Robert Owen paid around $150,000 for the town of Harmonie, Indiana. He got 20,000 acres, more than 160 buildings, working mills, and farms already producing food. He renamed it New Harmony. Close to a thousand people arrived in the first year.
Owen already ran successful textile mills in New Lanark, Scotland, where he was famous for treating workers well and running a profitable business at the same time. He believed that if you removed private property and paid everyone equally, cooperation would naturally replace competition.
In January 1826, William Maclure sailed a riverboat full of scientists, teachers, and geologists down the Ohio River to New Harmony. Historians call it the “Boatload of Knowledge”. Thomas Say, the father of American entomology, was on it. So was Charles-Alexandre Lesueur, one of the most respected naturalists of the era. This was the most educated, best-funded, best-equipped socialist community ever attempted on American soil. If cooperation could beat markets anywhere, it should have worked here.
It collapsed almost immediately.
The hardest workers were feeding, housing, and clothing neighbors who did nothing while receiving the same food, the same shelter, and the same rewards. So they stopped working too. Why wouldn’t they?
Production dropped and food ran short. Buildings decayed because no one owned them and no one was responsible for maintaining them. Endless meetings replaced actual work. Owen wrote seven different constitutions in two years trying to fix it. None of them worked.
American inventor Josiah Warren, one of the country’s earliest libertarian thinkers, was there. He watched the community fail from the inside and later wrote about why. His conclusion: “The difference of opinion, tastes and purposes increased just in proportion to the demand for conformity”. The more the community demanded unity, the more it fractured. Warren identified the deeper problem almost a century before Ludwig von Mises and Friedrich Hayek made it famous in academic economics.
When everyone owns everything, no one owns anything. When labor earns the same reward regardless of effort, effort disappears. When prices vanish, no one knows what anything is worth.
Owen finally admitted defeat in 1827. In his farewell address, he blamed the settlers themselves, saying they were “unprepared to be members of the community of common property and equality”.
Translation: the system would have worked if only people had been different.
Every socialist regime since has offered some version of that excuse.
His own son, Robert Dale Owen, put it plainly years later: “All cooperative schemes which provide equal remuneration to the skilled and industrious and the ignorant and idle must work their own downfall”. He had lived through the collapse. He knew what killed it.
Every socialist experiment since New Harmony has ended the same way, and for the same reasons.
Prices communicate what things are worth. Ownership creates responsibility for maintaining them. When both are abolished, production collapses because no one can calculate what to make or repair.
Tom Kratman, The social media site formerly known as Twitter, 2026-07-09.
October 11, 2026
October 8, 2026
Central planning also centralizes the importance of “who you know”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Handre points out the other thing that socialized economies share with one another: the overwhelming importance of “friends”, “connections”, and “family” in generating unearned wealth and power.
AI-generated image from @Handre on X
Socialism concentrates power, and concentrated power concentrates wealth. Hugo Chavez spent two decades screaming about imperialist oligarchs while his own daughters accumulated the kind of fortune that would embarrass a Rockefeller.
Maria Gabriela Chavez holds assets estimated at $4.2 billion, making her Venezuela’s wealthiest individual by a comfortable margin. Her father nationalized over 1,200 private companies between 2002 and 2012.
The mechanism is straightforward: When the state controls production, distribution, currency, and courts, political proximity becomes the only productive investment. You don’t build a business; you cultivate a minister. Chavez’s inner circle stole through socialism, using currency controls, preferential exchange rates, and state contracts as the instruments.
Meanwhile, the Venezuelan poverty rate crossed 80 percent in 2024. Infant mortality climbed. The bolivar collapsed so completely that Venezuelans began pricing transactions in dollars just to preserve basic calculation.
Ludwig von Mises proved mathematically in 1920 that socialist planners cannot rationally allocate resources without prices generated by voluntary exchange. No prices, no signal. No signal, no coordination. Shortages follow as surely as math follows addition.
This while Venezuela sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Poverty there is entirely manufactured. Chavez’s family lives in Caracas and Miami on wealth extracted from people who cannot buy protein. The ideology that promised to eat the rich ended with the people eating the zoo animals.
October 5, 2026
Communism and the DSA
The fortunes of America’s self-described socialists are clearly on the rise, as DSA-backed candidates gain more media attention and come closer to being elected to office. The DSA really could rename itself the DCA without much pushback, as communism has lost a lot of its massive historical baggage in the minds of average American voters.
Photo via Rob Henderson’s Newsletter
Communism is on the rise in America. More than that: It is being celebrated.
With the midterm elections just over one month away, at least eight congressional candidates with avowedly socialist perspectives are poised to take office, polling well ahead of their opponents in states from New York to Colorado.
Think there’s no connection between socialism and communism? Think again. Nearly half of the members of the Democratic Socialists of America‘s (DSA) leadership body identify as communists. As Stu Smith reported earlier this summer, “Members with Communist political tendencies now significantly shape the DSA’s leadership”. In their December 2025 newsletter, members of the DSA’s Red Star Caucus celebrated Mao Zedong’s 132nd birthday.
