By Kevin D. Williamson
Monday, July 13, 2026
George Orwell was a man of the left who was clear-eyed
about socialism and its practitioners: “One sometimes gets the impression that
the mere words ‘Socialism’ and ‘Communism’ draw towards them with magnetic
force every fruit-juice drinker, nudist, sandal-wearer, sex-maniac, Quaker,
‘Nature Cure’ quack, pacifist, and feminist in England,” he wrote. In the U.S.
context, he’d have had to have added “Jew-hating weirdos” and a few other categories.
The Democratic Socialists of America, which has a
foothold in the Democratic Party and is earnestly—and, at the moment, successfully—working
to take it over, offers one of the all-time great motte-and-bailey
propositions: When it is time to talk to normie voters, it’s all: “Oh,
pish-posh, ‘socialism’ just means things like public roads and public schools,
and those right-wingers who say that we’re a front for a bunch of communists
kowtowing to Mao are just trying to scare you.” That’s the motte; the bailey is
... well, here is a screenshot of the homepage of the DSA’s “liberation caucus”
you
probably heard Jonah Goldberg talking about:
Not every member of the DSA is a confessing Maoist or
Leninist. All of them make common cause with confessing Maoists and Leninists,
and with other advocates of a political movement that killed some 100 million
people in the 20th century. That isn’t the same thing as admiring
Denmark or enjoying public libraries.
If everything government does from sidewalks to national
security is socialism, then socialism does not really mean anything.
Happily, we do not have to entertain seriously that canard. Allow me to revisit
some territory that will be familiar to longtime readers but maybe new to a few
of you. The work of education is never completed.
In economics, there exists a category of things called public
goods. Public goods does not refer to goods available for use by the
public, things that the public likes and thinks are good, good things publicly
provided, or anything like that. Public goods in the formal sense have two characteristics: First, they are
non-rivalrous in consumption, meaning that the enjoyment of some quantity of
such a good by one party does not reduce the supply of that good by the
quantity consumed—e.g., if you drive down I-35 for 10 miles, that 10 miles of
blacktop remains available for the next guy to drive down. Second, public goods
are non-excludable in consumption, meaning that there is no practical way to
limit the benefits of the good to paying customers: If a missile-defense system
protects the residents of the house at 1313 Mockingbird Lane from a nuclear
warhead, it also protects the residents of the house at 1315 Mockingbird Lane,
and clean air available for Smith to breathe also is available to Jones.
Because of these two qualities—being non-rivalrous and non-excludable in
consumption—public goods can be difficult or effectively impossible to provide
through ordinary market mechanisms.
So ordinary market competition and innovation often will
fail to satisfy our desires when it comes to certain public goods. But because
we value these things, we come up with ways to provide them—often, though not
exclusively, through public means. Sometimes that takes the form of regulation:
Providing the public goods of clean air and clean water implies the power to
regulate externalities, such as industrial pollution, that would deprive people
of clean air and water. Some public goods are provided through subsidy
(vaccination) and others through direct public production (the interstate
highways). Some public goods are fairly simple and straightforward, such as
sidewalks, and these do not cease to be public goods in those instances in
which they are privately provided or maintained, as sidewalks often are.
In the real world, public goods often are complex
entities such as environments that are composed of both public and non-public
goods. Consider the case of a vibrant, walkable urban neighborhood. This is
undeniably a public good in one sense—anybody can walk down the street and
enjoy the neighborhood—but also a non-public good in that a business location
or a home in such a neighborhood is an excludable and rivalrous good that
requires private expenditure; those private expenditures, in turn, often support
public services such as government schools by encouraging economic activity and
building the tax base. Schools are not a public good—they are one of
those things that are good for the public and that the public likes and
considers desirable, but they are both rivalrous (there are only so many
classroom seats and so much teacher time to go around) and excludable (generally
limited to students living in a certain defined area), and private schools are
indeed a real thing—they are much older than public schools, in fact. (The
first public schools in anything like the modern sense came into being in
Pfalz-Zweibrücken in 1592; Oxford is so old that nobody knows when it was
founded, but students were being educated there in the 11th century.
Harvard was founded a few years before the passage of the first public
education law in the American colonies, the evocatively titled Old Deluder
Satan Law.) But even if access to any given school is not a public good, the
existence of a system of public education is a public good at least as far as
that neighborhood is concerned, and it provides generally shared benefits. For
example, excellent schools support the property values of every residence
eligible for their services, a benefit that is neither rivalrous nor excludable
within the context of that school district. Public services and the overall
desirable character of the neighborhood are, in turn, supported by private
investment in things such as housing, restaurants, entertainment venues, and
the like.
All of that can produce some very interesting
conversations about public goods—how they are provided, whose priorities
prevail in providing them, how we pay for them, etc. But if you are talking
about the provision of public goods, then you are not talking about socialism.
If the provision of public goods were socialism, then the only political
conditions in the modern world would be anarchism and some form of socialism,
with socialism necessarily being so broadly defined as to include the
systems governing diverse places from Singapore to Houston to Cuba. Which would
be stupid, and which is not, in any case, what the self-described Maoists and
Leninists of the Democratic Socialists of America are talking about.
