Tag: socialism

There’s a Real Problem in Seattle, and With Its Clueless Mayor, It’s Hard to See Resolution

There’s been a real mess brewing in the city of Seattle, and things have just about reached a fever pitch.

Criminal activity has reached an all-time high within the city, thanks to an inept Mayor, Katie Wilson, who can’t seem to figure out how to benefit her police department more. But then came a terrifying act – a mass shooting during the Bite of Seattle food event – on Sunday evening that has managed to leave three dead and a toddler wounded.

The police have acted quickly enough to apprehend a suspect, but they are still investigating the matter. But the shooting has led to a series of questions, namely surrounding then police chief Shon Barnes.

Apparently Barnes had been traveling at the time of the shooting, as he had just taken a trip from Chicago and was visiting the National Organization of Black Law Enforcement Executives in Dallas. 

Of course, officers are allowed to visit events such as this, but apparently Barnes took criticism of his out of town visit the wrong way.

During a press conference earlier this week, Barnes actually got into a confrontation with a reporter who kept pressing him about his being out of town, insisting he was dedicated to his city. It’s clear the pressure had gotten to him, and he simply needed to contain himself before he did something he regretted.

Now, I don’t personally know the history of Barnes, though it sounds like it might have been a bit troubled. But rather than work with him to try and put the pieces together on what happened and, more importantly, trying to keep it from occurring again, Mayor Wilson instead decided to give him a choice – resign or be fired. 

Which is a horrible decision. It’s true that the shooting was a tragedy, and the press conference did not do Barnes any favors. But to come to such a drastic decision and leave the city with even more questions? It just shows how absolutely flawed Wilson’s leadership is.

Barnes chose to resign, with Wilson saying, “I’ll say this decision was not solely due to the events of Sunday. Multiple factors figured into this decision and into the conversation that the Chief and I had.”

But a different resolution couldn’t have been made? Suspension? An investigation into the matter? It sounds like Wilson’s just trying to save face with her voter base, rather than standing behind the police and trying to right the wrongs.

Again, I can’t speak on Barnes’ record, I just can’t help but think Wilson doesn’t “get it” when it comes to doing what’s right for the city. And I’m not the only one who thinks this.

City Council President Joy Hollingsworth and council members Bob Kettle, Dan Strauss and Debora Juarez made a joint statement following the resignation. “Having cycled through four police chiefs in just two and a half years, our priority must be stability, not further disruption. The people of Seattle deserve reliable leadership, especially as we close out a busy summer of public events.”

That says everything you need to know right there. Four police chiefs in less than three years. That means Wilson has butted heads with every single one of them, potentially wiping out any plans to give them the support they deserve.

What’s more, a letter penned by the Urban League of Metropolitan Seattle and the Seattle NAACP noted that Barnes “should not be made a scapegoat for the complex challenges of public safety.”

So you’ve got a troubled police chief who didn’t even get a chance to validate himself for his actions and a mayor who can’t see eye to eye with, well, anyone in law enforcement. It’s a real mess, and the people of Seattle deserve far better.

There is light at the end of the tunnel here, and that’s with Deputy Chief Andre Sayles, who has stepped into the role of interim chief. It sounds like he’s good with Seattle police as a whole, with Kent Loux, President of the Seattle Police Officers Guild, noting he’s a “good pick.”

Now we just need Wilson to settle down and actually work with the police to make things good again. Between not addressing the shooting for several hours (which, surprise, she blamed the police for when it was clearly her fault) and dismissing a police chief before he even had a chance to figure out a proper resolution, I have zero faith in her at the moment. All we can hope is that she’ll work with Sayles and actually move forward in giving the police the support they need.

Because, otherwise, we’ll be looking at number five in a long line of police officials that Wilson can’t stand, and we have no idea who she’ll pick next.

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Establishment Democrats warn socialist candidates could cost the party the midterms

As Democratic Socialist candidates and their candidacies are gaining steam, establishment Democrats connected to the Clinton and Obama administrations are sounding the alarm, warning that the rise of radicals is threatening the party’s chances of winning the upcoming midterms. 

