 

I am not an anarchist who believes that the government has no role in modern life. But the government should know what it cannot know and should not claim what it does not own. A humane society can protect the poor without nationalizing production. It can regulate fraud and force without replacing prices with commands. It can tax without treating every private fortune as stolen goods.

 

Fetterman’s warning matters because socialism has become socially fashionable among historically ignorant people who would never tolerate its consequences. They want Swedish benefits, American innovation, Silicon Valley capital, Manhattan restaurants, cheap imports, private pensions, and moral superiority, all while sneering at the system that makes those things possible. They do not want socialism. They want capitalism with a guilty conscience and a bigger bill that’s paid by someone else.

 

Maher is wrong. The right response to the rising popularity of socialism is not to say, “We are all quasi-socialists now.” The right answer is to say that a free society may choose limited public programs, but it must never forget the line between assistance and control. Socialism crosses that line. It is immoral because it subordinates the person to the plan. It is unworkable because the plan cannot know what free people know through prices, property, profit, loss, and choice. Maher should stop giving America’s socialists an alibi.