Neither group sees it, but DSA and MAGA have a lot in common.
The Same Dangerous Flaw
CATO accurately comments, Democratic socialists of America (DSA) and MAGA nationalists both want sweeping government control of the economy.
History shows where that road leads, and how it undermines prosperity and democracy itself.
Please consider Democratic Socialists and MAGA Share a Dangerous Flaw
Democratic socialism is a terrible ideology. If implemented, its agenda would cause grave harm and imperil democracy itself. And in seeking massive state control of the economy, today’s socialists ironically have much in common with the MAGA nationalists they claim to oppose.
Both promote government control over the economy, and both paths undermine liberty, prosperity and democracy. Socialists do not control the Democratic Party in the way MAGA largely dominates the Republicans. But their influence is growing.
What’s the DSA’s Agenda? Let’s Look at the Socialist Wish List.
The democratic socialist agenda goes far beyond a marginal increase in economic regulation or welfare spending. It amounts to sweeping government control of the economy and society, on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union.The platform of the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA), America’s most prominent socialist organization, states the goal plainly: a system in which “food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods” – which is to say, a complete government takeover of those industries.
The DSA also envisions a society with no debt, no mortgages and no landlords, which would require government control of most housing, plus extensive rent control and a $20 an hour or higher minimum wage on whatever remains in private hands.
Economists across the political spectrum agree that this kind of wage floor would price millions of workers out of the labor market, and that rent control would greatly shrink the housing supply.
All told, the DSA agenda would add $71 trillion to $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade – at least doubling, and possibly tripling, today’s $7.4 trillion in annual federal outlays, which are already unsustainable on their own. And there’s no way to cover it by taxing “the wealthy” alone: Confiscating the entire net worth of the 400 richest Americans would cover, at most, 9% of the low-end estimate.
Democratic Socialists are MAGA’s Mirror Image
Ironically, democratic socialists have more in common with MAGA nationalists than either likely wants to admit. President Donald Trump has pursued his own version of economic central planning: ruinous tariffs, severely restrictive immigration policy and government equity stakes in Intel, U.S. Steel and roughly 30 other companies.
Tariffs and immigration restrictions are both major forms of government control over the economy. Immigration restrictions, in particular, curtail economic freedom more than any other current U.S. policy.
MAGA nationalists are also fiscally reckless much like socialists – Trump’s signature spending bill is projected to add $3.4 trillion to the deficit over the next decade, with no serious effort to reform the entitlement programs that drive most federal spending.
Socialists promote an egalitarian ideology, while nationalists generally believe that government should promote the interests of the ethnic and cultural majority in a society. But, despite different rhetoric, they have similar economics and similar flaws.
The fiscal cost is far from the worst of it. A century of socialist experiments prove that.
How Socialism Becomes Authoritarianism
When government takes over most of the economy, it destroys the incentive to produce. In a market economy, producers compete on price and quality to win customers. Under state control, those incentives vanish, and industries become government monopolies immune to competition. The result, time and again, is waste and shoddy goods.As an old Soviet joke put it: “We pretend to work, and they pretend to pay us.”
Even enterprises that want to produce quality goods are generally unable to do so under socialism. As Nobel Prize-winning economist F.A. Hayek showed in a classic article, in market economies the price system sends producers useful signals about what consumers want. Higher prices signal strong demand that producers are incentivized to respond to. Government control of production largely eliminates these price signals, leaving even well-intentioned planners without good information on how to allocate resources.
I Was a Refugee from Soviet Communism. I know Socialism Doesn’t Work.
Today’s socialists say they will avoid this fate because they champion “democratic” socialism, not the authoritarian kind. But near-total state control of the economy has never coexisted with democracy for long. A government that controls the economy can starve opposition parties of resources and weaponize control of basic goods to crush dissent.That’s exactly what happened in Venezuela, where a democratically elected socialist government became a dictatorship.
Right-wing nationalist regimes have followed a similar path, in Germany, Italy, Spain and many Latin American nations.
Many of today’s socialists even admire authoritarian socialist regimes and hope to emulate them:
- The DSA praises Cuban communist dictator Fidel Castro, who turned that country into a totalitarian state.
- Prominent socialist “influencer” Hasan Piker praised Mao – the biggest mass murderer of all time – as “one of the great leaders of this world.”
- Sen. Sanders has a long history of praising communist despots.
I know firsthand: I was a refugee from Soviet communism myself. If socialism worked as advertised, people would be fleeing market economies to live under it, not the other way around. Right-wing nationalist regimes have produced their own refugee outflows. Refugees from Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, for instance, helped build American science, including the Manhattan Project, which developed the atomic bomb.
The choices of people voting with their feet are the most powerful verdict on both these ideologies.
Mirror Image Meets at Control
Both parties want complete control and want to drive out anyone who disagrees.
They have the same cancel culture mentality.
Republicans criticize Democrats who cozy up with socialist despots like Castro and Mao, but themselves cozy up to Putin and Kim Jong Un.
Democratic socialists and MAGA nationalists both want sweeping government control of the economy.
The difference is the Right cozies up to the powerful while the Left cozies up to the weak.
The similarity is total control. The MAGA and the DSA cults have the same goal, to eliminate the other and everyone else who disagrees, on anything.
Neither is capable of seeing how similar, and dangerously so, they are to each other.
Democrats Propose Free Money for Stay at Home Parents.
On September 6, I asked Democrats Propose Free Money for Stay at Home Parents. Are You For It?
Sorry, I meant to say this socialistic proposal is by Republicans, not AOC.
Please read that post for more on how DSA and MAGA is alike. It’s also a mirror image of sorts.
In this case, Republicans want to take money earmarked from single moms and give to stay-at-home moms.
The result would be the same. Eventually it would be more money and more deficit spending for both.
An Accurate Assessment
Motivations differ, but the shared preference for state over decentralized allocation is clear.
The hidden subtext of this article: Free-market capitalism doesn’t work because it performs so poorly for such a large portion of the population that it necessarily leads to MAGA and socialism.
If you refuse to try and understand why and mitigate for it, you are doomed to MAGA and the DSA.
Maybe the “unintended subtext”?