“There is emerging evidence that Democrats are being harmed by perceptions that the party is drifting towards socialism,” wrote Douglas Schoen and Carly Cooperman, partners at the public opinion company Schoen Cooperman Research.

Schoen is a veteran of Democratic President Bill Clinton’s 1996 campaign as well as Hillary Clinton’s 2008 bid for the party’s presidential nomination.

Alarming to these Democrats is the fact that President Donald Trump’s low approval ratings have not translated into the expected polling advantage for Democratic candidates heading into the midterms in November, in which control of the House and Senate will be decided. 

Trump’s approval rating is underwater, hovering under 40% since May. However, in the most recent YouGov/Economist poll, in late July, Democrats outperformed Republicans by only 4 points. For comparison, Democrats consistently polled 7 to 13 points ahead of Republicans ahead of the 2018 blue wave election. 

Such a “narrow lead,” Schoen and Cooperman say, “suggests that heightened focus on the socialist-progressive candidates of late severely hurts Democrats’ ability to capitalize on widespread anti-Trump sentiment.”

New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani has become the face of the Democratic Socialist movement. Earlier this year, he clashed directly with the Democratic Party establishment in the city in order to remake its congressional delegation in his image. Mamdani backed three progressive socialist-aligned candidates who were successful in unseating incumbents or their establishment-backed opponents.

One of those winners, Darializa Avila Chevalier, who is a member of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), has drawn scrutiny over past social media posts expressing support for communism and Marxist ideology, including sympathy for Soviet figures. 

Democratic Socialists or their ideological allies have also surged in Colorado, Maine and Michigan. Schoen and Cooperman believe the party is “running bigger risks” by considering these candidates because it will fuel the Republican efforts to paint the Democratic Party more broadly as unpopular socialists. 

In Maine, scandal-ridden Graham Platner – who was closely tied to the Democratic Socialist infrastructure of Vermont Independent Sen. Bernie Sanders and Mayor Mamdani – had to drop out of the race. 

But, the state party chose Troy Jackson to replace him. Though not directly affiliated with the DSA, Jackson is backed by the organization and shares many of its policy goals. The DSA even endorsed Jackson for his earlier failed bid for governor.

In Michigan’s Democratic Senate primary Tuesday, the frontrunner is Abdul El-Sayed, who is backed by democratic socialist Sanders and New York Democratic Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez. Though not affiliated with the DSA, he also espouses policies similar to the organization’s goals.

To Schoen and Cooperman, an affiliation with the DSA is not necessary to hurt the Democratic Party.

“Republicans do not need every Democrat to be Democratic Socialists of America members to brand all Democrats as socialists. They simply need enough high-profile Democrats on the party’s left-wing fringe to make the caricature stick,” they said in a Monday op-ed published in The Hill.   

Making matters worse, DSA co-chair Megan Romer took to cable news on Sunday to fully embrace that “caricature.” 

In an interview with Fox News’ Shannon Bream, which circulated widely on social media, Romer publicly embraced the most radical DSA proposals for the country, including abolishing the Senate, the presidency, the Supreme Court, national borders, immigration enforcement, prisons and defunding the U.S. military.

Romer made clear she views the DSA as ascendant and the establishment Democrats as outdated. 

“We run on the Democratic ballot line where it makes sense,” she said. “We run independents sometimes where that is a viable possibility, but it’s a ballot line. What matters is what the voters think, and the voters are overwhelmingly choosing our candidates.” 

Beyond Schoen, other Democrats are raising the alarm about the growing influence of socialists in their party and warning that it could lead to disastrous consequences for the midterm elections as the party’s popularity continues to sag. 

This month, former Chicago Mayor, Obama Chief of Staff and Ambassador to Japan Rahm Emmanuel said that Democratic Socialist “Bernie Bros” could “spoil” the midterm elections for Democrats. 

“Ultimately, this is about policy. It was socialists who led the charge to defund the police, open the borders, abolish prisons, release violent criminals onto the streets and degrade the flag. We know those are electoral losers,” Emmanuel wrote last week.  

He argues that these positions often held by more radical candidates running in deep blue areas make it more difficult for Democratic candidates running in swing districts vital for winning the House.  

