Socialism: Same Old Pitch, New Packaging
The Cato Institute recently published a column explaining the flaws with socialists’ soundbites and political positions.
Rasmussen reports that support for capitalism has declined since 2023, and a growing share of likely voters now say socialism is better. 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.”
But this modern socialism is really just a repackaging of the same arguments and soundbites that communism used in the last century.
Earlier this month, the Cato Institute published a column titled “Ten Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) Arguments for Socialism and Why They’re Wrong.”
The column points out well-documented problems with socialism — like rationing in the Soviet Union and collectivized agriculture in Communist China, which oppressed millions of people and kept them in abject poverty.
The Cato Institute argues that government intervention in housing and real estate tends to actually raise housing prices instead of making homes more affordable.
The article also notes that socialism is inherently totalitarian, writing, “Socialism, as law professor Ilya Somin observes of its century-long record, has always required coercion to make people surrender their property to the state.”
Socialism and communism have a well-known track record of tyranny.
As Ben Shapiro put it a few years ago, “Socialism is bad, because socialism is tyranny. Not it’s an aspect of tyranny. Socialism itself is tyranny. … The notion of socialism is that you don’t own your own freedom.”
Or as the Colson Center’s John Stonestreet said last year, “The reason oppression results every time socialism is tried is because it’s built into the system. Oppression is not a bug of socialism. It’s a feature.”
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. said in 1953, “Communism is irreconcilable with Christianity,” because it is atheistic and materialistic and because “the methods of communism are diametrically opposed to Christianity.”
Socialism and communism have simply never worked. Capitalist systems have flaws and weaknesses, but they have still managed to produce good results. Socialism has not.
Maybe that’s why the Democratic Socialists of America has an online store powered by Shopify that accepts all major credit cards and sells DSA merchandise like $30 T-shirts and $45 hoodies.
Articles appearing on this website are written with the aid of Family Council’s researchers and writers.
