Recently, Family Research Council’s Tony Perkins sat down with House Speaker Mike Johnson to discuss some of the issues facing our nation. Among them was the rise of socialism and socialist candidates as well as the threat that socialist ideology poses to everyday Americans.
Earlier this year Rasmussen reported that support for capitalism has declined since 2023, and a growing share of likely voters now say socialism is better. On the whole, most Americans still support free markets — but that support has dwindled.
During their conversation, Speaker Johnson discussed socialism’s appeal among younger Americans, saying,
You have a lot of young people who are swayed with this idea that they’ll get free stuff, you know, and no one seems to want to finish and explain to them, you might get a few free things for a short while, but you’re going to give up your freedom and ultimately you might have to give up your life. That’s what’s happened in history.
Last November, Zohran Mamdani won New York City’s mayoral election. Mamdani, 34, belongs to the socialist Working Families Party. In his victory speech, Mamdani promised New Yorkers a “new age,” saying, “We will prove that there is no problem too large for government to solve, and no concern too small for it to care about.”
Unfortunately, there is nothing “new” about what Mamdani is saying. During the last century, Vladimir Lenin, Joseph Stalin, Fidel Castro, Mao Zedong, and others made similar promises to their citizens, and they all met with the same results. Many young people have been taught that socialism and communism failed in the past because they weren’t properly implemented, but that’s not the case. Socialism and communism failed every time they were implemented, because they are fatally flawed.
After the election, our friend Joseph Backholm published a list of some of socialism’s and communism’s basic flaws:
1. Socialism misunderstands human nature and implies that people will be virtuous as long as they have enough money. Then, ironically, it assumes everyone with money is sinister.
2. Socialism takes from the capable and gives to the less capable, ensuring that resources won’t ever be used productively.
3. Socialism destroys competition and consequently destroys innovation.
4. Socialism destroys people’s incentive to be productive by denying them the benefit of their labor. It always produces fewer, lower-quality products.
5. Socialism assumes I have the right to other people’s property just because they have more than I do. It depends upon and incentivizes greed.
6. Socialism denies people the dignity of having what they earn and earning what they have.
7. Socialism assumes people engaged in commerce always operate with corrupt motives, but people in government never do.
8. While claiming to decentralize power, it always centralizes power with a handful of bureaucrats.
9. Socialism assumes it’s always unjust for one person to have more than another, when real justice means the dishonest and unskilled shouldn’t have as much as the honest and skilled.
10. Socialism assumes humanity’s natural state is prosperity and rages over the fact that we aren’t all rich, when in reality the natural state is poverty, and capitalism is the only reason we aren’t all poor.
Joseph concluded by rightly pointing out, “Of course, none of this means a capitalist system doesn’t have weaknesses, but it can produce good outcomes and has. Communism never has because it assumes a world that does not exist and never will.”
Over the decades, other pundits have pointed out that socialism and communism are oppressive because they cannot work without using force against everyday citizens.
Americans — and especially Christians — need to understand socialism’s basic problems and its track record. This is a fatally flawed belief system that has produced disastrous results every time.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