Republicans are jumping on the success of the DSA to associate Democrats with the organization’s policies. 

President Trump and the GOP have launched a campaign arguing the Democratic Party has been infiltrated with communist candidates as the November election nears, Just the News reported on Wednesday. 

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Establishment Democrats Make Last Stand Against Socialist Takeover with Bizarre Rep. Haley Stevens Debate

Rep. Haley Stevens (D-MI) and former public health official Abdul El-Sayed presented Michigan Democrats with sharply different choices Monday during their final Senate debate before the August 4 primary, clashing over outside spending, corporate political contributions, Israel, immigration, health care, and which candidate was better positioned to defeat Republican Mike Rogers.

The Fox 2 Detroit debate highlighted the divide between Stevens, who is backed by Gov. Gretchen Whitmer (D-MI) and Rep. Jim Clyburn (D-SC), and El-Sayed, who has endorsements from Sens. Bernie Sanders (I-VT) and Elizabeth Warren (D-MA), Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-NY), and the United Auto Workers.

Outside spending and campaign finances dominated much of the debate. Stevens’ campaign and six super PACs backing her have spent more than $61 million on primary ads, according to AdImpact figures shared by CBS. El-Sayed’s campaign and outside groups supporting him have spent more than $15.3 million combined, according to FEC reports cited by CBS.

The New York Times reported that United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s main super PAC, had spent $30.6 million on advertising backing Stevens, while six other super PACs that had not disclosed their donors spent a combined $29.4 million on her behalf. 

El-Sayed repeatedly argued that groups spending tens of millions of dollars to support Stevens would expect something in return.

“Sixty million dollars from outside organizations in this race didn’t just go nowhere,” El-Sayed said. “It’s because those exact same organizations expect something on the other side.” He added that they “expect to own your next U.S. senator.”

He also questioned Stevens’ electability without that financial advantage.

“If you need a $60 million crutch, you probably can’t be elected on your own terms,” he said.

Stevens countered that El-Sayed also benefits from Fighting for Michigan PAC, which had spent about $2.4 million as of the debate. She said she did not believe there was “much difference” between super PACs supporting either candidate and pointed to her A grade from End Citizens United and endorsement from Defend the Vote.

The candidates also sparred over contributions connected to DTE Energy and Consumers Energy.

Moderator Roop Raj asked Stevens whether she was taking money from the two utilities for her Senate campaign. Stevens initially deflected, speaking about her transparency and criticism of her voice, before Raj pressed her for a direct answer. She then said no.

The Detroit News reported that Stevens’ House campaign received approximately $63,500 from the utilities’ main political action committees between 2019 and 2025. Her House committee later transferred two $2,500 contributions — one originating from DTE and one from Consumers Energy — to her Senate committee.

After the debate, Stevens said she answered no because Raj had asked specifically about the Senate race. El-Sayed called her response a “frank lie,” arguing that money transferred into her Senate committee had still entered the Senate campaign.

Israel and AIPAC also emerged as central points of disagreement. El-Sayed criticized Stevens for voting against cutting off U.S. aid to Israel and linked the vote to spending by United Democracy Project, AIPAC’s principal super PAC.

“That is the pro quo that comes with the quid of $30 million spent by AIPAC,” El-Sayed said.

Stevens responded by pointing to the super PAC supporting El-Sayed. “I don’t think there’s much difference between super PACs going in for Abdul or super PACs going in for me,” she said.

The candidates also disagreed over Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Stevens pointed to her visit to an ICE detention facility and said the agency’s treatment of detainees had become unacceptable.

“I went up to an ICE detention facility to call out and see why people were losing their lives, why they were being held for long periods of time without due process,” Stevens said. “This has been an outrage.”

El-Sayed took a more sweeping position, calling for ICE to be abolished.

“The idea that somehow we can’t say ‘abolish ICE’ because we’re so afraid of what they’re going to say, when we’ve seen ICE terrorize people in our streets, to me, it is exactly the kind of cowardice that we don’t need from Democrats,” he said.

Asked about accusations that he is a socialist, El-Sayed rejected the label and argued that monopolies and oligopolies pose the greatest threat to capitalism.