All of which raises some natural questions: Where is this revolutionary romance coming from? And as it steadily seeps into our leadership class, where will it lead?
The best guide to understanding these questions is a book published more than 50 years ago under a pseudonym — because the author feared what pro-Maoist intellectuals would do to him if they discovered who wrote it.
Simon Leys, whose real name was Pierre Ryckmans, was a Belgian-Australian scholar of Chinese art and literature. In 1974, he published Chinese Shadows, a record of the cultural and political destruction he saw in China in the years just after the Cultural Revolution. The book is full of eerily relevant observations. One of them, which I will get to, is the most haunting thing I’ve read about what political terror does to the human soul. And nearly all of them describe habits of mind that didn’t die with Mao. In fact, they are now alive in America.
First, some background. In The Cultural Revolution: A People’s History, 1962-1976, the historian Frank Dikötter explains how it began. Mao Zedong wanted to purge rivals at the top of the Communist Party. So he turned to radical students, giving them permission to denounce every authority except his own. Party officials egged on these young militants as they raided the homes of “class enemies” and turned them into social outcasts. What followed was violence, looting, the legitimization of hatred, and the denunciation of family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers.
When the resulting catastrophe became impossible to deny, Mao and the regime’s officials disavowed their own shock troops, claiming that an “extreme left” had been responsible for the atrocities.
Sound familiar? Americans witnessed a milder version of this in the summer of 2020. Rioting and looting that year caused between $1 billion and $2 billion in damages. As this transpired, prominent voices in politics and media minimized the destruction. And some leading officials quickly insisted that the destruction was not the work of their own residents. Minnesota governor Tim Walz, later the 2024 Democratic nominee for vice president, estimated that 80 percent of those causing damage came from out of state, while Minneapolis mayor Jacob Frey declared that “the people that are doing this are not Minneapolis residents”. Jail records showed the opposite.
If the scale is different, the pattern is the same: indulgence first, followed by disingenuous disavowal after the damage is done.
QotD: Socialism and the world wars
The tragedy was that those who promised utopia generally delivered hell on earth. According to the estimates in the Black Book of Communism, the “grand total of victims of Communism was between 85 and 100 million” for the twentieth century as a whole. The lowest estimate for the total number of Soviet citizens who lost their lives as a direct result of Stalin’s policies was more than 20 million, a quarter of them in the years after World War II. Mao alone, as Frank Dikötter has shown, accounted for tens of millions: two million between 1949 and 1951, another three million by the end of the 1950s, a staggering 45 million in the man-made famine known as the Great Leap Forward, yet more in the mayhem of the Cultural Revolution. Even the less bloodthirsty regimes of Eastern Europe killed and imprisoned their citizens on a shocking scale. In the Soviet Union, 2.75 million people were in the Gulag at Stalin’s death. The numbers were greatly reduced thereafter, but until the very end of the Soviet system its inhabitants lived in the knowledge that there was nothing but their own guile to protect them from an arbitrary and corrupt state. Other communist regimes around the world, including the very durable dictatorships in North Korea and Cuba, were strikingly similar in the miseries they inflicted on their own citizens.
The various socialist regimes could not even justify their murderous behavior by providing those they spared with higher living standards than their counterparts living under capitalism. On the contrary, they were economically disastrous. The collectivization of agriculture invariably reduced farming productivity. A substantial proportion of the victims of communism lost their lives because of the famines that resulted from collectivization in the Soviet Union and China. North Korea had a similarly disastrous experience. Central planning was a miserable failure for reasons long ago identified by Ludwig von Mises, Friedrich Hayek, and Janos Kornai, amongst others. Indeed, the economic performance of strictly socialist countries got worse over time because of rigidities and perverse incentives institutionalized by planning.
Moreover, the evidence is clear that, as countries moved away from socialist policies of state ownership and toward a greater reliance on market forces, they did better economically. The most striking example — but one of many — is that of China, which achieved a true great leap forward in economic output after beginning to dismantle restrictions on private initiative in 1978. After the collapse of “real existing socialism” in Central and Eastern Europe in 1989 and the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, there was widespread recognition (the “Washington consensus”) that all countries would benefit from reducing state ownership of the economy through privatization and from lowering marginal tax rates. […] the highest marginal personal income tax rate was reduced in nearly all Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) countries between the mid-1970s and mid-2000s.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
September 23, 2026
Friedrich Merz’s rapidly fading political future
On Substack, eugyppius discusses the electoral chasm at Chancellor Friedrich Merz’s feet after terrible showings in recent state elections for his party and the continued rise of the extremely extreme extreme-right Alternative für Deutschland (AfD):
Within months of becoming Chancellor, Friedrich Merz promised an “Autumn of reforms”, which never materialised because the political will to fix Germany’s economic and fiscal problems does not exist within his coalition. Having failed to fix anything and driven support for the once-mighty CDU to historic lows, Merz has instead been served an Autumn of Reckoning. It is unclear whether he will survive it.
