Right now in the US, part of the Democratic Party has decided to play the "socialist" card. Days before the midterms, DSA candidates are winning primaries and the word isn't taboo anymore. So today I'm going to show you why socialism never works. Not with ideology. With mechanics. Let's start with a dumb question. How much should a loaf of bread cost? You don't know. Neither do I. Nobody does. And that's exactly the point. The price of a loaf of bread is the instant synthesis of millions of pieces of information that no single person holds: the wheat harvest in Kansas, the price of gas for the oven, the baker's wages, the shop's rent, a drought in Argentina, a war on the Black Sea, whether people feel like bread this morning or a bagel. In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published a paper that should have ended the debate. His argument: without private ownership of the means of production, those means are never exchanged. No exchange, no prices. No prices, no economic calculation. The planner can't know whether a steel mill is worth more than a dam or a hospital. He's flying blind. He can't even tell that he's wrong. In 1945, Friedrich Hayek drove the point home in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Useful knowledge is scattered across millions of minds. The baker knows things about his neighborhood that no ministry ever will. Prices are a telecommunications system: when tin becomes scarce somewhere in the world, its price rises, and millions of users economize on it without even knowing why. No committee, no ministry, no plan can replicate that. The market isn't an ideology. It's a distributed information processor. Then Milton Friedman picked up a simple pencil. The wood comes from Washington State, the graphite from South America, the rubber from Malaysia. Thousands of people who don't know each other, don't speak the same language, maybe even hate each other, cooperate to make something none of them could make alone. Nobody gave them orders. Prices were enough. Now run the experiment in reverse. Set the price yourself. Cap rents below market: landlords stop maintaining, stop building, housing disappears. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a man of the left, said rent control is the most efficient technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it. Cap the price of flour: shelves empty, lines form, the black market takes over. Venezuela, 2016. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth, and people standing in line for hours to eat. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans eventually fled. Socialism smashes the thermometer and then acts surprised that the fever keeps rising. And this is where it gets serious. Because when the plan fails, and it always fails, the planner has two options. Admit the plan is wrong. Or blame the people. Saboteurs, speculators, kulaks, enemies of the people. He always picks the second one. Hayek saw it in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter with a chilling title: Why the Worst Get on Top. A central plan requires central power. Central power attracts those who crave power. And when reality resists the plan, reality has to be broken. Which means people have to be broken. Stalin. He collectivizes the land. Output collapses. He blames the peasants and seizes the harvests. The Holodomor, 1932-1933: millions starved to death in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. Add the Gulag, the purges, the deportations. Mao. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962. Backyard furnaces producing useless steel, insane grain quotas, local officials inflating numbers to avoid punishment, and the state requisitioning food based on those fake numbers. The result: the worst famine in human history. Estimates range from 30 to 45 million dead. Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge abolish money, markets, property, and empty the cities. The dream of total planning, carried all the way. In four years, roughly one in four Cambodians dies. Hitler. He sent communists to the camps, but his party called itself National Socialist and the economy answered to the plan and the party. Companies stayed private on paper, but the state decided what to produce, at what price, and for whom. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists of all parties" precisely because he saw the same root: the idea that the state must steer society toward a collective goal, and the individual must step aside. Different eras. Different continents. Different cultures. Same mechanism. Same ending. This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the system. Remove prices and you remove information. Remove information and you remove the ability to correct. And when you can no longer correct through prices, you correct through force. So let me say it plainly. Socialism always starts nice. A rent freeze. Public grocery stores. Make "the rich" pay. Nobody promises the Gulag on day one. But if America truly goes down this road, the rest of the story is already written. The plan will fail. There will need to be culprits. There will need to be power to punish them. And a socialist government holding the American state apparatus, its surveillance capabilities, its technology, its military, wouldn't be a regional tragedy. It could be the greatest tragedy in history. The 20th century paid for this lesson with tens of millions of lives. We don't get to forget it in one generation. Prices aren't the enemy of the people. Prices are the voice of the people.

