Ten positions from the DSA’s 2026 “Workers Deserve More” program, quoted word for word, and what’s wrong with each.
End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity
Demilitarize police departments, disempower police unions, and redirect funding to public services as steps towards fully abolishing the police and prison system which protects the rich and jails the poor.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Radical left abolitionists, some anarchists, historical communist regimes that replaced ordinary policing with political police.
Regimes that tore down ordinary policing did not end up with no police. They ended up with political police, loyal to the party instead of the public: the Cheka, the Stasi, the Securitate. abolished Cambodia’s courts, money, and schools and got mass graves, not a crime-free utopia.
Fix policing, don’t delete it. Body cameras, real civilian oversight, and firing officers who abuse the badge have support across the spectrum. What poor neighborhoods ask for is police who show up, solve murders, and treat them with respect, and roughly half of U.S. murders still go unsolved. The program’s one good idea, treating addiction and mental illness as health problems, does not need abolition to happen. Workers deserve safe streets, and their kids deserve to walk home on them.
A Real Democracy
Establish statehood for Washington D.C. and recognize the right to self-determination for all U.S. territories and colonies.… End political corruption and legalized bribery: get rid of lobbyists, dark money, and Citizens United, and publicly finance all elections. Abolish the Electoral College. Replace the President and Supreme Court with an executive and judiciary chosen by and subordinate to Congress.… Expand the House of Representatives, implement proportional representation and ranked choice voting in all elections, and abolish the Senate.… We are workers fighting to transform society: to win the battle for democracy, draft a new constitution, and create a democratic socialist republic.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Revolutionary socialists and communists who favored concentrated power in a single assembly or party.
In January 1918 Bolshevik guards dispersed the elected Constituent Assembly when it refused to give them what they wanted. Single-party rule followed across the Soviet bloc, where no court could tell the party no.
Keep the brakes. wrote Federalist 51 because he had met people: “If men were angels, no government would be necessary.” Divided power is slow and frustrating on purpose, because it makes every faction persuade instead of command. Britain and New Zealand do run on sovereign parliaments, but their judges are independent, not “subordinate,” and their governments do not also own the economy, which this program proposes in point 7. Want a fairer House? Reform it. Handing one chamber the courts, the presidency, and the pen for a new constitution gives you a constitution with an expiry date printed on the cover.
Free Palestine
Recognize the rights of the Palestinian people, including the right of return, the right to resist military occupation, and the right to self determination in a free Palestine with Jerusalem as its capital. End all military and economic aid to Israel. Prosecute U.S. and Israeli leaders responsible for the genocide in Gaza.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Hardline anti-Zionist left groups and regimes that have denied Israel’s legitimacy.
Jewish leaders accepted the 1947 UN partition plan. Arab leaders rejected it and went to war. Offers at Camp David in 2000 and from Ehud Olmert in 2008 were not accepted, and talks at Taba in 2001 ended without a deal. Hamas’s 1988 charter calls for killing Jews.
Peace has been made before, and it was made by recognizing Israel, not erasing it. Egypt signed in 1979 and got the Sinai back. Jordan signed in 1994. The UAE, Bahrain, and Morocco normalized ties in 2020. Israel is a democracy with Arab citizens and Arab members of parliament, and Jews have a claim to self-determination after centuries of being told where they may live. The serious path is a negotiated settlement with real security guarantees and a Palestinian leadership that accepts Israel exists. “Genocide” is a specific legal charge, and courts that weigh evidence should decide it, not a program that already has the verdict typed up.
Abolish ICE
End ICE detention and deportations and punish federal agents’ brutality. Legalize migration, grant amnesty for all immigrants regardless of status, provide a path to citizenship for all permanent residents, and end visa caps and quotas.… Extend full voting rights to all permanent U.S. residents and restore the right to vote for incarcerated people and people with criminal convictions.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Open-borders advocates on the far left, and dictators who used migrants as a weapon and would welcome a border with no limits: , , .
The 2015 European asylum surge produced years of fights over housing, welfare, and integration. Voters answered by electing governments that promised tighter borders, including Denmark’s Social Democrats, who won in 2019 on strict immigration rules. This program would repeal that lesson with a single line.
Immigration works when the public trusts the system. Keep legal immigration generous, tie more of it to skills and work, enforce the law at the border and the workplace, and clear the asylum backlog so claims are decided in months, not years. , no friend of the right, called open borders “a Koch brothers proposal” in 2015, because unlimited cheap labor helps employers and squeezes the workers already at the bottom. Voting stays tied to citizenship because it is a say over laws and taxes, and the road to citizenship ends with an oath for a reason.