The state elections in Sachsen-Anhalt, Mecklenburg-Vorpommern and Berlin that for months have inspired fear and trembling within the German political establishment have come and gone. Each of them has realised our rulers’ worst fears in different ways.
1) In Sachsen-Anhalt, the CDU underperformed polls by more than 20%, while Alternative für Deutschland achieved the highest vote share any party has ever won in that state. The AfD are already in talks with the Bündnis Sahra Wagenknecht, and everyone expects an AfD government under Ulrich Siegmund to take power in the coming months.
2) In Berlin, the CDU managed to squander the clear polling dominance it enjoyed throughout 2025 to finish in second place with just 18.8% of the vote – nearly seven points behind Die Linke. That is what a series of extremely stupid and unnecessary local scandals alongside association with the most unpopular Chancellor in the history of the Federal Republic can do to a party.
Zohran Mamdani’s advisers and campaign strategists assisted Die Linke in their left-populist Berlin campaign, which enjoyed particularly strong appeal among young voters. Assuming some late-breaking turbulence caused by the corruption and indiscipline that are typical of Die Linke do not derail things, they will form a government with the Greens and the Social Democrats.
3) In Mecklenburg-Vorpommern, the CDU managed to underperform every last poll, logging their worst electoral result in all of history. With just 4.9% of the vote, they failed for the first time ever to scrape across the 5% hurdle for representation in the Landtag – an outcome I have predicted for weeks. Whereas in Sachsen-Anhalt voters overcame the firewall by making the AfD too powerful to wall off, in Mecklenburg-Vorpommern they abolished it entirely by kicking the party that invented and maintains the firewall straight out of parliament.
Alternative für Deutschland won the largest vote share, but the result will be another coalition of Social Democrats, Greens and Die Linke under the long-serving Minister President Manuela Schwesig. Schwesig enjoys especially strong popularity among women and pensioners, and she will be helped into power by a smattering of leftist students and climate-obsessed urbanites. The AfD will stand alone in opposition to the tepid foolishness of the coming legislature, and the citizens of Mecklenburg-Vorpommern will develop new ways of thinking about the Evil Fascist Nazi Hitler party, which probably cannot be all that evil or fascist or Nazi or Hitler, given that there is no longer any alternative to the left here in the northeast.
September 8, 2026
We should stop using the terms “capitalism” and “capitalist”
On his Substack, Lorenzo Warby returns to the issue of how we describe the (theoretical) predominant economic system by which the west has risen to wealth and power using terms coined by the man who hated it more than any other:
Title page of Das Kapital in the first German edition of Volume 1.
Wikimedia Commons.
It would be a great improvement to our understanding of social dynamics if people stopped using the terms capitalism and capitalist. Given how ubiquitous these terms are, this may seem a strong claim, but it is one that is easy to sustain.
The Marxist definition of capitalism is:
The socio-economic system where social relations are based on commodities for exchange, in particular private ownership of the means of production and on the exploitation of wage labour.
According to Wikipedia:
Capitalism is an economic system based on the private ownership of the means of production and its use for the purpose of obtaining profit.
The first problem is the ism. There is no role for the state here. The state becomes, implicitly or explicitly, a “reflection” of the economic system, despite the fact that people do not describe non-state societies as “capitalist” even though such societies can have lots of private ownership used for the purposes of gaining income.
Non-state societies cannot manage the scale of economic activity so as to have, for example, firms. Their economic production is overwhelmingly centred on households.
Sedentism — living in dwellings — created households that then became, for millennia, the centre of most economic activity. Even states were governed out of royal or imperial households. It is factories, and offices, that move economic activity out of households.
The mass energy-use take-off we call the Industrial Revolution has brought the arc of economic history that began with sedentism to an end. When economist Robin Hanson writes about the shift from farmer “back” to forager patterns, it is the effects of the supplanting of households from the centre of economic activity that he is pointing to (without fully grasping that).
Note that this shift away from households being central to economic activity is very much about energy use: it applies to both commerce and to state activity (including state production). It is not inherently “capitalist”.
State production also produces commodities: calling such “state capitalism” just shows how much capitalism is a ridiculously protean term.
Eliding the state
The exclusion of the state in defining capitalism is not analytically benign. A classic and continuing use of the term capitalism is to romanticise the state. By viewing the state as a “reflection” of the economic system, all bad things, all disliked features, can be based on the malign influence of “capitalists”, of the dynamics of “capitalism”, with the state reduced to an instrument or reflection of such dynamics. (The same thing can be done in reverse, blaming all bad things on the state — see anarcho-capitalism — but that is much less common.)
The natural — and used — implication of blaming private commerce for all bad things is that, if good people, with good intentions, and proper understanding, run the state, it can do anything needed for their program to be achieved. This is very obvious if one, for example, reads the program of the Democratic Socialists of America.