"You reduce crime by eliminating poverty." This is one of the greatest intellectual confusions of our century. It sounds compassionate. It feels obvious. And the moment you actually test it, it falls apart. Let's look at the data. First, the correlation is real. Nobody serious denies that poorer areas have more crime. In Sweden, kids from the poorest 20% of families are about 7 times more likely to be convicted of a violent crime than kids from the richest 20%. But correlation is not causation. So Swedish researchers did something brilliant: they compared siblings. Same parents, same home, same upbringing, but different family income at different points in their childhood, because parents' income moves over time. Result, on more than 500,000 children (Sariaslan et al., British Journal of Psychiatry, 2014): once you account for what's shared inside the family, the effect of income on violent crime goes from 7x to nothing. The hazard ratio drops to 0.95. No effect. Finland ran the same test on 650,000 people. Same result: the income-crime link disappears when you compare siblings. What predicts crime isn't the bank balance. It's what travels inside families. Second test: what happens when poverty spikes for everyone at once? 2008. US unemployment doubled from 5% to nearly 10%. 15% of Americans officially poor. If poverty creates crime, crime should have exploded. Instead it fell. Year after year. Robbery, the most "economic" crime of all, dropped 10% in 2010 alone. Criminologists literally said they were stumped. Same story in the Great Depression: 25% unemployment, and crime went down in many cities. Third test: take families out of poverty and see. The US government ran a randomized lottery called Moving to Opportunity. Thousands of families in public housing got vouchers to move to low-poverty neighborhoods. For boys, violent arrests dropped at first, property crime arrests went up, and over time the effects faded. New zip code. Same behavior. Fourth: the claim that police don't matter. This one is just false. Chalfin et al. (American Economic Review: Insights, 2022): each additional police officer prevents about 0.1 homicides. And per capita, the lives saved are twice as many among Black victims as among white victims. The people who suffer most from "police don't matter" are the poorest neighborhoods. So what does predict crime? The Dunedin study followed 1,000 children from birth to age 32. Self-control measured between ages 3 and 11 predicted adult criminal convictions, even after controlling for social class and IQ (Moffitt et al., PNAS, 2011). Cognitive ability matters too: across 700,000 Swedish men, lower cognitive scores at 18 track with violent convictions, and the link barely moves when you control for childhood socioeconomic status (Frisell et al., 2012). And here's the part nobody quotes: in Dunedin, kids whose self-control improved over time did better than predicted. Behavior can change. Which means responsibility is real. Why does this matter? Because "poverty creates crime" isn't just wrong. It's toxic. It turns criminals into victims. The man who robbed you becomes a symptom of "the system," and you, the real victim, become a footnote in someone else's narrative. It merges two completely different things. "You're poor, we'll help you" is one policy. "You're poor and you committed a crime, so we'll excuse you" is another. Fusing them insults the millions of poor people who work, raise their kids, and never hurt anyone. The vast majority of poor people are not criminals. That alone kills the theory. It removes responsibility. Build a political system on "your circumstances made you do it" and you destroy the one thing that actually changes behavior: the certainty that you own your choices. Every excuse the state manufactures is an incentive. And it feeds the state forever. If every crime is a social failure, every crime justifies a new program, a new budget, a new agency. Crime becomes the business model of bureaucracy. The alternative is simple and old. A lighter state that protects instead of explains. The same rules for everyone, from the projects or from a gated community. Certain, swift punishment for anyone who commits a crime. And never, ever telling someone their crime was written in their social condition. Treating someone as responsible is respecting them. Excusing someone because they're poor is the most condescending thing you can do to them.