“If making it easy to be an illegal alien isn’t enough, how about offering a reward for being an illegal immigrant? No sane country would do that, right?”
“All Americans… are rightly disturbed by the large numbers of illegal aliens entering our country. The jobs they hold might otherwise be held by citizens or legal immigrants. The public service they use impose burdens on our taxpayers.”Watch the clip
“…cannot allow people to pour into the U.S. undetected, undocumented and unchecked.”
“Illegal immigration is wrong, plain and simple.”
End Blockades, Embargoes, and Sanctions
End economic warfare against countries whose governments act independently of the United States, such as Cuba, Venezuela, and Iran.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Socialist and communist governments and their Western supporters.
Cuba’s state economy has produced chronic shortages and mass emigration since 1959, and more than a million Cubans, roughly a tenth of the population, have left since 2021. Venezuela went from one of the richest countries in South America to hyperinflation and millions of refugees. Iran’s regime has spent its oil money on proxies and missiles while its people went without.
Target the regime and spare the people. Smart sanctions that freeze officials’ assets and choke the security services, with food and medicine exempt, put the pressure where it belongs. The left knew this once: sanctions on apartheid South Africa were its proudest campaign, and they stayed on until the regime came to the table. Sanctions were good enough for Pretoria. They are good enough for a theocracy that hangs protesters. The program’s alternative is to end the pressure and hand the cash to the people doing the repression.
End the U.S. War Machine
Defund the Department of War. End all foreign wars and close overseas military bases.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Isolationist socialists and some anti-imperialist left currents.
Britain and France let their militaries run down while Hitler rearmed in the 1930s. Withdrawals from Vietnam and Afghanistan were followed by rapid collapses, and in Afghanistan a Taliban takeover. Deterrence is usually cheaper than rebuilding after the war it failed to prevent.
Peace through strength is the cheapest peace on offer. Shipping lanes, allied economies, and eight decades without great-power war do not defend themselves. Forward presence costs less than the war it prevents, and the people who call bases imperialism rarely ask the allies who want them. Afghanistan showed that leaving badly is expensive. The fix is smaller, smarter commitments with allies paying their share, not packing up and hoping for the best.
Economic Democracy
Establish public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries to ensure democratic control and accountability to the people. Enact aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations to spend on public goods and infrastructure.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Socialists and communists who nationalized industry.
Soviet and Eastern Bloc state factories made goods nobody wanted and not enough of what they did. Britain’s nationalized steel, coal, and car industries were swallowing large subsidies by the 1970s, and the country spent the 1980s selling them off. Venezuela’s state oil company went from over 3 million barrels a day to under half a million.
Competition is the regulator that never sleeps. A company that loses money has to change or die; a state monopoly that loses money sends the bill to taxpayers and carries on. Antitrust, sensible regulation, and open markets can deal with big firms without handing the biggest ones to a government that would then run the economy and the ballot box. China lifted around 800 million people out of extreme poverty after it started letting markets work in 1978. Nobody has ever nationalized their way there.
Finish Reconstruction
Enact reparations and massively invest in good jobs, quality housing and infrastructure in neglected minority communities.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Identity-focused left programs and some historical socialist redistribution schemes.
Soviet nationality policy stamped ethnicity into every passport and used it for quotas, and the resentments outlived the USSR. Malaysia’s ethnic preferences, in place since 1971, flowed mostly to the already well-off within the favored group. Sri Lanka’s preferences for the majority fed the grievances behind a 26-year civil war.
Equal treatment under law is the reason anyone is protected in the first place. Handing out benefits by group is the same mistake as handing out guilt by group, just with a check attached. What actually closes gaps: prosecuting specific acts of discrimination, letting parents choose schools that work, making it easier to start a business and own a home, and keeping neighborhoods safe enough to build in. Those help the kid who needs help, whatever their background.
Healthcare for All · Feminism for All
Guarantee universal healthcare at no cost to individuals, including complete access to reproductive and gender-affirming care.… Socialist feminism fights for queer liberation and the freedoms of all working class women.… Stop gender violence and end policies that oppress bodily autonomy and intimate life, including patriarchal restrictions on abortion, childbirth and childraising, gender expression and transition, marriage, and divorce.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Contemporary progressive and queer-liberation currents; some earlier radical left experiments with family restructuring.
The Soviets legalized easy divorce in 1917 and abortion in 1920, then reversed course by 1936, recriminalizing abortion and tightening divorce. Recent European reviews of youth gender medicine have restricted medical transition after weak evidence of benefit.