Fun fact: no nation with a history of democracy and capitalism has ever voted in a totalitarian socialist government.
Over the long-term, the important issue isn’t socialism or capitalism, it’s democracy versus authoritarianism. Why? Because you can always vote out the socialists if they’re not meeting your needs.
“on a scale that invites comparison to Cuba, North Korea and the old Soviet Union.”
Forgot to mention China the most successful economy in the last 50 years, maybe ever.
Complete BS article only looking at failed communist economy not successful socialist economies.
“Our democracy” is nothing more than the spoils system taken a step further. Give the politician some money and he will provide a war, jobs, tax cuts or free money in return for your vote or contribution. Jay Gould had President Grant’s brother on his payroll-how is this any different?
I mean, cherry pick why don’t you
From an outside perspective …
America’s two-party system forces voters to choose the lesser of two evils.
But when one of those options is Trump’s Party, it’s no longer a choice.
Voting for him again is simply repeating the same mistake and hoping for a different outcome.
Except, they almost always vote for the Greater of Two Evils.
This “Team D Tweedledee vs Team R Tweedledum” dichotomy is entirely intentional.
A few loosely related thoughts before I head out…
I blame the center. Our mafia regime is repugnant, the center of the regime is repugnant, and the regime fields controlled opposition that makes outliers look hypocritical and incompetent. So almost everyone votes uniparty every “election”.
Let’s please distinguish between the beliefs of individuals and professionals/parties. You can sometimes have a normal conversation with the former. The latter exists to undermine competition against the center, to serve as a tarpit to sap political energy. So of course those parties have dangerous flaws.
The professionals behind MAGA, AFD, Farage (whatever his party is) — they all work for the same class and help themselves while they’re at it. Just like Clinton, Obama, Bernie, Biiden, Trump, etc.
I sometimes think in terms of physics vectors. Imagine each party or politician moves people in some way. Some promote hostility towards Russia but not China. Some vice versa. Some offset, but the net vector is hostility towards both. That’s the /center/ where the regime wants to push us.
That’s cute, slimy pols are really vectors. Why not the obvious description (slimy pols)?
I’ve usually only glanced at your stuff, because of your terrible handle, and I didn’t realize that you could think to some extent.
Your first-past-the-post system of voting in America tends to force a two-party or one-and-a-half party system on the public. Any group who wants to initiate change is forced to try to infiltrate one of the major parties, instead of putting their theories plainly before the voters. That is what the Democratic Socialists are doing now.
Politics is not a game for nice people. I think you are right in saying that the people who get to the top are likely to be pretty awful people. I suggest that you should remember that some of them don’t have independent minds at all, but are working for someone else.
You want to be careful about applying metaphors from physics to humans. That leads to a lot of messy conclusions, because it leaves out of the calculation the fact that at least some humans can think and observe.
Sorry to have to be repetitive, but AI will be the only savior!
A number of people are saying that OpenAI’s latest release, Astra, has now achieved AGI What is AGI?
This is a bit of a confused take. Democratic socialists are not “Soviet Communists.” They’re considered moderate in Europe, and a lot of the countries where they are among the major parties are economically quite well off.
On a more general note, it’s more worthwhile to examine the realpolitik situation than worry too much about pie in the sky wishes from the far left.
It’s kind of like Creamer says below. It’s not about the particulars of the DSA program. It’s that things have gotten so out of whack that people – especially the young – understandably want something other than what the current American economy has on offer – a financialized subscription-based lifestyle where there is no plausible way to claw your way to half the quality of life of a prior generation. I’ll shamefully admit that there was a time I objected to generous subsidies for school lunches. Now I’m like: if we can afford $200B for a pointless, illegal and unconstitutional war of choice, I’m ok with buying some schoolchildren a cheese sandwich.succumbleany,
agree. and very honest.
I agree that ignorant right-wing people seem to have a lot in common with ignorant left-wing people. I do have a few other observations about this essay.
Firstly, we do have the object lesson of the Soviet Union still within living memory. I am sometimes amazed at how ignorant of economics a lot of left-wing people are, and how resistant they are to having it explained to them, but I think you need some sort of intellectual superstructure in any movement, and the intellectuals are not likely to make exactly the same mistakes as last time.
Secondly, I would observe that corruption seems to be universal in human affairs. A libertarian movement under Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher did a lot of good in the English-speaking world in the 1980s, after a revival of intellectual activity earlier on, led perhaps by Ayn Rand as much as anyone else. But Alan Greenspan didn’t restore gold money, and soon the regulators got back into the saddle and started trying to bend the market to their wishes.
Other forms of silliness, notably racial equality and women’s lib (with homosexual liberation as part of it), had not been discredited, and contributed to the collapse of the hope that had seemed to be restored under Reagan and Thatcher.
Now we have a much more mixed-race world than we had in the 1980s, with accompanying stupidity and resistance to knowledge – but not to “education,” which a lot of people mistake for knowledge. I don’t think this can be rectified under a democratic system, but in spite of what Americans may think, democracy is not the only way to run a government. Democracy favors the priesthood, the people who live by deception, but the soldiers, the people who live by force, may yet take over, and what happens then depends largely on the quality of those of the officer corps who take charge. In case nobody remembers, Franco in Spain and Pinochet in Chile saved their countries from appalling horrors, though they may have been rough on some of the worst people while doing so. Nasser didn’t do a bad job in Egypt either, I think, given what he had to work with.
Extra! Extra! Racist man touches children!
https://mishtalk.com/economics/does-president-trump-have-any-idea-what-passports-are-for/#comment-449328
I should have said that in my experience, no political movement, whether of the “center” or the “extremes,” is much of an exemplar of free speech. Any organized force in politics is very anxious not to have its followers discredit it, and insists on everyone toeing the party line. The reason free enterprise allows for a degree of freedom of opinion is that people are financially independent. If you can’t stand the opinions of the people you have to work with, you may have the option of going to work somewhere else. There are wealthy people who really can afford to say exactly what they think – they have what N. N. Taleb calls “fuck-you” money. I wasn’t well off in my younger days, but I was independent enough to be able to say what I thought – provided I wrote off the idea of succeeding in any organization. I was able to get a lot off my chest by writing letters to the local newspaper. I actually became a great thorn in the side of a Communist-sympathizing doctor who was our representative in the federal capital (Canberra – I’m talking about Australia), and who was in our Cabinet – in Australia, as in Britain, what you call Cabinet secretaries have to be members of the Parliament.
