THEIR PARENTS FLED SOCIALISM. NOW THEY’RE RUNNING TO BRING IT TO AMERICA

The Democratic Socialists of America does not describe its project as Scandinavian-style capitalism with a larger welfare state. DSA says its vision “pushes further than historic social democracy” and calls for collective ownership of key economic sectors.

That distinction matters.

Socialism has undergone an extraordinary marketing transformation. Ask about socialism, and the conversation quickly becomes about affordable healthcare, cheaper housing, higher wages, and helping working families.

But compassion is not socialism. A safety net is not socialism. Public schools are not socialism.

Socialism is ultimately about power: who owns, who decides, and who controls.

And that is precisely where its promise begins to unravel.

Socialists correctly recognize that concentrated private economic power can be dangerous. Then they offer a remarkable solution: Concentrate more economic power in political institutions.

Why should we trust politicians with economic power we would never trust corporations to possess?

A corporation cannot tax you. It cannot imprison you. It cannot write the laws governing its competitors. Government can.

Economic power does not become harmless when transferred to the state. It becomes political power, too.

That should trouble liberals as much as conservatives.

This debate is no longer academic. DSA announced in July that it had reached a record 120,000 members. Gallup found last year that 66% of Democrats viewed socialism positively, compared with just 42% who viewed capitalism positively.

That should alarm us.

Socialism also has a fundamental problem with wealth: It spends far more time asking how wealth should be distributed than explaining how wealth is created.

Before the government can redistribute a dollar, somebody must create something worth a dollar.

Before we can finance hospitals, schools, pensions, or housing subsidies, people have to build businesses, invent products, invest capital, employ workers, and generate the wealth that pays for them.

Capitalism understands something socialism persistently underestimates: incentives matter.

Profit encourages people to risk their money on ideas that might fail. Competition forces businesses to improve. Prices communicate scarcity. Loss punishes bad decisions. Consumers decide which ideas survive.

Markets are imperfect because people are imperfect. But their great advantage is that no single person needs to know what an entire economy should do.

Not a president.

Not Congress.

Not an economics professor.

Not a so-called “democratic socialist” committee.

Nobody.

The genius of capitalism is that nobody has to.

Millions of individuals make decisions using knowledge of their own needs, ambitions, and circumstances. The result is messy, unequal, and sometimes unfair. It is also an extraordinary engine of innovation and prosperity.

That does not mean capitalism should escape criticism.

Protect competition. Punish fraud. Make housing easier to build. Reform healthcare. Maintain a serious safety net. Help people who fall.

But reform capitalism because it is worth preserving, not because we are embarrassed by it.

Socialism’s central promise is greater economic fairness through greater collective control.

But “collective control” is a comforting phrase for an uncomfortable reality:

Someone still has to do the controlling.

I would rather trust millions of imperfect people to make their own economic decisions than trust a smaller number of equally imperfect people to make those decisions for everyone else.

That isn’t a Republican principle.

DEMOCRATIC SOCIALISM IS A LIE — IT’S JUST COMMUNISM WITH BETTER BRANDING

It’s a liberal one.

And it is more than enough reason to reject socialism.

Ori Solow is an Israeli-American and the founder of SZM, a social media movement advocating the safety of Jewish New Yorkers and empowering the next generation of Jewish voices.