Parents, not a federal mandate, should guide medical decisions for their children, and irreversible treatment should clear a higher bar than a slogan. Sweden, Finland, and the UK tightened youth guidance after reviewing the evidence. Adults can live as they choose, and liberals and conservatives alike defend that. Conservatives add that marriage exists to raise children, which is a reasonable thing to say out loud. You can believe all of that and still question state policy on minors and on sport.
Freedom to Flourish
Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits… Pass a federal jobs guarantee.… Provide free, quality public education from pre-K to college and cancel all student debt.… Housing is a human right.… Build new, publicly-owned social housing, strictly regulate investment properties, establish universal rent control… Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Socialists and communists who treated housing, jobs, and basic goods as state responsibilities.
Soviet and Eastern Bloc housing queues and crumbling state flats are the textbook case. ’s Great Leap Forward collectivized food and production, and tens of millions died in the famine that followed. Venezuela’s price controls left shelves empty and millions emigrated.
Abundance comes from building, not decreeing. Make it legal to build housing and rents fall. Let people choose the hours that fit their lives. Aim help at the people who need it instead of handing it to everyone. Cancelling student debt sends the bill to taxpayers, including the roughly six in ten adults without a degree and the graduates who paid theirs off. “Free” college is paid for by the plumber who never went. Economists across the spectrum agree that rent control shrinks supply and price controls make shortages. Cheap slogans are not an industrial policy.
Same source, same official status. These planks did not make the ten above, but DSA wrote them down just the same.
Green New Deal
Implement massive investment in sustainable, publicly owned energy and transit infrastructure. Phase out the use of fossil fuels.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Fossil fuels still supply about four-fifths of America’s energy. The program gives no date, no price, and no plan for keeping the lights on, and hands the replacement to the same government that would own everything else. Germany shut its last nuclear plants in 2023 and pays some of the highest electricity prices in Europe. Fewer than one European home in five has air conditioning, against nine in ten in America, and a Nature Medicine study estimated that about 61,000 Europeans died from the heat in the summer of 2022. When energy bills spiked that winter, cold homes were blamed for about 4,700 deaths in Britain alone. Cheap, reliable energy is not a luxury. It keeps people alive.
Democracy at Work
Protect, expand, and enforce the rights of all workers to form, join, and strike with their unions, regardless of industry.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
“Regardless of industry” takes in nurses, firefighters, and air-traffic controllers. Franklin Roosevelt, who signed the Wagner Act, called a strike by government workers “unthinkable and intolerable” in 1937. And the same program wants to “disempower police unions” in point 1. Unions are sacred, it seems, until they wear a badge.
Healthcare for All
Expand healthcare access and quality by investing in new public hospitals and clinics. Make all medical education and training public and free.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
“At no cost to individuals” means at full cost to taxpayers, paid in waiting time. England’s NHS waiting list passed 7.7 million in 2023. Canadians waited a median of about 30 weeks from a GP’s referral to treatment in 2024, the Fraser Institute found. A free queue is still a queue.
End Mass Incarceration and Police Immunity
End qualified immunity and empower civilian oversight bodies with real authority over the police.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
Qualified immunity has critics on the right too, and civilian oversight is fine (see point 1). But read this next to the program’s goal of “fully abolishing the police.” It is not a plan to fix policing. It is a step on the way to ending it, and departments already struggle to hire.
End the U.S. War Machine
End immunity for U.S. war criminals and support the International Criminal Court’s mandate to prosecute war crimes.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
The United States never joined the ICC, and neither did China, Russia, or India. President Clinton signed the treaty in 2000 but advised that it not go to the Senate until its flaws were fixed. They never were. The program would hand a foreign court with no American jury power over American soldiers anyway.
Freedom to Flourish
Establish paid family leave for all workers, a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage.
DSA, “Workers Deserve More” program, 2026 · text as of 9 November 2026
A minimum wage is a ban on jobs that pay less. In 2019 the Congressional Budget Office estimated that a $15 federal minimum would raise pay for 17 million workers and cost 1.3 million jobs. A “living” wage set in Washington also ignores that rent in rural Mississippi is not rent in Manhattan.
DSA is not a party, so its members run as Democrats. Below are the officials who belong to it, used to, or wear the socialist label without joining, as of 8 November 2026. Six DSA members won House seats on 3 November 2026. When they are sworn in, DSA’s House caucus goes from two to eight.