“I’m not a socialist,” El-Sayed said. “I’m just a capitalist who understands how capitalism works. The biggest threat to capitalism was never the idea of government regulation. It was always monopoly.”

He continued: “I think government ought to be there to regulate on monopolies and oligopolies, so that everybody can actually participate in an economy without having to be forced to pay more or get paid less for the work that they do.”

Elsewhere in the debate, El-Sayed called for eliminating the Senate filibuster, passing the PRO Act, taxing billionaire wealth, strengthening antitrust enforcement, and establishing Medicare for All.

Stevens portrayed El-Sayed as a “celebrity candidate” who viewed the Senate as another step toward higher office, pointing to his podcasts, books, and what she said was a website for a presidential campaign.

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The Socialist Monster Awakens

Who Caused Unaffordability?

Fear about “affordability” supposedly fueled the new, strident socialism.

Yet annual inflation during Biden’s four years averaged almost 5 percent. It peaked at over 9 percent, while prices for some key staples rose by 30 percent over his tenure—all to silence from the Left. (By contrast, annual inflation during Trump’s first term averaged 1.9 percent. In his second term, it averaged 2.6 percent in 2025—and may rise to 4.5 percent in 2026, given the war with Iran.)

The socialists were not just quiet during Biden’s four years; they were themselves responsible for the rampant Biden inflation. They had implemented an inflationary de facto third Obama term, ramming through the most radical and costly agenda in decades under the veneer of that cognitively challenged waxen effigy, good ol’ Joe Biden from Scranton.

So the current Jacobin takeover of the Democratic Party was not sparked by concerns about “affordability”—or at least not if by “affordability” we mean the middle-class struggle to buy a house, a car, or groceries.

Instead, the socialist moment was merely the logical culmination of years of boutique radicalism within the Democratic aristocracy—the ossified leadership of Chuck Schumer, Nancy Pelosi, Elizabeth Warren, Kamala Harris, and Hakeem Jeffries, along with the aging Black Caucus, the incoherent Squad, the DEI crowd, the open-border zealots, and the radical greens.

The grandees of the party also normalized the crazy mobs of BLM and Antifa long ago.

Democrats as Dr. Frankenstein

Almost every weaponized scam and national hysteria in the last two decades was amplified and spread by mainstream Democrats: the farcical claim that the Wuhan-lab-hatched COVID virus came from pangolins or bats; the Duke Lacrosse and Covington Kids hoaxes; the Jussie Smollett scam, the “Hands up, don’t shoot” lie; the deification of George Floyd, often portrayed with wings and a halo; Fauxcahontas Liz Warren, touted as the first Native American Harvard law professor (thanks to her grandfather’s high cheekbones); the radical diminution of in-person voting; the canonization of Trayvon Martin and Karmelo Anthony as blameless model children; and the mythology of a 1619 national founding.

Who allowed not just one, two, three, or four million border-jumpers into the country, but over ten million—illegal, unvetted, viewed as an assumed new political constituency, and instantaneously dependent on the welfare state?

Who gave us three, four, five, or even more genders and biological males showering with teenage girls or female prisoners? Who sloganeered about “defund the police” and “no cash bail”?

All this was about as radical as it gets.

The Democratic establishment’s unhinged hatred of Donald Trump mainstreamed radicalism even further and helped birth the socialist-cum-communist Frankensteinian monster that is now devouring its mad-scientist creators.

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Spain: 60% Reject Current Socialist Government While 30% Find It ‘Disastrous’

A survey in Spain found six out of ten Spaniards hold a negative opinion of Spain’s current legislative term and socialist Prime Minister Pedro Sánchez’s government, with as many as a third strongly condemning the legislature as “disastrous,” “nefarious,” and “ruinous.”

Spain will hold new elections next year, expected to occur no later than August 22, 2027. Although the Spanish conservative People’s Party obtained the most amount of seats in the August 2023 elections, Sánchez and the Spanish Socialist Workers’ Party (PSOE) managed to cling to power by securing alliances with minority leftist parties — allowing PSOE to secure enough votes for Sánchez’s current four year term.