The term capitalism thereby becomes a vehicle for getting the state profoundly wrong; for not understanding that the state is a fundamental structuring feature of any state society; for not understanding that, across history, states have been the dominant extractor and creator of surplus, and so of class structures. That, when it comes to state societies, the state itself is fundamental.
August 20, 2026
The Frankfurt School – The most destructive intellectual project of the 20th Century
People tend to underestimate how influential intellectual movements can be, as they rarely get outside attention until they’re deeply entrenched in the university system. The Frankfurt School‘s damage record is unmatched by any other intellectual movement of the era:
Notable members of the Frankfurt School in Heidelberg, April 1964 at the Max Weber-Soziologentag. Max Horkheimer is front left, Theodor W. Adorno front right, and Jürgen Habermas is in the background, right, running his hand through his hair. Siegfried Landshut is in the background left.
Photograph by Jeremy J. Shapiro via Wikimedia Commons.
The Most Destructive Intellectual Project of the Twentieth Century.
The Frankfurt School. You should know what it was, what it built, and why you are still living inside it.
1. The Institute for Social Research was founded in Frankfurt in 1923 and relocated to Columbia University in 1934 when Hitler came to power. The civilization they had decided to dismantle gave them refuge when another tried to kill them. They spent the next five decades producing the theoretical infrastructure for that dismantling. Western civilization itself was the problem: reason, the Enlightenment, the family, tradition, authority. Not reformed. Dismantled.
2. They called it Critical Theory – and the name is the program. Everything is to be criticized; nothing is to be built. In The Dialectic of Enlightenment (1944), Adorno and Horkheimer argued that Western reason — the reason that produced Newton and the rule of law — contained the seeds of Auschwitz. Not that reason had been misused, but that reason itself, taken to its conclusion, produces the death camp. This was not a critique of institutions. It was an indictment of the civilization itself.
3. Adorno gave them the psychological weapon. The Authoritarian Personality (1950) classified conservatism, religious faith, patriotism, and the traditional family not as political positions but as symptoms of a proto-fascist personality. If you believe in the nation or the father’s authority, you are pre-fascist. The opponent was no longer wrong – he was sick. You don’t argue with a pathology. You treat it. This made dialogue impossible. You don’t persuade someone who is wrong; you diagnose someone who is sick. Politics becomes therapy, and disagreement becomes pathology.
4. Marcuse gave them the political weapon. Repressive Tolerance (1965) argued that tolerating wrong ideas is itself oppression. True tolerance therefore requires suppressing intolerant ideas. The left decides which ideas are intolerant. Everyone else is silenced – not despite tolerance, but “in its name”. Censorship dressed in the vocabulary of liberation.
5. The generation that read Marcuse at Columbia, Berkeley, and Yale went on to run universities, media, foundations, NGOs, content moderation departments, and the EU regulatory apparatus. They implemented the argument sincerely because they had been taught it as philosophy. This was the Frankfurt School’s greatest achievement: it produced true believers.
6. French Theory picked up the tools and made them aesthetic. Foucault made the critique of power literary. Derrida made the critique of meaning philosophical. Deleuze made the critique of identity elegant. A political program became a cultural sensibility. You can argue with a program. A sensibility is in the air you breathe. By the time these ideas reached the American campus through the French conduit, they were no longer ideology. They were the water. The fish did not know they were wet.
7. A civilization stands on three pillars: truth exists and is accessible to reason; good is distinguishable from evil; and there is an inheritance worth transmitting. The Frankfurt School attacked all three – systematically and with considerable intellectual sophistication. It produced a generation that knows how to deconstruct and has forgotten how to build. That sees power everywhere and beauty nowhere. The ultimate achievement was to make destruction feel like progress. Every inherited institution became suspect; every constraint became oppression; every act of preservation became reactionary. Deconstruction became the default, while construction became something that needed to justify itself.
The answer is not another theory. It is the thing the Frankfurt School most feared: the builder who simply builds, the scientist who follows the evidence, the father who transmits what was transmitted to him.
The deconstruction machine runs on the assumption that nothing is worth building.
Prove it wrong.
Tell the truth, have courage, and build.
August 12, 2026
“Hitler’s socialism wasn’t just an internal economic policy – it was the cause of the war”
On the social media site formerly known as Twitter, Krzysztof Szczawinski explains why socialism — of the left (the Soviet Union) and the right (Nazi Germany) — was the economic driver that pushed Europe into war in 1939. German socialism (in one state) could only continue to grow by annexing resources and manufacturing capabilities from neighbouring states, and by August 1939 it was Poland’s turn:
Socialism was at the origin of the war. Not as a coincidence. As a necessity. The socialist economic model generates contradictions it cannot resolve internally – the calculation problem, the misallocation, the stagnation, the mounting failure. War is the exit. It provides the external enemy that explains the internal failure. It justifies the total mobilization the system always wanted. It consumes the surplus population the economy cannot employ. It redirects the resentment outward.
