The Price of "Free"

“The inherent vice of capitalism is the unequal sharing of blessings; the inherent
virtue of socialism is the equal sharing of miseries.”  — Winston Churchill.

Socialism begins with an alluring promise: get more, pay less, and work fewer hours. Someone else, usually “the rich,” will pick up the check.

The Democratic Socialists of America propose a 32-hour workweek with full pay, free education from pre-K through college, canceled student debt, housing without landlords, healthcare without insurance, and publicly funded retirement. Food, energy, medicine, and transportation are increasingly treated as “common goods” to be administered collectively. The platform also advocates sharply reducing traditional policing and incarceration, liberalizing immigration, and providing broad pathways to legal status.

It sounds compassionate. It ignores economic reality.

Nothing government provides is free. The cost arrives through taxes, borrowing, inflation, rationing, or declining quality. When politicians control housing, medicine, energy, and transportation, citizens become customers of a monopoly that writes the rules, allocates scarce resources, and decides what is available. Freedom inevitably contracts.

At home, DSA promises abundance without cost. Abroad, its moral certainty focuses almost exclusively on Israel. Its platform demands an end to all military and economic aid, endorses a Palestinian “right to resist,” and calls for a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. It demands the prosecution of American and Israeli leaders, yet does not identify Hamas or describe the October 7 massacre.

That omission is revealing. While Israel receives collective blame, its enemies barely receive a name. Terrorism becomes context, and America’s democratic ally becomes the villain required by the socialist script.

This is political marketing at its most seductive: everything you want will be free, someone else will pay, and the world’s conflicts will disappear once America abandons its allies. History offers a different verdict. Socialism has never delivered the paradise it promises—not in the Soviet Union, Cuba, Venezuela, or anywhere else. It produces shortages, coercion, and privileged political elites before blaming capitalism for the failure.

Perhaps it is time to revisit The God That Failed and The Gulag Archipelago before embracing promises that history has tested—and repeatedly rejected.

— Sina.