If you feel that you don’t have freedom of speech, and that your voice is ignored, it may be that your side of politics is out of power, or that you have important differences with the official view of your side. Freedom of speech has always been a struggle, and will probably always continue to be a struggle. I’m not excusing those who try to outlaw it, as your Democrats were doing a few years back.
Rather bold to say liberals are “ignorant of economics” when the Trumpy right still clings to disproven trickle down economics and tariffs. We learned from the disastrous Smoot-Hawley Act of 1930, a major contributor to the Great Depression, that tariffs are ultimately recessionary. And we’ve certainly learned — repeatedly — that giving tax cuts to the wealthy, paid for with increased public debt, does not trickle down and cause significant employment nor wage gains.
Democrats have it right: the best economy is Keynesian, using public spending to fund infrastructure and jobs to boost the overall public and private sectors.
I don’t think you can expect the sorts of angry people who make up the majority of Trump voters to have much patience with abstract ideas about economics. I was taught in school about how disastrous the Smoot-Hawley tariff law was, too, but I haven’t researched it, and I have my doubts. I think the Laffer Curve is just silly, and I think the same about a lot of bush theories of economics that I have come across thanks to my association with the right-wing resistance here in Australia.
But Keynes wasn’t right either. Keynesian economics was a “concoction” (word used by Ludwig von Mises) cooked up to justify interventionist economics. At the time, Communism was a real threat, and I don’t know what I would have done had I been in charge in those circumstances, but there is an old couplet from an English poem that is relevant: “What a tangled web we weave, when first we practice to deceive.” Keynes himself famously said that he wasn’t concerned about the long run, but the long run has arrived now, and if we are to survive, we have to dig ourselves out from under the accumulated confusions caused by his deft misdirections.
For my entire life I have been totally bewildered by the abject ignorance of the economics forced upon this country by Republicans, and on my side there are now 40 trillion plus, soon to be 50, individual little George Washington proofs of their abject stupidity. Ditto for any idiot who actually believes CIA Pinochet et al saved anybody at all from a fucking God damned thing. JFC.
You believed what some nice teacher told you in school, didn’t you? I’ll let you in on a secret: she didn’t know either.
i think the coup at the constitutional convention, in 1787 is to blame. we will be going back to articles of confederation imho, by hook or by crook. DSA rule in some states. MAGA rule in other states. and many states might decide to be old fashioned republican or democrat or even lean classical liberal(aka libertarian). as this empire is crumbling on battlefield and in DC………..the 50 state solution is coming. we’ll still have a potus and us congress but they will be much weaker in the next 5 to 20 years. i give it until jan 20, 2028 when a few states will “effectively” secede. no need for any declarations or wars.
This is honestly just laughable. Oh yes, the DSA idolizes… Castro and Mao? And I’m supposed to engage with this pile of trash “article” with good faith?
I expect better out of this blog. Normally I’d try to put effort into responding to this genuinely and explaining why this totally misunderstands the DSA and how it’s a sign of people being sick of the Epstein elite 1% bringing back feudalism, but this is not worth my time or effort. I might as well be responding to Fox fucking news articles at this rate.
CATO’s article reeks of desperation from an elite who wants us to buy a red scare again, shut up, and get back to not affording our groceries while the owner of CATO diddles some kids on an island. No thanks, I’ll cozy up to the weak and demand better.
ha ha ha. i thought the same. CATO used to be great. after 9.11.01 they went to shit. i attended an elite invitation only CATO luncheon at fancy joint in NYC about 5 years ago. i couldn’t believe the war mongering and corporatism bent. pre 9.11.01 CATO seemed to stand for classical liberalism. not anymore.
Anyone who honestly thinks the DSA is anything close to MAGA isn’t worth listening too. Sad this seems to include Mish.
The initial Tea Party and OWS overlapped.
The 2000’s antiwar lefties (me) and the 2020-4 antiwar righties (also me?) overlapped.
Antiwar, anti-oligarchy. There’s an overlap.
…
I suggest people look at the political compass in at least 2 dimensions. For more, search for the topic “political compass”.
@ Mish, I wish you would switch platforms.
Did you like being smeared in the 2010s by the “PropOrNot” group? (Obviously not.) Well, it seems people with the same mindset prevent me from posting links to some websites on /your/blog. Please dont patronize them with your business.
Come to think of it, what is the name of the comment system here? I should find another website they “serve”, go there, and test whether I can post a link to /your/ blog. If they censor links to you, would that bother you enough to switch comment platforms?
agree. me too. tea party was hijacked by koch bros. saw it with my own eyes, from an inside the dugout connection to the top of that hideous crowd.
agree. though his livelihood seems to rely on clickbait. he’s better than most bloggers. laughable DSA v MAGA. like comparing run of the mill social welfare programs like free lunches to school kids, to Mussolini or Hitler.
How on earth could you have thought that? They were born despicable, and then got worse. Ditto for The Hysterical Foundation.
“The difference is the Right cozies up to the powerful while the Left cozies up to the weak”
Both the ‘left and right’ designations of by-gone years are no longer valid. Neither party support the majority of their voting constituents. Due to lax anti-trusty laws mega corporations such as the MAG7 are now your true government. They grow like a cancer and gobble up smaller competitors as well as most of our politicians.
The Republicans support one group of mega corporations and the Democrats support another group.
I hardly think the Democrats were cozying up the weak when they allowed in 11 million illegal aliens to compete with their constituents during the Biden years. And I have no idea what the Republicans stand for since their brand once was fiscal discipline and personal freedom ( killed by police state rhetoric and flock cameras).
Trump’s election was a reaction to the absurdities of democratic woke policies, amnesty for illegals nonsense and Khamala Harris being a transparent tool and moron.
But right now who is prospering-?- the MAG7 and mega corporations. 99% of the American people can go to hell for all they care. Those mega corporations will try to replace the US population with AI and robots in the coming years.