Socialism has a few salient characteristics that will be
present to varying degrees in any socialist system—and in pretty much every
ordinary liberal-democratic and capitalist system such as our own that has
practices or elements that could accurately be described as socialist.
One element of socialism is the public provision of non-public goods, and here
our socialist friends are entirely correct to cite the government schools, in
which the state literally owns the means of production, and they would be
equally correct—arguably more so—in citing the federal highway system, which
not only is a state enterprise but furthermore is one that exemplifies another
hallmark element of socialism: central planning.
Central planning is, in my view—and, more important, in
the view of such trenchant analysts as F.A. Hayek and Ludwig von Mises—the real
insurmountable problem with socialism. The Hayek-Mises argument (the “Austrian”
view) is that in the absence of the information conveyed by prices, economic
planning is not simply difficult or likely to be inefficient but
actually impossible as a consequence of epistemic limitations that
simply cannot be overcome. Without price signals, there is no way to know what
consumer preferences actually are at any given moment and in any given economic
context (and preferences and contexts are always in flux) or what priorities
should prevail in decisions about production and distribution. There was a time
when socialists heeded that critique: The Soviet Union, for example, once
invested non-trivial sums in primitive computer science in the hope that computers
would be able to replicate the calculation work that markets do, a fantasy that
predictably has been revivified with the advent of more sophisticated
artificial intelligence tools. You could do a great deal of interesting reading
on that subject, and I recommend that you do so if you are at all interested in
socialism, beginning with Mises’ 1920 essay “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth.”
The point relevant here is that it is central planning
that really helps to distinguish socialism per se from welfare. For example:
Food is a non-public good, being both excludable and rivalrous in consumption.
We buy and sell food in markets of all kinds—and these probably were the very
first markets. As a matter of conscience, we do not want people to have to go
hungry for reasons of some personal economic misfortune that has left them
unable to provide for themselves—or for their children. We have a wildly
wealthy and prosperous society, and it is relatively easy to subsidize the
consumption of things such as food, housing, and healthcare for people who are
poor, and especially for people who are disabled, for children, and others we
do not expect to be able to take care of themselves individually. We do that by
giving them money to buy food in the same markets in which pretty much
everybody else buys food. Some of that money is money in its familiar form, and
some of it is limited-purpose money—vouchers, or “food stamps”—which many
Americans prefer because they believe that poor people are too stupid and
feckless to make their own economic decisions (why else would they be too poor
to buy a can of soup?) or that the poor are so morally weak that they would let
their children starve and use the money we give them for beer or pills instead
of baby formula. (And it is not as though we have zero evidence for such
beliefs.) We can have all sorts of interesting arguments about how to structure
and administer welfare programs (I lean toward the give-’em-cash side), but
whether we give the poor dollars or vouchers, the markets go on working as they
are supposed to.
A socialist model, as opposed to a welfare model, would
mean having the government own and run the farms, food-processing plants, and
grocery stores in the same way the government owns and operates the government
schools, in which the teachers and administrators are state employees teaching
that which the state mandates. Such a socialist enterprise would need to
attempt to centrally plan the production, processing, and distributing of food
in accordance with what the state judges to be the proper set of priorities.
(The old Bismarckian welfare model assumes that the schools exist to provide
competent bureaucrats for the state and efficient workers for the economy, and
we in the United States still most often talk about K-12 education as though it
were workforce preparation: Da kann sich noch so viel ändern, es bleibt doch
immer das Gleiche.) New York City Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s imbecilic idea for
government-run grocery stores did not come out of nowhere, though it apparently
has not occurred to him to ask anybody who has lived under such a system how
well that worked.
In the United States, we typically have preferred
indirect political control of the means of production to state ownership in
most sectors. We do not have government-run farms, but—oh, boy!—neither do we
have something that closely approximates a free market when it comes to
farming, a grotesquely
corporatist enterprise (here as it is in most advanced economies) distorted
by subsidies, production controls, trade barriers, and the like. But even that
warped market seems to work pretty well—a big consumer market can absorb a
great deal of political nonsense. We have a pretty free labor market, but we
also use employers as de facto welfare providers (through wage and benefit
mandates) because passing a law that says Steve’s Bricks has to buy its
employees insurance is a way to provide a welfare benefit without having to go
through the unpleasant business of spending money and taxing somebody to pay
for it. Welfare-by-proxy has its problems, to be sure, and it surely is
suboptimal to have a system in which, e.g., most medical spending is laundered
through a highly regulated financial risk-management instrument rather than by
direct transactions between doctors and their patients, but our markets are
sufficiently robust and innovative to continue functioning well even with
considerable levels of political interference and attempts (almost always
failed and destructive) at regimentation.
Poor people in Baltimore can use their SNAP benefits at
Whole Foods Market the same as anybody else, but they do not have access to the
same quality of schools as their better-off neighbors do. That’s the difference
between how welfare programs work in a market context and how socialism works.
