What Is Socialism?

The liberty principle for this Freedom Friday concerns statism, socialism, and communism. The election of Zohran Mamdani, a devout socialist, to be the next mayor of New York City – the financial capital of the United States and to the world – brought socialism to the forefront.

Victor Davis Hanson, senior contributor for The Daily Signal, claims in his article on the topic that Mamdani admitted that he is a communist when he advocated for “seizing the means of production.” “And almost every day, a quote from his past comes out that suggests that he’s not just a socialist who wants the government to control utilities or housing, but he wants to ‘seize the means of production.’ That means the industrial base and private property itself.”

Hanson continues his article by explaining why the above information is scary. 

… Because we have a whole generation who have gone through K-12 and higher education and heard about the glories of statism, socialism, communism in the universities and our school system, but not the merits of capitalism. It’s not really socialism versus capitalism. It is socialism has nothing to offer. And we know that for two reasons.

If we look at the contemporary world, in the recent past and in the present, everywhere a socialist paradigm has been implemented, it has done two things: It has destroyed the economy and made people poor, and two, it has deprived people of their civil liberties.

I should add, it also has created greater inequality, at least in terms of the ruling elite, who feel they’re not subject to the ramifications of their socialist ideology, and they live a very refined and affluent lifestyle.

Hanson suggests that we look at the Soviet Union before it collapsed, the collapsed Mao’s China, Cuba under the Castro brothers since 1959. A more recent example is Venezuela – once “the wealthiest country in Latin America” but now collapsed. Other nations are collapsing to a lesser degree – Peru, Colombia.

Hanson says that any nation that adopts socialism does not do well. China is doing better now “because it has an odd mixture of a communist authoritarian government, but it allows free market principles to save the economy from itself.” He says that that “the same thing is true of President Vladimir Putin’s Russia” which “achieved levels of gross domestic product, oil production that were superior to the communist past, just simply because it had elements of a market economy. Some market economy is better than none.” Hanson’s article continues:

Why, then secondly, does socialism fail? It is contrary to human nature. All of us want to be rewarded for our own efforts. We’re unique individuals. We don’t wanna be like a tessera in just one large mosaic….

And that’s what socialism does. It tries to say that we’re all brothers and we all love each other, and we all want the same thing. That’s what Mamdani is saying.

But look at Mamdani himself. He comes from one of the more affluent families in New York. His father is an endowed professor. He’s very well compensated. Hardcore Marxist. Pro-Hamas. His mother is a multimillion-dollar filmmaker. He grew up in affluence. He lives in a rent-controlled apartment, even though, by any standard, he would be qualified as a wealthy person and doesn’t need a state subsidy and could do better to give that apartment to someone with less means.

So, my point is that socialism destroys private initiative. If you think the harder you work, the better ideas you have, the more efficiency you can create in your business or in your own life but you’re not going to be compensated more than someone who does not either show those traits or doesn’t want to show those traits….

We have one last, more controversial proof that it doesn’t work. Since the Obama age, the rate of socialist practices, policies, agendas in the United States have vastly accelerated. And after the Obama presidency, the rather esoteric political term “red state,” “blue state” became commonplace. And it basically denotes those states who are more socialist and those states that are more free market.

California is a socialist state, in the sense that we’re talking, like New York, a 13%+ income tax rate at the highest rates. We have the highest gas and oil prices … highest energy prices … highest housing prices. The same is true of New York … Minnesota, Michigan, all of these states.

Why? Because the central government, first of all, … goes after the opposition. And most of these states are one-party state, without a viable opposition to keep it in check. No. 2, the people who have created this socialist system are not subject to it themselves.

[Think Nancy Pelosis, Barbara Boxer, Dianne Feinstein, Jerry Brown, Gavin Newsom – all] very, very wealthy. They live lives completely distinct, separate from the masses, whom they said would benefit from their socialist policy. And the result is they took a paradise, like California, and turned it into purgatory. So, there’s no empirical evidence whether, within the United States or abroad, that there’s a socialist cure for what socialism has done.

Mamdani has, basically, taken a New York under Bill de Blasio and prior mayors that was a socialist paradigm and is in dire straits, and he thinks more socialism will cure it….

So, what we’re seeing in Europe today is disastrous policies, importing poor illegal aliens with antithetical political, religious, cultural, social views than the Europeans themselves….

Are people happy? No. As we speak, there are right-wing … conservative, free market governments in places like Hungary, the Czech Republic, Italy and growing in places like Britain, the Netherlands, Austria, in France itself. The opposition, who opposes socialism, is gaining and the people are behind it. Why? Is it because they don’t know socialism? No. It’s because they know it all too well.