The DSA’s dangerous ‘affordability’ plan

OPINION:

Americans should read the Democratic Socialists of America’s political manifesto.

Not because the DSA’s ideas have merit, but so that everyday Americans can see for themselves how socialism denies reality.

The DSA’s utopian vision rests on the assumption that if socialism replaced capitalism, human vice would magically disappear and everyone would set aside their own interests and serve the national collective.

In this imagined fantasy, the government would take companies away from their owners and somehow run them better than their owners did.

Do you really think a government-run Amazon would deliver quality, affordable products on time?

Socialism declares goods and services fundamental human rights but then neglects how they come into being. Socialists are very good at telling people what they should have, but they do not bother explaining how socialism would produce such abundance. Because they cannot.

Although the DSA wants to assume the mantle of “affordability” and ending poverty, the reality is that wherever socialism has been implemented, it has left runaway inflation or economic rationing in its wake, not boundless prosperity.

Socialism has led to many of the world’s largest mass starvation events: China’s catastrophic Great Leap Forward, the Soviet famine of 1932-1933 and devastating famines in countries such as Cambodia, North Korea and Ethiopia. The death count from the Great Leap Forward alone likely exceeds the current population of Texas.

The DSA seeks to disassociate itself from socialism’s horrific record by claiming to be “democratic,” but socialism always begins by portraying itself as a movement of the people.

Socialist theories rest on fantastical ideas about creating an egalitarian society in which the form of government transforms or perfects human nature. Although common sense and experience tell us that people act according to incentives they face, socialists imagine people can be rewired to labor for central planners’ idea of the “common good.”

That fundamental disconnect from reality is a key reason why socialism always ends up in widespread poverty and despair. The DSA manifesto imagines a world without bills — except for “aggressive” tax bills on those who produce anything of value.

The DSA then fails to explain why anyone should work a hard, dirty or stressful job if the state will just take the fruits of their labor to provide for those who do not work. Why not just kick back and enjoy the food, utilities, healthcare, transportation and “comfortable housing” that the state promises to provide?

In socialists’ wishful imaginations, “everyone is free, equal and cared for,” but somehow there will be no freeloading.

In the real world, when people do not have a personal incentive to work, they work less — or not at all — so there is less to go around. Socialist countries deal with that scarcity in one of two ways: by printing money that leads to hyperinflation or by using price controls and rationing.

Under socialist policies set in motion by Hugo Chavez and carried out under Nicolas Maduro, Venezuela experienced catastrophic hyperinflation that the IMF estimated at nearly 930,000% in 2018.

At the peak of hyperinflation in Zimbabwe, prices were roughly doubling every day in November 2008.

The Soviet Union experienced high inflation before switching to a strict price control program that led to meager incomes, persistent shortages, scant choices and long food lines.

The DSA’s cartoonish proposals reflect a sophomoric ignorance of socialism’s brutal reality. Its outlandish platform calls for a new Constitution, abolishing the Senate, seizing the assets of large corporations and wealthy individuals and extending full voting rights to noncitizens. It is a sanitized call for a revolution.

Like all other socialist revolutions, if it succeeds, it will not end well.

The DSA promises that you will be free to live life “without worrying about cost.” Yet if you are not worrying about costs, you will be worrying about rationing.

The DSA says you will not have a landlord. Yet under socialism, you would live in broken-down public housing like everyone else, and a government bureaucrat would be your landlord.

The DSA says you will have “no debt” and a “publicly funded retirement” after they tear down the “entire global system of capital.” That means you will die as a ward of the state without a penny to your name. When the DSA calls for abolishing the police and prison system — and it really does call for that — the goal would ultimately be to use it as a temporary measure to accelerate the revolution.

When the socialists consolidate power, the police state will arrive in force.

Socialism is not the solution to high prices. The gradual, decades-long encroachment of the government into individuals’ lives and pocketbooks, and into businesses’ operations, is exactly the problem.

No amount of wishful thinking can change that reality.

• Preston Brashers is a senior research fellow in the Plymouth Institute for Economic Freedom at Advancing American Freedom Foundation.