Socialism promises warmth, equality, and fairness. In practice, it centralizes power, rations scarcity, and delivers a system best described as “trickle-down socialism.“
Hearing New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani proclaim in his inaugural address that “we will replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism,” it occurs to me that for all the Left’s accusations that conservatives want to take us back to the 1950s, it is in fact socialists who are most committed to that project.
Not 1950s America, of course. 1950s East Berlin.
Because when one surveys the historical record, the only “warmth” produced by collectivism has been in the form of trash-can fires on street corners, with starving people in rags huddled around them to avoid freezing to death.
This, of course, is merely one of the many ways in which socialism reliably produces the very conditions it claims to oppose.
In our recent commentary on Bernie Sanders, we noted that socialism cannot operate without contradicting itself. It claims to demand equality, yet imposes hierarchy. It denounces wealth “in the hands of the few,” yet demands that wealth be controlled by a handful of political elites. It rails against a “rigged” economy, while openly declaring that its purpose is to rig outcomes in defiance of a free market.
These are not unfortunate side effects. They are structural necessities. Socialism cannot function without them because it is not merely an objection to inequality; it is an objection to freedom. It does not protest unfair outcomes so much as uncontrolled ones.
There are further contradictions that demand to be explored. One of them concerns socialism’s fixation on referring to the free market as “trickle-down economics,” a phrase meant to conjure an image of wealth pooling obscenely at the top and grudgingly dripping downward to a neglected public. It is rhetorically useful. It is also profoundly dishonest, because it is really socialism that deserves to be known as “trickle-down.”
If you want to see an economy brought to a trickle, where resources are controlled by a few at the top and handed out to a thirsty population by the drop, try socialism in earnest. Socialism does not abolish trickle-down economics. It institutionalizes it.
Under socialism, nothing moves horizontally. Jobs, housing, food, energy, capital, and opportunity all trickle down from a single source at the top. The state becomes the reservoir; the citizen becomes the supplicant. If capitalism is accused of allowing wealth to flow imperfectly, socialism’s solution is to stop the flow entirely and distribute droplets by decree. This “trickle down socialism” is not a corruption of the collective. It is socialism working exactly as designed. In this sense, socialists are not opponents of trickle-down economics; they are its most disciplined practitioners.
A similar absurdity appears elsewhere. Socialists profess hatred for banks, denouncing them as engines of greed and symbols of unearned financial power. And yet they seem to love controlling the Federal Reserve, since it’s the one financial institution empowered to create money out of nothing, to transfer wealth and distribute it without consent, and to dilute its value without accountability.
Private banks are condemned for excess, while monetary centralization is celebrated precisely because it allows political actors to spend without restraint and conceal the cost through inflation. What socialism objects to is not financial power itself, but financial power it does not control.
The pattern repeats with corporations. Socialists speak of them with moral revulsion, portraying them as soulless, unaccountable, and indifferent to human dignity. And then, without irony, they entrust their hopes to government, the largest, most coercive, and least accountable corporation ever devised.
Does government ever go out of business? Does any government agency, no matter how badly it fails? Any public school, no matter the results? Is there any accountability for the TSA, the DMV, the courts, or any number of other government functions that don’t seem to function? No. If anything, failure becomes more subsidized and more insulated. The government absorbs failure without consequence, consolidates power, and operates free from competitive pressure.
This is not to say that we should not be governed. We are conservatives, not anarchists. We merely observe the obvious: that if corporations are dangerous because they concentrate power, then we should be far more concerned with a government that does so by orders of magnitude, and without meaningful recourse.
This is the recurring sleight of hand at the heart of socialism. Power is condemned when it is decentralized and voluntary, but sanctified when it is centralized and compulsory. Inefficiency is intolerable when it emerges from markets, but excusable when it flows from bureaucracies. Socialism does not oppose dominance. It merely insists on being the dominant force.
Taken together, the contradictions are too consistent to dismiss as coincidence. Socialism claims to oppose hierarchy, yet requires planners. It claims to oppose wealth concentration, yet concentrates power absolutely. It claims to oppose rigged systems, yet exists to override free outcomes. It claims to oppose trickle-down economics, yet mandates top-down distribution. It claims to despise banks, yet worships the world’s most powerful bank. It claims to loathe corporations, yet places its faith in the ultimate monopoly. It claims to reject nostalgia, yet endlessly resurrects the failed models of the past.
This is not hypocrisy in the casual sense. It is ideological necessity. Socialism does not lead to force; it is force. A system that rejects the outcomes of free people must manage them. A system that cannot produce abundance must ration it. And a system that cannot persuade must coerce.
Socialism survives not by resolving its contradictions, but by forever presenting itself as something new and untried, rather than old and disproven. And here we see socialism’s ultimate contradiction, and perhaps its greatest achievement.
Each failure is dismissed as an aberration. Each collapse is blamed on insufficient purity, hostile conditions, or the wrong people in charge. The theory survives precisely because its consequences are never allowed to count as evidence.
Socialism is sold not as a legacy of results, but as a promise forever deferred. It is described as “full of possibilities” only because its history is treated as irrelevant. And yet that history is not ambiguous. It is old. It is documented. And it is catastrophic.
From stagnation to starvation, from rationing to repression, socialism has left a trail of disasters too consistent to be accidental. It killed tens of millions of people in the 20th century alone. What endures is not a bold experiment, but graveyards—and a well-worn illusion: that next time will be different, that this version will finally work, that the river will somehow flow once the dam is complete.
This is socialism’s true sleight of hand: not the redistribution of wealth, but the redistribution of memory. Capitalism is endlessly judged by its outcomes. Socialism survives by pretending it has none. And that, more than any other contradiction, explains both its resilience and its failure.
Capitalism, without compassion, is flawed, imperfect, and often unfair. It deserves criticism. What it does not deserve is replacement by a system whose defining feature is that it cannot tell the truth about itself.