Markets work because consumers have a right of exit, which they do not really
enjoy under socialist organization—you go right on paying taxes for those
crappy schools whether they serve your children’s interest or not, or even if
you do not use them at all. The fancy fromagerie in the trendy
neighborhood may not care very much about its market share among the poor, but
it has to fight for its market share among the wealthy, and whatever
improvements in quality and/or price that produces are available to consumers
of every income group. Weight-loss drugs that once were more or less reserved
for rich Hollywood types quickly became widely available to those with more
modest incomes, and the price almost certainly will keep going down even as
effectiveness improves. Consumer electronics get better and cheaper every year,
while college gets more expensive. Lots of Americans do not enjoy very
high-quality police services—and there is a pretty obvious fundamental economic
reason for that. That doesn’t mean we should privatize the police—the case for
privatizing retirement savings is not the same as the case for privatizing the
enforcement of traffic rules—but it does mean that we should be realistic and
modest about our expectations when it comes to state-provided goods.
All regimes are mixed regimes: Singapore is one of the
most capitalistic places on God’s green earth, but the state owns practically
all of the land and the hospitals. Switzerland does not have any
government-provided healthcare, but it does require that insurance companies
offer the specified minimum policy on a nonprofit basis as a condition for
participating in the more lucrative parts of the market. Again, if your idea of
socialism encompasses Singapore and Switzerland, then socialism does not mean anything.
If you say that your democratic socialism means that you want the United States
to be more like Switzerland, then I am going to want to have some conversations
with you about getting rid of capital gains taxes and Medicare. There isn’t
anything remotely socialist about Switzerland—but while we’re at it, there’s a
heck of a lot less that is socialistic about Norway, Denmark, or Sweden than
American progressives seem to think.
The real question for the socialists is: Do they mean it
or don’t they? Do they actually want socialism?
My read is that in most cases they do not want socialism,
and that a great many people who talk about socialism and call themselves
socialists do not know what they are talking about. (And a great many of them
seem to believe that national single-payer healthcare is the norm in Europe,
which it is not.) Being a conservative, I have some experience with a parallel
underlying dynamic: For years, people with right-leaning sensibilities were
embarrassed to call themselves Republicans, for entirely understandable
reasons. So they called themselves conservatives instead of Republicans, or,
later, Tea Partiers or nationalists or populists or “national
conservatives” or America First-ers or whatever. Mostly they voted for and got
the same old Republican slop spiced up with a little extra rage. (And, now,
more rage and much more corruption.) Democrats, especially the young and the
dumb ones, believe that the Democratic Party has been too modest, too moderate,
too accommodating, too deferential to the bond markets whose dominance James Carville privately kvetched about in the
centrist Clinton years, too interested in the big money from the titans of
Wall Street (which lean Democratic and have for a while, though there are fluctuations) and
Silicon Valley, too obsessed with “respectability.”
Republicans who were embarrassed to call themselves
Republicans mostly wanted a Republican Party that was more like them: angrier,
more emotionally demonstrative, etc. The GOP has changed its policy stance in
the Donald Trump years (almost exclusively for the worse, of course) but what
has changed most remarkably is its affect. My impression is that the supposed
socialists in the Democratic Party would like some substantive policy changes,
mostly idiotic ones that would combine Scandinavian levels of welfare spending
with Canadian levels of taxation. But mainly they seem to want a Democratic
Party that is simply a more adventurous and exciting—and
confrontational—version of what it already is.
The most effective kind of politics is based on giving
people a heroic story to tell about themselves and their friends; capitalism,
in the mouth of a well-fed American socialist, means the same thing as elites
or globalists in the mouth of a slothful American nationalist: “enemy,”
and nothing more. A heroic story needs an enemy—an enemy is required.
Think of the way popular Christianity has created these literary characters we
call “the Devil” and “the Antichrist” that have little to do with the Satan
(and satans) or pseudochristos of Scripture. (A big part of the
reason for the cult of presidentialism in our politics is literary-dramatic
rather than political-constitutional: Our storytelling brains have an easier
time keeping track of a singular hero than hundreds of representatives,
senators, judges and justices, Cabinet members, committees and subcommittees,
etc.) We prefer the agon
to the white paper. And so the argument goes: “Is your life miserable? Do you
feel unfulfilled, unhappy, insecure? Can’t get a date? We know who is really at
fault, and it isn’t you. It is ... .” Capitalism. Global elites. The Jews.
The Illuminati. People who aren’t vegans. Etc.
Some people are serious about socialism. They are mostly
cranks and fanatics who should be kept—and probably will be—far from real
political power. Some people would like the United States to have a welfare
system that looks more like that of Denmark. That’s a conversation we can have;
even acknowledging that there are some insurmountable reasons the full-on
Scandinavian model would not produce Scandinavian results in the United States,
there is much to learn from these prosperous and well-governed countries. Many
people don’t know the difference between socialism and how they do things in
Copenhagen or Oslo or Stockholm, and it is difficult to have a productive
conversation with people who refuse to learn. But that also is a conversation
that we can and probably should have. But if you are looking for an enemy to
provide your political movement with an organizing principle, and if you insist
on “carrying
pictures of Chairman Mao, you ain’t gonna make it with anyone anyhow.”
In Closing
You can read a great deal more about the real-world
legacy of real-world socialism here. And here. And here. And here.
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