PSOE and the Sánchez administration, however, find themselves navigating through an extremely complex moment as the last year of the current parliamentary term approaches. The Spanish socialists have been rocked by several corruption scandals and widespread rejection — most notably, with regards to the widely revile mass amnesty plan that saw some 1.2 million illegal migrants apply to receive “legal” status in Spain and all the benefits that it entails.

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Vulnerable Dem Implodes When Pressed About Support for Socialism

Yes, there’s a congressional race on the Left Coast that Republicans could wrest away from Democrats. Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez (D-WA) from Washington’s 3rd District is underwater in her race, not well-liked, and trailing her primary challengers. Washington goes by a top-two primary system: everyone from all parties is on the ballot, and the top two vote-getters advance to the general election. Perez is trying to lie low, keeping mum about the state income tax issue (via Oregon Public Radio): 

The race for Washington’s 3rd congressional district is expected to be one of the most competitive in the nation this fall, thanks to a wave of redistricting across the U.S. that has left few seats in play for either political party.

Washington state holds a “top-two primary,” which means that the top two vote-getters advance to the general election in November, regardless of party.

Yet as voters head into the Aug. 4 primary, experts predict a fiercely partisan general election, with an incumbent Democrat fighting to hold her seat against a state senator who’s been endorsed by President Donald Trump in a deeply purple district.

Two-term Rep. Marie Gluesenkamp Perez is favored in a field of four Democratic candidates. The frontrunner in a field of three GOP candidates appears to be state Sen. John Braun, a Trump favorite who represents a rural legislative district that includes northern Clark County.

Whoever emerges victorious will quickly find themselves at the heart of one of the fiercest and most closely watched Congressional races — one of just 18 seats without a likely outcome in November out of the entire 435-member House of Representatives, according to the Cook Political Report.

Perez knows she’s vulnerable, walking a waffled line on some issues, like this interview with a local NPR outlet, where she couldn’t handle questions about her ties and support for socialist causes. The FEC reports don’t lie; she’s taken in over $2 million from the MGP Victory Fund, which has ties to the Washington Democratic Party. It’s no shock, but lady, admit that you’re in with socialists, because that’s the state party platform. There’s a lot of Mamdani in these pages. 

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Socialism Fails: Why the Danish Model Won’t Work in the U.S.

Denmark is regularly held up in U.S. political debate as proof that socialism works, with the country’s high taxes, universal healthcare, and generous benefits cited as a model the United States could adopt if it were only willing to embrace socialism the way Denmark has. The comparison usually comes with a pointed question: if socialism produces this standard of living in Denmark, why can’t the United States do the same?

The record of countries that have actually implemented socialism answers that question on its own. China, Cuba, Laos, North Korea, and Venezuela have all organized their economies around state or Communist Party control of production. All five rank among the world’s most repressed economies and least free societies. Denmark’s nominal GDP per capita is high at $77,046, but it still trails the United States’ $89,991. The other five countries badly trail both: China sits at $13,968, Venezuela at $3,736, Laos at $2,288, and North Korea at just $640.

Cuba’s official GDP per capita is reported at more than $7,000 per year. That figure is calculated using the government’s official exchange rates, which bear little resemblance to the rate used in everyday transactions. At market exchange rates, the average state worker earns only about $15 to $25 per month.

On political rights and civil liberties, Freedom House’s 2026 report rates China at 9 out of 100 and North Korea at 3, both among the world’s least free states. Cuba, Laos, and Venezuela are all rated “Not Free” as well. Socialism, in its actual historical applications, has consistently produced restricted freedom and a low standard of living for the citizens living under it.

Denmark is frequently described as a socialist success story, but the label does not match how the Danish economy actually functions. Socialism, in its standard economic definition, means state or collective ownership of the means of production, with government directing investment, pricing, and output. Denmark does not operate this way. It is a capitalist market economy with private ownership of firms, competitive markets, and free trade. It carries a large tax-funded welfare and transfer system layered on top. That is the same market foundation the United States has, just carrying a much heavier tax load.