Does this remind you of anything?
The evidence is not subtle. The NSDAP program of 1920 reads like a standard socialist manifesto. The economic reality confirmed it – price controls, industrial planning, state allocation of raw materials, entrepreneurs reduced to government functionaries. Private property in name only. Mises called it Zwangswirtschaft – coercive economy. Hayek dedicated a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the socialist roots of Nazism. Both writing from observation, not retrospect.
After 1945 the Soviet victors imposed their version and attached the capitalist label to every rival. Western textbooks followed. The lie became the curriculum.
The real divide has never been left versus right. It is collective control versus individual freedom. Once you place National Socialism correctly within the family of collectivisms, the political spectrum becomes legible – and the war becomes explicable.
When the system fails — and it always fails — it needs an enemy. The bigger the failure, the bigger the enemy required.
Imagine being Poland. Squeezed between two socialist systems, both searching for their enemy.
We were it.
August 11, 2026
The surging Democratic Socialists of America
J.D. Tuccille on the unlikely rise of the DSA faction within the Democratic party in time for the 2026 midterm elections:
Abdul El-Sayed’s victory in the Michigan Democratic Senate primary battle is only the latest by candidates affiliated with or adjacent to the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA). Unlike many of the openly socialist officeholders and political hopefuls gaining traction in the Democratic Party, El-Sayed claims to be a capitalist, but his positions are indistinguishable from those of the left-wing figures he campaigns with, such as Sen. Bernie Sanders (I–Vt.), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D–N.Y.), and podcaster Hasan Piker, who has aligned himself with both the Chinese government and Hamas.
As democratic socialists in general and the DSA in particular take over the Democratic Party, it’s worth examining the positions they take, the enemies they pick, and who supports them to see what they have in store for us as they seek to remake the country.
Young, Credentialed, and Unhappy Recruits
At a time when trust in higher education is sliding among Americans, the socialist surge is largely a project of young college graduates. El-Sayed “eked out his victory by winning young voters and highly educated voters”, finds a Washington Post analysis. That squares with a June Pew Research report that “Democrats who are White, younger or college-educated are more likely to view democratic socialists positively”. Credentialed but relatively low-income people make up the core of DSA recruitment.
Political analyst Nate Silver writes that “the sweet spot for the DSA” is “voters with postgraduate degrees but lower-to-middle household incomes of $30K to $60K per year”. Silver adds that “only 19 percent of Americans with bachelor’s degrees or higher had household incomes of $60K or below. The DSA rate is around twice that.” He puts this in the context of Peter Turchin’s elite overproduction hypothesis which argues that the country’s universities crank out too many credentialed graduates, with student loan debt attached to not-so-useful degrees, to be absorbed into the prestigious positions they believe they’re entitled to. The result is disillusionment and a search for somebody or something to blame.
That blame is falling on capitalism, American and western civilization in general, and Israel and Jews (the line between the people and the only majority-Jewish nation is inherently fuzzy, and “antizionism” has become a cover for bigotry the way the pseudoscientific term “antisemitism” repackaged old-fashioned Jew-hatred in the 19th century).
[…]
Socialists Revive Ancient Bigotry
DSA-aligned figures are not especially fond of the United States and its allies. It’s not difficult to find comments like New York socialist congressional candidate Darializa Avila Chevalier’s quip: “I forgot to get napkins so I just wiped my hand on the American flag behind me”. But as a group, they especially despise the world’s only majority-Jewish state.
Michigan’s El-Sayed says he believes the Israeli government is as evil as the terrorist group Hamas, which launched the October 7 attacks, and calls it guilty of “apartheid” and “genocide”. The DSA last year adopted a resolution denouncing Zionism (the belief that Jews have the right to establish and maintain Israel) as “a racist, imperialist, settler-colonial project” and made belief that “Israel has a right to defend itself” an offense punishable by expulsion from the organization. Hasan Piker claimed and repeated that Hamas is “a thousand times better” than Israel. Colorado congressional candidate Melat Kiros declined to label as antisemitic a deadly firebombing attack on a Jewish rally in Boulder.
August 9, 2026
The drift toward socialism in the west
I’m reminded of that line from Kipling: “And the burnt Fool’s bandaged finger goes wabbling back to the Fire”, as most western countries have had plenty of opportunities to observe socialism in the wild, yet there’s always the chorus that it “wasn’t real socialism” and this time it’ll be great:
Socialism survives because it flatters the most powerful human instinct you have: the desire to believe that good intentions produce good outcomes.
The engine is pure motivated reasoning: not ignorance, not stupidity.
Venezuela collapsed from one of Latin America’s wealthiest economies into a country where citizens lost an average of 11 kilograms of body weight in 2017 because food disappeared. The Soviet Union murdered tens of millions in gulags and deliberately starved Ukraine in 1932-33. Cuba turned a middle-income Caribbean nation into a prison island. West and East Germany, North and South Korea. The pattern repeats, and yet the ideology never takes the blame.