See those life-like robots in videos? In the not too distant future they
will be going door to door and ‘taking care of’ anyone who might cause a problem for your corporate masters.
To have a REAL comparison between MAGA and DSA, people should get to see BOTH in action and then make a choice between either or neither.
MAGA got an impeached President Trump that campaigned on specific issues and then reverted to his own pro-Trump actual choices, a Republican Senate, a Tea Party-like House, and effectively a MAGA Supreme Court.
And we can all see where we are less than two years in.
Now let’s let Bernie Sanders be Preside, AOC can chair the Supreme Court, Elizabeth Warren can lead the Senate and Rashida Tlaib can handle the House.
Then we’ll see what we get there. And people can make a better, rational choice after seeing both in real-life action.
I’d place a big bet that people won’t think MAGA and the DSA are essentially the same
And what about the slightly difference Social Democrats? Not the same. I think they are far more interesting
social democracy is what places like switzerland and NZ……….have. medicare for all is a rounding error compared to world wide warmongering trillions. no to mention the blowback like 9.11.01 etc. which cannot be priced in shekels. Amerika is an empire. end of story. the rest is bullshit and eyewash. DSA v MAGA. idiotic click bait.
Sat in on my US House Rep’s phone-in town hall. He dove right into questions. #1) What are you doing about the concerns of everyday people? Things like tariffs, inflation, affordability?
Answer: We need to make sure men don’t play in women’s sports.
Reply: That’s not my concern
Retort: Well it is to some people.
And this jackass will probably get elected again…the stupid is strong among the red hats. My friends are liberals but not liberal idiots, so I guess I am biased that way.
As you’ve said before, fascism and communism are kissing cousins…
The center tells you theyre kissing cousins, while the center (fascists) take our money to their bank.
That “jackass” is a conman selling wedge issues.
+1 FWIW… I dream you at least annoyed a conman (though they have thick skin). At least you care enough to try.
I do not agree with this assessment. Our system is riddled with monopolies that abuse the system to prevent competition. Our MIC is a fine example. We have 5 companies whose leadership greases Congress and provides cushy jobs for retired generals while selling us mostly 20th century military gear at 21st century plus prices.
Even Mexico now has socialized medicine.
We could use a good dose of FDR style Democratic Socialism again.
An assessment brought to you by the fairy godmother of supply side economics.
The article is highly flawed. His perception of MAGA is flawed as MAGA isn’t a formal group but just a collection of ideas. Pro legal migration of people who will fit in with the melting pot, pro family, pro capitalism, pro USA. So the author is wrong in many of his assumptions. Plus not all under the MAGA umbrella support every single point. Some like Putin, some don’t, some have no position. Same with support for taxpayer money for stay at home parents (many oppose any socialist welfare).
As for government investments in Intel and other corporations there isn’t universal support for that and those who do support it have differing reasons.
Same with tariffs and other policies.
Though the author does make many good points such as about the position of DSA in the Democrats or the influence of MAGA on the Republicans.
The vast majority of MAGA does not fit that profile. People who are pro legal migration do not vilify legal Haitian immigrants or vote for politicians that do.
People who are pro legal migration, pro USA and pro Constitution do not vote for politicians who implement blanket “Muslim bans”.
People who are pro legal migration do not vote for politicians who implement blanket immigration VISA processing bans on 75+ countries.
Maga’s anti-illegal immigration rhetoric is a dog whistle for their racist ideology of keeping America white.
Mish, I think you and CATO have it right. There is no meaningful political party in the US in favor of individual freedom and limited government. And especially none that promotes the subset of freedom that is the free market.
Thank God.
when the libertarians focus on getting rid if corporations, then we can start to talk about a free market.
the same people who rush to the government to allow them to have limited liability then turn around and complain about not having a free market.
I don’t agree with this assessment, Democrats are allowing republicans to define them and paint them in the same category as MAGA, this is fundamentally and structurally wrong. Yes democrats do want Government having more of a say in the economy, because the private sector is full blown Crony Capitalism now, with no safe guards on the economy or society at large. Profit is the essential decision criteria, but its profit for the wealthiest 10% that is the driver for the current crony capitalistic framework,which came to power in the early 1980s with the Reagan Revolution and the US economy was transformed into a Ponzi Scheme Financial system where borrowing and massive debt creation was/is used to “UNECONOMICALLY’ grow the US economy by inflating asset values and profits by artificially bidding up asset prices and profits by borrowing billions and trillions of dollars to do this for the wealthiest 20% in the US economy, while the buying power of the bottom 80% has fallen by 80% over the last 40 years, as wage growth 1 – 3% is swamped by Asset and Wealth growth that leaves wages in the dust growing at, 5% – 30%……………This is the structural affordability crisis squeezing the bottom 80%……….we know the outcome of all Ponzi Schemes, even the super sophisticated ones, know as the US Financial system(no longer an economy)………..system should have died in 2008, but Americans socialized the Wealthy Ponzi Scheme 25 year failure with the bailouts 2007 – 2009. The unaffordable high prices will keep getting worse no matter which party is in charge until we decide to fundamentally and structurally transform the US economy, back into an economy that works best for all Americans, and not the Ponzi scheme financial system created using financial engineering which basically chops up dept into a trillion pieces, and diversifies that risk all over the world so that we cannot see and understand that fundamentally we are toast if we do not fix this before its too late!!!!!!!!! Wealthy corrupt republican know about this but they want to keep it under cover because when run on the global bank comes, they think they have enough stashed away so that they will be ok, NOT!!!!!!!!!!! NO ONE SURVIVES PONZI SCHEME FAILURE………….THEIR BLIND LUST AND GREED MAKES THEM FALSELY BELIEVE THEY WILL BE OK………….NOT!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
Ouch, I read this entire stream-of-consciousness riff. Please use some sentence breaks and periods.
You didn’t really elaborate on any of the problems of the DSA.
sorry kid, it is a uniparty. MAGA is still a work in progress. i hope trump destroys the empire and leaves the states to fend for themselves. the way it was meant to be.