According to the OECD’s Revenue Statistics 2025, Denmark’s tax-to-GDP ratio reached 45.2% in 2024, the highest in the OECD for the second consecutive year, up from 44.0% in 2023. By comparison, the OECD average was 34.1% in 2024, and the United States collected roughly 25.6% of GDP in tax revenue, near the bottom of the OECD. That revenue funds redistribution and social insurance, not state-run enterprise.

Denmark’s private sector remains dominant, and government involvement is concentrated in financing benefits rather than owning production. The result is a market economy with a Gini coefficient of 28.6, among the lowest measures of income inequality globally, and a poverty rate of about 4% as of 2021.

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All Socialists are Ignorant… But Some are More Ignorant Than Others

n The Law, published in 1850, Frédéric Bastiat made a case against “legal plunder,” the perversion of the law to violate liberty and property rights. Nearly 100 years later in The Road to Serfdom, Friedrich Hayek warned that socialists, whatever their intentions, lacked the knowledge to command the economy.

Hayek also explained how the worst always get on top in socialist regimes, and after the German National Socialists’ Anschluss in 1938, he did not return to his native Austria. In 1983, President Reagan brought Hayek to the White House, and in 1991 President George H.W. Bush awarded Hayek the Presidential Medal of Freedom.

Nobel laureate Milton Friedman authored Capitalism and Freedom and became a national figure with the “Free to Choose” series on PBS. Basic Economics by Thomas Sowell also upheld the virtues of the market over government command of the economy. Those now proudly calling themselves “democratic socialists” seem unaware of these authors and show little if any inclination to engage in debate.

The surging socialists are even more unaware of works that show socialism as it actually existed under its most enthusiastic promoters. Consider, for example, the experience of Malcolm Muggeridge. His magisterial Chronicles of Wasted Time (1972) devotes a chapter to “A Socialist Upbringing.” The Muggeridge household jostled with politicians, scholars, and clergy dedicated to the cause, along with Labor Party stalwarts such as Ramsey MacDonald and Fabian socialists Sidney and Beatrice Webb. Their collective efforts aimed to benefit “the workers,” who were never present at any of their events.

“A worker is someone for whom everything is done as long as he keeps off stage,” Muggeridge noted, and “the whole notion of a working class with a specific political or cultural, or even spiritual role qua working class is a fantasy invented by guilt-stricken renegade proletarians like D.H. Lawrence, or by renegade bourgeoisie on the run like William Morris or, for that matter, Marx and Engels themselves, or just by a sociologist looking for a subject and a job.”

After stints teaching in India and Egypt, Muggeridge wound up in the first “workers’ state,” the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics (USSR), as the Moscow correspondent of the Manchester Guardian. Correspondents ran contests to see who could pass off the most fatuous story to the regime’s foreign admirers. Muggeridge convinced Lord Marley that the long lines for everything were intended to give zealous workers a chance to rest. When a British lawyer asked if the Soviets practiced habeas corpus, A.T. Cholerton of the Daily Telegraph told him they strictly adhered to habeas cadaver.

Stalin’s collectivization of agriculture claimed more than a million victims in Ukraine, but Walter Duranty of the New York Times contended that there was no forced famine there. Muggeridge decided to see for himself. “This particular famine was planned and deliberate, not due to any natural catastrophe like failure of rain, or cyclone, or flooding,” he wrote. “There is not only a famine but a state of war, a military occupation… Peasants with their hands tied behind their back being loaded into cattle-trucks at gunpoint.” After breaking this story, Muggeridge was widely vilified while Duranty’s mendacious reports won a Pulitzer Prize.

In August, 1939, Stalin signed a pact with Hitler’s Germany. “I had been expecting such a development,” Muggeridge wrote, “never losing an opportunity to say that Bolshevism and National Socialism were the same thing, except that one was a Slav version and the other Teutonic.” Margarete Buber-Neumann described that reality in Under Two Dictators: Prisoner of Stalin and Hitler.