Here’s why. Socialism’s defenders always move the goalposts. When the USSR fell, they said it wasn’t “real” socialism. When Venezuela imploded under Chavez and Maduro’s nationalizations, they blamed American sanctions. There is always an excuse, and that excuse always points away from the central planning mechanism itself.
Ludwig von Mises nailed this in 1920 in his essay on economic calculation. Without prices set by voluntary exchange, planners cannot allocate resources rationally. You get shortages and surpluses simultaneously, not because bureaucrats are evil, but because they are operating blind. The information simply does not exist in a form they can use.
Mises’s argument is uncomfortable in a specific way: it says the system cannot work regardless of who runs it. You cannot fix central planning by finding better central planners.
The real villain is the intellectual class, professors and politicians who build careers selling the promise of top-down coordination. They capture universities, media institutions, and government agencies, and they teach each new generation that the solution to failed socialism is more socialism.
Socialism survives because the people promoting it face zero personal cost when it fails. The Venezuelan peasant starves. The tenured professor in Boston gets a book deal.
That gap between who sells the idea and who pays for it is what keeps the whole rotten project alive.
Celina notes that a recent Cato Instutute report shows uncomfortably strong support for both socialism and communism in the youngest groups:
This summer, America celebrated the 250th anniversary of its founding. At the same time, the Cato Institute, a libertarian think tank whose entire institutional purpose is the defence of free markets, commissioned a survey with Morning Consult of 2,253 American adults. The survey included the usual questions: pride in country, knowledge of what the anniversary commemorated, and belief in the American Dream.
Besides the typical civic questions, the Cato questionnaire also asked Americans their feelings on communism, socialism and capitalism. The responses were quite explosive; the survey’s authors reported that: 21 percent of Americans said they held a favourable view of communism.1
Not socialism but communism. The word itself, which to the older Western mind is attached to the gulag and the Stasi and the Cultural Revolution, the one that American politics spent literally seven decades treating as roughly synonymous with treason.
Among Americans aged 18 to 29, the figure was 38 percent. In that cohort, favourable views of communism (38 percent) ran only seven points behind favourable views of capitalism (45 percent), and the generation was the only age group in which favourable views of communism actually edged out unfavourable ones, 38 to 36. Socialism, meanwhile, outpolled capitalism among the young outright: 53 percent favourable against capitalism’s 45. Also, the generational gradient was almost perfectly linear. Favourability toward communism fell from 38 percent among Gen Z to 29 percent among younger millennials, 19 percent among the middle-aged, 13 percent among those approaching retirement, and just 5 percent among seniors, the Americans old enough to remember duck-and-cover drills, Brezhnev, and the Berlin Wall as a piece of functioning infrastructure.
The 2026 Cato survey was not a fluke, which would be plainly obvious to people with even a slight interest in American politics. We also know this was not a fluke because the year before, in March of 2025, a Cato/YouGov survey of 2,000 adults found 34 percent of under-30s favourable toward communism and 62 percent favourable toward socialism. Cato’s senior editor Michael Chapman recorded roughly 52 million Americans aged 18 to 29, reporting a 34 percent favourability figure implying something on the order of eighteen million young people willing to say a kind word about an ideology that the Black Book of Communism credits with approximately 100 million deaths.
If you know a bit about the history of communism in America, you can understand why these numbers landed the way they did. American attitudes toward communism for most of the twentieth century were not just slightly negative; they were extremely so. Anti-communism was one of the few genuinely bipartisan commitments in American life, embraced by Cold War liberals and conservatives alike. Congress quite literally passed the Communist Control Act of 1954, effectively outlawing the Communist Party. Having any public sympathy for communism was politically and professionally fatal, as evidenced by the loyalty oaths, blacklists, and the House of Un-American Activities Committee (HUAC). When Gallup asked Americans in 1949 what “socialism” meant to them, the largest share answered on the lines of “government ownership of the means of production”, and they wanted no part of it. Communism, the harder and more explicit term, was too unthinkable during that time to even be asked in the poll.2
https://www.cato.org/blog/new-poll-nearly-half-americans-dont-know-what-americas-250th-celebrating
https://news.gallup.com/vault/240749/gallup-vault-americans-views-socialism-1949-1965.aspx
July 23, 2026
DSA: Trump doesn’t respect political norms. Also DSA: Let’s abolish the current system
On Substack, Chris Bray attempts to establish what the nascent Democratic Socialists of America actually stand for — and what they stand against:
Democrats are racing left, sprinting faster and faster toward abject authoritarian idiocy. Democratic socialists are defeating old Democrats in Congress and governing our big cities to death, and the DSA now offers an explicitly post-capitalist future in which everything is “free”, the one thing that resources can’t actually ever be:
You have no debt. You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
You get as much food, energy, and everything else as you feel that you need, and labor is no longer imposed on anyone. Should work well.