On my way to the office this morning, I passed a group of young people protesting, a Palestinian flag draped over their shoulders. And I asked myself a question I can't shake: why does this generation always fall into the same trap? No matter the history. No matter the context. Even the ones from wealthy families, who went to the best schools, who were dealt every good card. Always the same trap. I don't think it's stupidity. I think it's a mechanism. And a mechanism can be taken apart, piece by piece. A. The observation: everything the state touches becomes unaffordable. Look at economist Mark Perry's famous chart, the one people call "the chart of the century." It tracks US prices since 2000. At the top, what explodes: hospital services, college tuition, textbooks, childcare, housing. Increases of +100%, +150%, up to +250%, far above general inflation. At the bottom, what collapses: TVs, software, phones, toys, clothing. A TV today costs a fraction of what it did in 2000, for an infinitely better product. Look at what separates the two groups. It isn't technology. It isn't complexity. It's one variable: how much the state is involved. At the top, sectors that are subsidized, regulated, shielded from competition, where the state funds demand and blocks supply. At the bottom, sectors where companies fight every single morning to serve you better and cheaper. B. The mechanism: why it's systematic. When the state subsidizes demand without freeing supply, prices rise. Every time. Guaranteed student loans, and universities raise tuition. Housing aid plus blocked building permits, and rents skyrocket. Administered healthcare, and bureaucracy eats the budget before it ever reaches the patient. In France it's even more vicious, because the price doesn't disappear: it hides. You never see the hospital bill, you pay it through payroll contributions. You never see the cost of school, you pay it through taxes. Public spending at 57% of GDP, one of the heaviest tax burdens in the world, more than €3.4 trillion in debt. And the result? Overflowing ERs, falling PISA scores, young people who can't afford to live in the city where they work. The market didn't fail in these sectors. It was never allowed in. C. Suffering demands a culprit. A 22-year-old lives all of this in their bones. They can't find a place to live. Their degree either buries them in debt or opens no doors. The future feels blocked. That suffering is real, and I don't deny it for a second. But human beings can't stand suffering without a culprit. They need a face. A scapegoat. And this is where everything is decided: who taught them how to read the world? D. Whoever tells the story picks the villain. Schools are public. Universities are public. Culture runs on grants. Film goes through funding committees. Public broadcasting shapes the narratives. The people handing down the interpretive framework are, overwhelmingly, paid by the very system that creates the problem. Do you really think that system is going to name itself as the culprit? No. It names the capitalist. The boss. The landlord. "The rich." The multinational. The commercial West. Same role, same casting, every time. E. One lens, a thousand causes. And this brings me back to that flag. A generation taught to read every situation through a single lens, oppressor on one side, rich, Western, capitalist, oppressed on the other, will apply that lens everywhere. To housing. To climate. To conflicts on the other side of the world. The cause changes, the lens stays. That's why the trap is always the same: it's not the cause that draws them in, it's the way of thinking that was installed in them. F. The perfect inversion. Here's the irony. Capitalism is the force that drove down the price of almost everything it touched. The state is the force that blew up the price of almost everything it captured. And young people blame the first for the crimes of the second. It's like blaming the firefighter for the fire because you saw him at the scene. G. The ballot box confirms it. In the US, a few weeks out from the midterms, a large share of urban young voters is getting ready to vote Democrat for more state, more spending, more regulation. New York elected a self-described socialist mayor, carried by young voters, on promises of rent freezes and city-run grocery stores. Rent freezes, the policy that has made housing scarcer everywhere it's been tried. The cure that worsens the disease. In France, it's the same play in two acts. Part of the youth votes for the radical left, which promises more state. Another part votes for the center, which promises to "manage" the state well, and has dug the debt deeper than ever. Two different ballots, one shared assumption: the problem is the market, the solution is the state. H. The way out. These young people aren't stupid. They're right to be angry. They're just aiming at the wrong target. The day they understand that their rent, their tuition and their hospital are expensive precisely because the state runs them, their anger will change direction. They'll stop protesting against those who create. They'll start protesting against those who capture. That day, the greatest intellectual scam of our time will be over.