We’ve been headed toward Europe for a while. Maybe we never really left. Larger populations just get harder to hold together. Would China be as big without authoritarianism? India has held together but they seem to be used to living on top of each other. Maybe that’s how they got so many people!!! Rim shot…lol
USA is more authoritarian than China. You can see it in the history of how it approaches everything around the world. “Dont do what we say? We bomb you!”. At war almost every year throughout its history. Even if we pay attention to only the last 30 or 70 years, you can see it. Internally, the incarceration rate is much higher than anywhere else. And you see what happens when you say the wrong thing or refuse the wrong medical experiment: you lose your job.
Trump is hollowing out the state institutions, for his family’s enrichment, and that of his elite friends.
The Maga base’s job is to pay fealty to Trump and his elites – that’s all. They have no other purpose.
Not true! The Epstein class has uses for their children.
ET, some of the best humor is evocative bc of the large element of truth within; yours is pulverizing, but on point. Despairingly, the liberal left’s destruction seemingly trumps that of the right. Opposite sides of the same selfishly-ruinous coin.
who’s the 1 person who downvoted this comment? lol.
any guesses?
Flav, no dispute from here, but what case can be made for a “President” who invites 10,000 illegal migrants, DAILY, into our formerly great country, hands them U.S. taxpayer’s $$$ and puts them up in luxury hotels? I heartedly encourage all (legal) Americans to rewatch 1976’s “Network” & pound your fists while exclaiming Howard Beale’s, “I’m as mad as hell, and I’m not going to take this anymore!” Until that day we’ll just have to “ride the tide out and hope for the best” (ain’t gonna happen unless we stand, together and fight for fairness).
Wrong! Democratic Socialistw wants workers to own the means of production. Not the government.
What you delude yourself as “democratic socialism” is state capitalism. No democratic socialist worth their salt would aspire for that.
“Democratic” qualifies “socialism” the way it would qualify “theft.” Democratic theft is still theft and that is what democratic socialism is. Getting the mob to back the govt stealing for them doesn’t change anything.
So the workers who make a company produce products and services are the “mob”?! Ok.
But how are the workers to own the means of production? Normally one EARNS the right to own production by a combination of hard work, investing and entrepreneurship.
If the plan is simply to steal it from those who own it now and GIVE it away to the workers then it’s a doomed plan. Its the same problem that happens when I GIVE my teenage kids something instead of making them earn it. They expect me to give them even more next time and they resent anything they don’t get on demand.
My parents never got started with hand-outs. Money in my pocket, even at 8 years old, was earned Shoveling snow, mowing lawns and washing cars. I hustled up Money.
i’m sure you had it real tough. probably had to walk 10 feet across shag carpet or hard wood floors to turn the station on the idiot box. like the rest of us rich world inhabitants. no fancy remote controls back in my day.
Rep. Bainer used to bring up his youth working at the family store from the age of 12. Nice that his family had a store for him to work in.
The workers have earned the right to own the company because the company exists and flourishes because of their efforts.
And these “workers” went unpaid?
Or you just didn’t and don’t like the amount of pay? OK. So pay your workers more. Or don’t take the job.
The company exists and flourishes because of the customers, and because of the money spent up-front in the hopes of pay, and because of etc, etc, and the list goes on to include the “workers”. Bringing in the guys with the guns to side with and only with one of those “because” groups will work out exactly how it always does.
And then the company becomes the ONLY company so customers can’t walk away from it and…? Oh wait, that’s where we are now!
Don’t like poison or parasites in your food? Just buy premium price organic or starve! Don’t like the cabal who owns TV? Just don’t watch! Don’t like printers you have to pay a subscription to use? Just draw copies of your papers by hand! This is capitalism! Don’t you like capitalism? What do you mean this sounds like how the USSR worked?
Creamer, if your beef is with monopolies, I’m with you!
Two places often missed when looking for monopolies are:
1) Inside governments.
2) Regulated sectors. Though a regulation may be well intentioned, whether it works or not, it pretty much always reduces competition.
BTW, I don’t buy organic (nor light/lite). I don’t watch TV. And I don’t print to paper outside of Kinkos. So to me, these examples sound like a guy on a 600mph coast-to-coast flight saying with disgust, “This WiFi sucks”.
Who are the customers? They are largely the workers!
The severe debt problems that we face in credit card, mortgage and education loan sectors are all caused by the workers being squeezed.
In your original comment, I thought that “workers” meant employees of the company. Apparently, you meant “people who work for a living” or “the general public” or something of that sort. Otherwise there’s an arithmetic problem with “largely the workers”. Or there’s a doomed company. 🙂
The general public’s efforts can certainly make a company not exist. Happens all the time and throughout history. Especially during times the general public grabs the company’s helm and steers it into the rocks. Which is a reason it’s best to keep the general public out of the wheelhouse. They have no skin in the game.
By “workers being squeezed”, did you mean “pay is too low for too many people”? Well, yeah. It would be better if many people were paid far more than now. Just like what has been happening in the last 250 years. So, like our ancestors did during those years, let’s figure out what people can do to be worth a lot more pay.
the right? nonsense. but smart companies from wall st to main st provide some sort of employee stock ownership via vesting or whatever……….
Well, of course, it is considered “nonsense” in this capitalist dystopian world. The fucking capitalists own this wreckage. It is time for things to change in a drastic way.
No one ever does it alone but only a few take the risk and have the vision and leadership to make the difficult decisions that result in success. Compensation should be rewarding but putting the decisions into the hands of the many is tricky business. That’s where unions can be good but only if they stay lean and focused. Union buracracy too often gets bloated and in the way. But I get the wage gap. CEOs making $1M a week compared to employee who might not see that in a life time is not cool. Do we have an affordability problem or a chroninc low wage issue?
There was never any socialism on earth where the workers owned something.
Under all forms of socialism that have been tried (the USSR itself tried about a dozen varieties), the State owned the means of production.
Soooo how about Saturn cars then?
The General Motors subsidiary “Saturn” brand? What about them?
It used to be worker owned before it became so good that GM killed them for being too good. Go ahead and look into that for me.