Meanwhile, after years of dire warnings that Evil Trump doesn’t respect our Constitution, here’s an actual headline today from one of the mindless institutions of the Democratic Party’s narrative-making apparatus:
They also propose the replacement of the Supreme Court, the restructuring of the presidency, and the elimination of the Electoral College, but other than that they’re really mad that Trump doesn’t respect our political norms. Trump is very bad, because he’s tearing down our political system, and also we demand the destruction of our political system.
Why are they moving left, moving left, and then moving left some more? Why doesn’t anything ever hold them in check?
Because there’s no anchor on the right to hold the left anywhere near the center. There’s no force in American politics pulling consistently and effectively in the other direction. They’re unopposed and unanchored, so nothing holds them. Mixing metaphors, it’s like gravity ceased to exist, so the moon is floating away. Political centering is the product of a contest. Bad ideas are punished and rejected through debate. And we increasingly don’t have that. Here’s a Republican congressman bragging about getting his measure passed to make home repairs a federally funded giveaway:
Democrats think the federal government should just give you whatever you need as a government handout, while Republicans think the federal government should, how can I put this, just give you whatever you need as a government handout. Your bathroom faucet broke? Don’t worry, that’s a federal program.
Meanwhile, while Democrats demand the abolition of the Senate, the Supreme Court, the Electoral College, and private property, prominent Republicans are theatrically angry at … Donald Trump.
July 21, 2026
Business idea – socialist-themed holiday camp
This idea is a banger, but it won’t attract the audience who really could benefit from the experience: the camp experience is what they want you to have, not for themselves.
New startup idea: a socialist-themed holiday camp where affluent Westerners pay premium prices to experience the system they keep voting for.
Picture it. You arrive at Camp VS (Virtue Signal) and hand over your passport (you won’t need it, exit visas take eleven years to process). Staff assign you to a concrete panel block, 320 square feet, shared with two other families you’ve never met. The heating works from 6 to 8 a.m. The elevator works never. Authentic Khrushchyovka construction, guaranteed.
Your daily itinerary: Wake at 5 a.m. Stand in the bread line until noon in minus 15 Celsius. The bread runs out at 11:40, but the queuing builds character, and character is the only thing not in shortage. Afternoon activities include a second line for toilet paper (there is no toilet paper) and a mandatory lecture on how the shortages prove capitalism sabotaged the harvest.
For guests seeking the deluxe package, we offer the Gulag Experience: rock-busting in a quarry under armed supervision, with optional whipping for anyone who fulfills less than 110 percent of quota. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn wrote 1,800 pages about this amenity. Rave reviews, in a sense.
Every fourth guest works as an informant. You won’t know which one. Complaining about the food earns you a midnight interview with camp security, and the food gives you plenty to complain about: it’s cabbage. All of it. Abolish market prices and you abolish economic calculation, so nobody can know what to produce, in what quantity, or for whom. The planners guess. The planners guess cabbage.
Checkout is where the theme really lands. You can’t. The wall around the camp faces inward, and East Germany shot 140 people at theirs between 1961 and 1989 to keep paying customers from leaving the workers’ paradise.
The irony here is that this business would only survive under capitalism, because it needs voluntary customers, market prices, and profit signals to exist at all. Run it as an actual socialist enterprise and within a year the camp has no bread, no rocks, and no guests. Just like the original.
July 15, 2026
QotD: First up against the wall, come the revolution
A real-life individual named Savva Morozov (1862–1905) was one of the wealthiest men in pre-revolutionary Russia.
He was a textile magnate, a patron of the arts, and a genuine philanthropist. His Moscow mansion was said to be the most expensive in the city. He and his wife, Zinaida, hosted famous writers, composers, and scientists. Morozov also worked to improve conditions for workers in his factories. He gave pregnant women paid leave. He funded scholarships for students. He built a hospital and a theater for his workers. He pushed for constitutional reform: freedom of the press, freedom of association, workers’ rights to organize and strike, and public oversight of the state budget.
Morozov also bankrolled the Bolsheviks.
Reports from this period suggest he gave hundreds of thousands of rubles to the revolutionary cause. He personally financed an underground newspaper of the banned social-democratic party that would eventually become the Russian Communist Party.
Morozov’s goal was almost certainly not to ignite a civil war or hand power to a dictatorship. He likely saw the radicals as useful pressure on the tsar, a way to force real reforms from a regime that would not move on its own.
When revolution came in January 1905, the violence shocked him.
He had set forces in motion that he could not control.
He suffered a nervous breakdown and fell into depression. His doctors and family sent him to the French Riviera to recover. He checked into a hotel in Cannes. There, he apparently shot himself, though rumors persisted for years that he had been murdered and the suicide had been staged.
His wife Zinaida returned to Russia and continued living off the enormous fortune her husband had left behind. Then came 1917. The Bolsheviks seized everything. She survived by selling off the few pieces of jewelry she had managed to keep.