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Lenin’s New Economic Policy: When the Soviets Admitted Socialism Doesn’t Work

A century ago, the Mother Ship of Socialism—the Soviet Union—was teetering on the precipice. The Poles had just vanquished the hopes of dictator Vladimir Lenin to sweep across Europe. Under the bludgeon of Marxist central planning, the economy had collapsed to a fraction of its pre-war dimensions. The country was seething in discontent. Insurrection seemed imminent. Indeed, the month of March 1921 had begun with hungry Soviet soldiers and sailors mounting the Kronstadt Rebellion against the Bolshevik regime.

What was Lenin’s remedy for his unfolding socialist catastrophe? It wasn’t more socialism, at least for the moment. That would be like chasing a glass of tainted water with a gallon of Clorox. Desperate to reverse the consequences of socialism, Lenin turned to their only known antidote—capitalism.

Sunday marked the 100th anniversary of the start of Lenin’s New Economic Policy (NEP). In a stunning about-face on March 21, 1921, the NEP began undoing the previous four years. Expropriation of businesses and the nationalization of industries stopped. Lenin proclaimed a partial restoration of, in his own words, “a free market and capitalism.” Even state-owned firms would seek to operate on a “profit” basis. Individuals could own small enterprises again. Market prices would be permitted in place of state directives.

A little bit of freedom goes a long way. In this instance, it turned the economy around and saved the infant Bolshevik tyranny. But it did not last long. Three years later, Lenin would be dead. Before the end of the decade, Stalin obliterated the NEP with a massive collectivist campaign to re-socialize the economy. Of the NEP, former US national security advisor Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in his 1989 book, The Grand Failure, “For many Russians, even more than sixty years later, these were the best years of the era ushered in by the revolution of 1917.”

On that March day in 1921, the very day winter bowed to spring, the socialists in Moscow effectively admitted they had to stop stealing. There just was not much left to steal. In a 1990 article, economist Peter Boettke cited a litany of mea culpas from leading Soviet intellectuals, including a most revealing tribute to free market economist Ludwig von Mises from socialist architect Nikolai Bukharin. He grudgingly admitted that Mises’s devastating critique of socialism made him “one of the most learned critics.”

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Price Fixing at the Pump

Conservatives often criticize Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and Zohran Mamdani for believing that government should direct private economic decisions. Yet when President Donald Trump recently warned gasoline retailers to lower their prices, or face “big problems,” he embraced a remarkably similar premise: that politicians should pressure private businesses to charge prices that the government considers acceptable.

According to a recent Fox News report, President Trump demanded that gasoline retailers immediately lower their prices, renewing his call for $2.50 gasoline. On Truth Social, he urged retailers to “DROP YOUR PRICE FOR OUR GREAT AMERICAN PEOPLE!” and warned that if they failed to do so, “big problems lie ahead.”

That matters because when politicians discuss gasoline prices, many Americans picture giant oil companies. In reality, roughly 95% of US gas stations are independently owned small businesses. Most do not buy gasoline directly from refiners. Instead, they purchase fuel through wholesale distributors, or “jobbers,” who deliver it to local stations. It’s these independent owners, not major oil companies, who set retail prices, based on local competition, taxes, operating costs, and, perhaps most importantly, the cost of replacing the fuel once their underground tanks are empty. Because gasoline profit margins are razor-thin, many stations rely more on convenience-store sales than on gasoline sales to remain profitable.

None of this means that government policy is irrelevant. President Trump is correct to criticize California’s role in high gasoline prices, for instance. California consistently has some of the highest gasoline prices in the nation, often $1.50 to $2.00 per gallon above the national average. Those higher prices reflect, in part, the state’s nation-leading gasoline excise tax (which climbed to 63.4¢ per gallon), state sales taxes, the Low Carbon Fuel Standard, cap-and-trade programs, and unique fuel formulation requirements. All of these state-mandated policies increase the baseline expense of supplying gasoline.

Many economic conservatives and libertarians, myself included, have criticized Sanders, Ocasio-Cortez, and Mamdani for advocating a larger government role in directing private economic decisions. At the very least, their calls for greater government intervention are consistent with the philosophy they have long espoused. The same standard should apply when a Republican president threatens private businesses over the prices they voluntarily charge. Free-market principles should not depend on which political party holds political power.

The real question is simple: Is it the legitimate role of government to pressure or threaten private businesses over the prices they voluntarily charge for their own property?

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