Not the State, so much as the Communist Party (the new nobility, because it tends to be inherited). The people with the levers of power own everything. Socialism devolves to feudalism over time.
That doesn’t mean worker ownership cannot exist.
And thanks for (inadvertently?) pointing out that socialism was never tried. What we got was state capitalism instead.
The state owned the means of production on behalf of the workers, because it was more practical. Just like people claim we use “representative democracy” because “direct democracy ” isnt practical,
The rewards for statenownerhsip? Literacy rose and healthcare improved and longevity increased. In countries that were backward until then.
And the people survived the genocidal West. Within 10-20years of their revolution, communist Russia fought off invading British-American armies and the Wehrmacht. 20+ million died at the hands of an invader led by a man who rose to power with Western financing only a few years after proposing from prison that Germany should expand east because the people there are subhuman. FDR said “in politics, there are no coincidences”. Well, i doubt that was a coincidence.
Then they beat USA in the space race at every turn until Oceania pretended their unmanned moon missions were manned.
If they didn’t lose 20+ million workers in ww2, they would have had more economic strength in the ensuing decades. In a sense, the capitalist Mafia inflicted a mortal wound on the USSR via ww2. People accuse them of “thinking only of the next quarter”. But that’s myopic. The top mafiosos do think multigenerationally. It’s the rest of us that think short term, like “the next election”.
What you are talking about is syndicalism. I think Noam Chomsky is one of its supporters. With all due respect to him, it doesn’t work and can’t work, just as government ownership of the means of production doesn’t and can’t work (or at least can’t work nearly as well as free enterprise).
A lot of what people think are the faults of “capitalism” are just the result of good old-fashioned corruption. They had heaps of it back in the Middle Ages. I think limited-liability corporations are an invalid form, because they are creations of government. I understand that some businesses need to be large, but I suggest that the limited-liability corporation is not the right way to go about creating them.
“””some businesses need to be large”””
Or need to get income from tiny purchases from many, many people. Where per-purchase transaction costs dwarf income.
Or natural monopolies. E.g. Many utilities.
Arthur, what do you figure is the alternative to limited-liability corps in such cases?
the answer is pretty easy the pendulum has managed to swing too far
and this is wny we cannot keep going the way we are. Why MAGA happened and why the democratic socialist will be the next party in control . The oountries with the happiest countries are democratic socialist. not the country with the richest companies or the most billionaires and the government should work for the people. I remember something about of the people for the people by the people. Its time for that to happen
to quote John Hussmans latest article. entire article is here
https://www.hussmanfunds.com/comment/mc260908/
As of the first quarter of 2026, the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households held 67.9% of all household net worth. The wealthiest 1% held 31.6%, and the bottom half of U.S. households held just 2.5% of household net worth.
Meanwhile, the wealthiest 10% of U.S. households held 87.4% of all corporate equities and mutual fund shares. The wealthiest 1% held 50.2%, and the bottom half of U.S. households held 1.1% of corporate equities and mutual fund shares.
Among government and municipal securities owned by U.S. households, roughly 79% are held by the wealthiest 10% of households, including about 38% held by the top 1%. The bottom half of U.S. households held just 0.5% of government and municipal securities.
The accumulation of financial wealth at the top isn’t simply the result of thrift, or the ordinary workings of the economy – it’s shaped by active choices, particularly the fact that we somehow can’t imagine taxing a dollar of income earned as capital gain or financial income at anything close to the combined rates commonly imposed on a dollar earned as wages and salaries, or to apply the payroll-tax base uniformly across labor and capital income. The 12.4% Social Security payroll tax base currently stops at $184,500 of wages. A broader tax base would permit substantially lower rates while reducing the extraordinary preference presently given to certain forms of capital income.
Meanwhile, we somehow can’t imagine a tax on the “dominance rents” of massive corporations that benefit from the private capture of network effects, content created by the public or trained by the intellectual property of others, and features of natural monopoly that go far beyond the normal compensation for productive innovation and risk-bearing (see Mountain, Cliff, or Ocean).
John Hussman
<<the happiest countries>>
These type of fake surveys are like depicting a smurfs’ village. There is no credible method to test “happiness”, let alone of an entire country. Especially when these countries are the top in per person consumption of anti-depressants. And you don’t believe them yourself either, otherwise you would have already gone there. Or many people you know would have gone there. But they haven’t, and you won’t either.
As far as the DSA, many of its members, all trust-fund foreign kids full of hatred, have declared on camera that their goal is to take down this Republic (Senate-Supreme Court-Executive branch). Even Bill Maher called them out.
You Americans have the only Constitution and legal framework that assumes that people have natural rights, and the Constitution is to mainly regulate the government, not the people. You have the most optimistic foundations of any country I’ve been, seen or heard, and yet you’re clinging to the Europeans who scream for help for survival every 30-50 years, and are famous only for their ancestors. Americans and Asians go to Europe and they come back with 9/10 pictures being of cathedrals and ancient ruins, hardly anything new.
The three products of European political thinking in the last 100 years are Fascism, Nazism, and Communism. The emphasis on social programs (which was in fact partially American-induced post WWII), was always in the context of their economies: high unemployment, low production in housing and food, and the nihilistic destruction of natural safety nets such as families: It’s no coincidence that back in the 80s, Greece had practically zero homeless people with 25% unofficial unemployment (official 17%), due to traditional families, while in the area of Berlin, just 12% unemployment made 1/10th of the city look like Kensington PA.
if one can not be content in the rich world, whether europe, north america, south america, or asia……that, is on individuals. if you look to your government for contentment in life, you need some help.
Count in one hand how many public water distribution and sewage collection systems there are.
This is why no matter how much you love your Party (Rep or Dem) that it’s important for the other side to be in control close to half the time. It prevents things going too far in one direction and when the party in power exits the other one gets to investigate the inevitable corruption.
Many individual States that used to be really great (eg. California) have embraced one party rule for a long time now and are now a shadow of what they were at their peak when they alternated control.
The same is happening in many countries in Europe and Canada etc where one party has remained in power for too long and things have gotten increasingly worse.
Tim, in the end, BOTH parties have the bulk of the money going in the same direction. Can’t you see it?