The lavish country estate she and her husband owned later became the personal residence of Vladimir Lenin, leader of the communist revolution. Today it is a museum called Lenin’s Gorki, filled with the possessions and mementos of the first leader of the Soviet Union.
In his book End Times: Elites, Counter-Elites and the Path of Political Disintegration, Peter Turchin points out that in most cases of societal collapse and state breakdown, “the overwhelming majority of precrisis elites … were clueless about the catastrophe that was about to engulf them. They shook the foundations of the state and then were surprised when the state crumbled.”
Rob Henderson, “Dark Shadows Fall, One Upon The Other”, Rob Henderson’s Newsletter, 2026-03-22.
July 14, 2026
The problem is the state
Brivael Le Pogram explains that acceptance of mediocrity is key to the decline of most western societies … meek acceptance that we are lesser people living in the ruins of a just-passed but rapidly receding Golden Age:
An SNCF Train à Grande Vitesse (TGV) Duplex DASYE (moteur asynchrone, nouvelle generation de duplex) train at Figueres-Vilafant station, May 2011.
Photo by eldelinux via Wikimedia Commons.
I’m on a “air-conditioned” train where it’s 26 degrees. The WiFi doesn’t work. No one says a word.
And that’s what fascinates me the most: not the breakdown, but the collective acceptance.
The socialist state has pulled off a psychological feat. It’s made us internalize that a mediocre service, paid for at exorbitant cost, is normal. That it’s even what “public service” means.
The same service in a free market would cost a fraction of the price. And if the AC broke down, you’d be refunded within the hour, because a competitor is waiting right next door for you to switch shops.
Make a list of everything the state touches:
Education: plummeting standards, teachers burning out, PISA rankings in freefall.
Healthcare: months-long waits, hallways full of gurneys, caregivers fleeing.
Transport: delays, breakdowns, strikes, prices exploding.
Justice: years for a judgment.
Police: overwhelmed, demoralized.
Colossal budgets.
Record-high tax takes in Europe.
Result: everything’s rotten.Why?
Because two things are missing that only the market provides: skin in the game and prices.
Skin in the game first. An entrepreneur who delivers a lousy service goes bankrupt. He loses HIS money, HIS reputation, HIS years of work. A bureaucrat who mismanages a public service loses nothing. He’ll get promoted, transferred, or at worst he’ll coast to retirement. Failure has no personal consequences. So failure repeats, indefinitely.
Prices next. Hayek showed it: market prices are an information system. Every price aggregates millions of individual decisions and signals where to allocate resources. When the state sets prices or subsidizes at a loss, it destroys that signal. No one knows anymore what anything is worth. We sprinkle money at random, we waste, and we call it “public investment”.
That’s why the bureaucrat is the worst possible steward of your taxes: he spends other people’s money, on other people. No incentive to save, no incentive to serve well. Milton Friedman summed it up in one sentence: it’s the worst of the four ways to spend money.
The problem isn’t this minister, that government, this reform. The problem is structural. A monopoly without competition, without prices, without skin in the game, will ALWAYS produce mediocrity. No matter who’s running it. No matter the budget.
If you’ve grasped that, you’ve grasped 90% of political economy.
So do one simple thing: explain it to your loved ones. Next delayed train, next emergency room wait, ask the question: “Who loses money when this service sucks?” Answer: no one. That’s the problem.
The information will eventually spread. And one day, collectively, we’ll stop swallowing it.
The problem is the state. Always.
Auto-translated from the original French by X.
Update, 15 July: Welcome, Instapundit readers! Have a look around at some of my other posts you may find of interest. I send out a daily summary of posts here through my Substack – https://substack.com/@nicholasrusson that you can subscribe to if you’d like to be informed of new posts in the future.
July 9, 2026
QotD: The labels “capitalism” and “socialism”
It was not necessary to be an intellectual to be dismayed by the inequality of industrial society. The Welsh-born factory owner Robert Owen envisaged an alternative economic model based on cooperative production and utopian villages like the ones he founded at Orbiston in Scotland and New Harmony, Indiana. It was in a letter to Owen, written by Edward Cowper in 1822, that the word “socialism” in its modern sense first appears. An unidentified woman was, Cowper thought, “well adapted to become what my friend Jo. Applegath calls a Socialist”. Five years later, Owen himself argued that “the chief question … between the modern … Political Economists, and the Communionists or Socialists, is whether it is more beneficial that this capital should be individual or in common”. The term “capitalism” made its debut in an English periodical in April 1833 — in the London newspaper the Standard — in the phrase “tyranny of capitalism”, part of an article on “the ill consequences of that greatest curse that can exist amongst men, too much money-power in too few hands”. Fifteen years later, the Caledonian Mercury referred with similar aversion to “that sweeping tide of capitalism and money-loving which threatens our country with the horrors of a plutocracy”.
Niall Ferguson, “Capitalism, Socialism and Nationalism: Lessons from History”, 2020-02.