You mean like when Canada voted in a conservative and he did so badly he got thrown out?
RED and BLUE party in usa are the same. until trump destroyed the R party. we shall see if they survive Trump
Because it seems most people have such short term memories and dont stray off the reservation, the R party will be fine. TPTB will just install another horrible D puppet and the R fans will vote for the next horrible R puppet.
NPCs everywhere.
> it’s important for the other side to be in control close to half the time.
No. The uniparty loves the scenario. “Gridlock” allows corrupt forces to tip the scales with the *least* amount of effort and money!
Each wing tells its followers “we couldn’t do what you wanted because of gridlock” or “we had to agree to this putrid bill including Y and Z because it was the only way to pass X”. People eat it up.
When one power wins 2 or 3 branches, then they’re naked. Suddenly, what’s their excuse? They must sabotage themselves and push the system back into gridlock quickly. Otherwise, their hapless marks might realize their leaders’ plan was *never* to give them what they want. In turn, they might start entertaining other ideas to acquire political power or remove TPTB.
As with Obama 1, as with Trump 2. Even when doing something MAGA wanted (closing the borders), the trump admin does it in a manner that disgusts a likely small but significant percentage of his former voters. And then he even calls his supporters losers.
Gridlock is the ideal condition for TPTB.
Too many facile comparisons and morality lessons without context.
The US actively recruited those nazis.
They were refugees from justice.
Who knows what would have happened in Korea, Vietnam, China, Venezuela, or Cuba without interminable interference and attempts to strangle by the US?
Current American society is rife with (quasi) monopolies, many enforced, it is an oligopoly, and already more than authoritarian enough (especially within corporations), with little will to enforce the rule of law. People naturally ask themselves if things need to be this way and lack control of their own destinies in so many ways.
Naturally they turn to anything that promises better or even relief.
The worse things get, the more they will perhaps reluctantly embrace anything that promises change.
It was Operation Paperclip that recruited the Post WWII Germans.
The Manhattan Project involved Jewish scientists ( Einstein being the most famous ) who were either expelled from Germany or facing death.
einstein left early as he understood the drum beats. my uncle worked with him at princeton, after the war.
exactly. that old trope about nazi scientists helped build the nuke bomb. like that was a good thing. mish sometimes misses the point. i have italian citizenship, and am very proud that the italian army were great at surrendering and not fighting. italians gave up fighting after 2000 years of the roman empire. someday even the nazis in usa and germany will arrive at that proper place for mankind.
Yanks also mock the French (home of one of the most successful militaries in history) for surrendering in ww2. France lost several million in ww1. Then it watched its “allies” finance German rearmament and pretend not to notice. With allies like that, why fight your enemies.
This is a false equivalence because it confuses radical policy with authoritarian political power. The DSA may have many dumb ideas, but it has no Trump: no dominant charismatic leader, no personality cult, no mass movement built around personal loyalty, and no comparable ability to bend a major party and its institutions to one individual’s will.
MAGA is not just an ideology; it is a highly personalised political movement centred on a leader who has already shown that democratic rules are negotiable when they obstruct him.
Treating that as equivalent to an ideological faction simply because both favour greater state intervention misses the central danger entirely….whichh is the erosion of democracy. Sorry but I do not see that in DSA at all (however dumb they are).
> MAGA is not just an ideology; it is a highly personalised political movement centred on a leader who has already shown that democratic rules are negotiable when they obstruct him.
It *was*. Then he fucked them over. Even the “promises” trump arguably kept (close the borders, evict a few) were so ham-handed that he started turning some of his supoorters against him. At this point, Trump’s only cult following is only stupid old people whonwatche Fox (instead of MSNBC), like some of my family. Can “stupid old people” qualify as a “mass movement “? As a “cult”? IDK. Maybe so. IDK. Maybe it is the funniest, saddest cult or movement in political history.
But, TBH, I’m not sure of my own claims above, because I lack data from interacting with R voters. If you have more direct interactions, please correct.
The analysis I fully subscribe to. But the fact that Maga rules the republican party completely while dsa (at least so far) is not nearly as powerful in the democratic party should be highlighted more i think. Maga = republicans, but for democrats there is some hope yet at least.
The choice in not either Soviet-style communism or libertarianism, you can only choose one or the other.
Those are not the only outcomes. There are countless variants and gray areas in between, which are what we see in the real world. And anarchy on the outside.
That is sort of my point. “Libertarian or Soviet” is a false dichotomy.
I see,I interpreted your sentence differently (incorrectly). So yeah, I’m agreeing.
there is no real difference between the two except MAGA hates people with pigment in their skin
Big difference. MAGA is more corrupt by orders of magnitude. Also pro pedophiles. One more, Israel over America, every single time.
I’m sorry to disabuse you, but on the left you will find corruption and sexual overreach. It is perhaps more apparent when they have their turn at the tiller. Classically, Ii would think of Dems as having sexual scandals (JFK, Clinton) and Repubs as having the financial ones (Teapot Dome, Cheney Sr,). But it’s a new era, with all sorts of crossovers (starting with Trump).
Nonsense. Most are not against people based purely on the colour of their skin. Most are against those who are illegal, won’t assimilate, hate the US, hate whites, hate Christians, hate capitalism.
If you kick out 30 million illegals and make room for productive legal migrants then that defined the difference between the DSA and MAGA
New Mexico has made it abundantly clear that they’re not interested in Donald Trump’s name-change game.
He’s just trying to help the government schooled minions who think they need a passport to travel there.
The last time we had responsible govt was under Clinton. A budget surplus and conservative social /legal policies. Since then we have been circling the drain. Both parties have betrayed the electorate. This is why we have maga and dsa. All fourth turning drama. We have the best govt money can buy. Free market capitalism is dead and we have devolved into corrupt cronly capitalism. We need to elect politicians who will address this regardles of partly.
Mostly true. But the best government is only best for a few constituencies such as defense contractors and their employees. Whatever happened to the party of Family Values? Many Americans who were born around the time of the 9/11 bombings can look forward to troubling economic times. Where were the Family Values folks when Bush 43 took the country into two costly wars and pushed for two costly tax cuts? As former president Hoover once remarked, “Blessed are the children for they shall inherit the national debt.”
“fourth turning”? LOL
“Free market capitalism is dead … crony capitalism”? LOL So many laptop mega-thinkers think this time is different somehow.
The Federal Reserve has existed for over a century.
Social Security has been around for almost a century.
We’ve had compulsory education attendance in this country for a century plus.
We’ve been off the gold standard for half a century….
We’ve had calls of nationalism/communism ‘scares’ in our past. They were overblown them and now.
The economy keeps working generally. The Earth keeps rotating. And people keep living.
Have a beer and relax…
Amen
The modern zeitgeist is citizens believing that a system exists were someone else will take care of them
Governments can provide certain limited, vital insurance functions for the entire pubic. National security and even government-provided infrastructure are, in a sense, expressions of this logic. Key word: limited. It should be soundly, actuarially funded by contributions of the people who are also the beneficiaries. Blank checks, unfunded, only in a national emergency, and again, limited.
The cheapened politics, however classify all kinds of things as emergencies. As with Trump’s 2025 tariffs.
How dare citizens expect any benefit from their government! Only businesses can, don’t they know their CATO catechism?
Sorry Mish, you’ve turned what used to be a dynamic presentation of global economics into an unreadable political diatribe, painting with a wide brush as you feed tribal narratives. You won’t miss me, but I do miss the days when global economics dominated your blog.
Global economics got a new heavyweight arbitrary shoulder-checking player in the last few years. This person cannot be ignored in any serious discussion.
bingo. Trump cult and trade wars and hot wars and amerikan isolation and the world boycotting our goods is a game changer for this crumbling empire. mish is properly analyzing it with economics and politics. you really cannot ever separate this anyway.
It’s not even political. It’s a post-apocalyptic Disneyland. And I suspect that at least 2 frequent commentators either work for social media “farms” of the DSA, or have successfully brainwashed themselves by being chronically online. With zero living experience: for example, they talk about workers’ cooperatives (where workers actually own the company by registered shares), which are a common theme in Western countries, but were totally forbidden in all socialist countries (where only the State owned means of production). They hear the DSA saying “nationalize the means of production” and they believe that the word “nationalize” means in the hands of the workers. What a circus!
As opposed to a tiny sliver of humanity controlling the economy, the government, and everything else that entails, including deficit spending to start wars and commit genocide, to profit from it, and to bail themselves out if they fuck up. IOW the status quo.
Gee, i dont know…
Was just going to say this, but you beat me to it.
I used to be a Libertarian from an economic perspective, but one day I realized that Capitalism and Communism arrive at the same shitty end……consolidation, reduced choice, and evntually oppression. Once a small group people accumulates enough capital they will simply buy the government. We are witnessing that right now. And before someone stupidly chimes in saying that “we don’t have “real” Capitalism in the US”, I’d remind them that the Communist fools say the same stupid thing about the Soviet Union and Maoist China….”neither were true Communism”. Bullshit, the Capitalism and Communism theories I hear are just abstract nonsense. It simply describes how each should work in a nice neat setting, but no one takes the time to evaluate how each ACTUALLY has worked when you add humans to the equation.
Thanks.
FD: I’ve arguably become one of those “communist fools” after decades learning everything the oligarchs told us about “capitalism” and about “communism” is worthless.
The oligarchs exaggerated by orders of magnitude everything bad about the USSR and China (fabricating death counts and intent then just like they did about every bogeyman the past 40+ years of my life) while covering up their own hands in worse or sometimes creating the events for which they blames their enemies.
As for the relative economic performance between the two blocs, everyone overlooks a fundamental difference in starting conditions. The communist bloc compromised nations: (a) where 80% of ww2 death and destruction occurred and (b) where oligarchs raped and pillaged for easily 100 years before that, leading the people there to revolt violently.
Putting (a) another way, while it’s true the USSR did most of the work to defeat Nazi Germany, IMO it’s misleading to say they “won”. More correctly, they “lost ww2 but survived”. They lost a great many of the people who would’ve grown their economy in the ensuing years. And they had to spend the next few decades after the war rebuilding residential housing while the west could invest elsewhere.
That’s a big hole to dig out of. And its a hole inside the other hole of (b). All while the rich and powerful foreigners work together to assassinate you, coup you, strangle your economy, or bomb your periphery.
Most people alive in USA have never had to think about this history. When they see life in e.g. Cuba, they compare it to life in their middle class neighborhood while forgetting they live in a country that steals from the RoW every time it prints another unit of the world’s reserve currency and that destabilizes and impoverishes Cuba with economic attacks since its revolution. They should compare life Cuba to Baltimore, Camden, Detroit, and now many places in “Flyoverville” (between the riches of Manhattan and LA or Miami and Redmond).
I’ve arrived at the conclusion that extremes in either direction are bad. A balanced approach, in my view, would work best.
Are u familiar with the “political compass” that plots people across at least 2 axes instead of 1? It makes much more sense, to me. Maybe to you, if you check it out.
I can’t link to it, because mish’s comment platform blocks it (a very neutral website), as well as other blogs I read.
The centre doesn’t exist anymore. Without a centre to balance the extremes, we end up with a Newton’s Cradle with 2 balls, a system of -1 and 1. With/against, pro/Con, … To re-establish balance, we need a centre.
“Newton’s Cradle simulation with two balls of equal mass; assuming perfect elasticity which implies no energy loss in collisions. The left ball is pulled away which lifts it, and then let go. The left ball swings back as it falls and strikes the right ball, transferring all its momentum to the right ball because they are the same mass. Transferring all the momentum implies the same velocity, which confirms all the kinetic energy. The kinetic energy, proportionate to the velocity squared, is converted to potential energy as the 2nd mass rises to the same height as the initial ball, then it falls and the cycle repeats in the other direction.”(wikipedia)
The balls here are not on neat repeating fenced paths though, they are like circling wrestlers looking to cut the legs out from the other. They can end up destroying the self and the other, unlike Newton;’s balls. Then the energy dispels erratically wherever nobody planned or wants it to go. there are innumerable paths, a la Borges’s ‘Garden of Forking Paths.’