Alexandria Ocasio-CortezU.S. Representative (D), New York’s 14th DistrictMember. National DSA withdrew its endorsement in 2024; New York City DSA still backs her.Source Approves positions: #4, #5, #10
Rashida TlaibU.S. Representative (D), Michigan’s 12th DistrictMember, endorsed by national DSA.Source Approves positions: #1, #3, #4, #8
Zohran MamdaniMayor of New York City (D) since January 2026Member, endorsed by DSA.Source Approves positions: #3, #4, #7, #9, #10
Nithya RamanMayor-elect of Los Angeles (D), takes office in DecemberMember. Beat Mayor Karen Bass, a fellow Democrat, on 3 November.Source
Janeese Lewis GeorgeMayor-elect of Washington, D.C. (D), takes office in January 2027Member, endorsed by DSA.Source
Darializa Avila ChevalierU.S. Representative-elect (D), New York’s 13th DistrictMember. Takes her seat 3 January 2027.Source Approves positions: #1, #4
Claire ValdezU.S. Representative-elect (D), New York’s 7th DistrictMember. Succeeds the retiring Nydia Velázquez.Source
Melat KirosU.S. Representative-elect (D), Colorado’s 1st DistrictMember, endorsed by national DSA.Source
Angela Gonzales-TorresU.S. Representative-elect (D), California’s 34th DistrictMember. Unseated Rep. Jimmy Gomez, a fellow Democrat.Source
Donavan McKinneyU.S. Representative-elect (D), Michigan’s 13th DistrictMember, endorsed by national DSA.Source
Chris RabbU.S. Representative-elect (D), Pennsylvania’s 3rd DistrictMember, endorsed by national DSA.SourcePhotos via Wikimedia Commons, public domain except: Zohran Mamdani (Dmitryshein, CC BY-SA 4.0), Melat Kiros (Andra Turner, CC BY-SA 4.0), Darializa Avila Chevalier (A Lo Claro and Indhira Baez, CC BY 4.0), Claire Valdez (NY Senate Photo, CC BY 2.0) and Chris Rabb (Yolanda Cheers, CC0). Angela Gonzales-Torres: photo courtesy of Ballotpedia, reused non-commercially with attribution under Ballotpedia’s image use policy.
Nobody below is a DSA member. But on the rules of the game itself, leading Democrats now back milder versions of point 2.
DSA program “Abolish the Electoral College.”
Mainstream Democrats Hillary Clinton (2020): abolish it. Tim Walz (2024): it “needs to go.” Kamala Harris (2026): review it.
DSA program “Establish statehood for Washington D.C.” and self-determination for “all U.S. territories and colonies.”
Mainstream Democrats James Carville and Kamala Harris (2026): make D.C. and Puerto Rico states.
DSA program Replace it with a judiciary “chosen by and subordinate to Congress.”
Mainstream Democrats Carville and Harris (2026): expand it to 13 justices.
DSA program “Abolish the Senate.”
Mainstream Democrats Joe Biden (2022) and Harris (2024): end the filibuster for the bills they want, so 51 senators can pass them.
“If the Democrats win the presidency and both houses of Congress, I think on day one, they should make Puerto Rico [and] D.C. a state, and they should expand the Supreme Court to 13.… Don’t run on it. Don’t talk about it. Just do it.”Podcast with Al Hunt, April 2026 · Source
“We need to revisit the point of expanding the court to 13 justices like we have 13 district courts.”There are 13 federal appeals circuits, not district courts. In the same speech she called for a review of the Electoral College and for statehood for D.C. and Puerto Rico (CNN).National Urban League conference, Nashville, 31 July 2026 · Source
“I believe we should abolish the Electoral College and select our president by the winner of the popular vote, same as every other office.”She has called for ending the Electoral College since 2000.On X, 14 December 2020 · Source
“I think all of us know the Electoral College needs to go. We need, we need national popular vote, but that’s not the world we live in.”The Harris campaign said this was not its position, and Walz agreed two days later.Fundraiser in Sacramento, 8 October 2024 · Source
“We have no option but to change the Senate rules, including getting rid of the filibuster for this.”Voting-rights speech, Atlanta, 11 January 2022 · Source
“I think we should eliminate the filibuster for Roe.”Wisconsin Public Radio interview, 24 September 2024 · Source
Same destination, different speeds. DSA puts it in writing. Carville’s advice is not to say it out loud at all. Quotes checked 9 November 2026.
| Country | 1950 | 1960 | 1970 | 1980 | 1990 |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| United States | 68.1 | 69.8 | 70.7 | 73.7 | 75.4 |
| United Kingdom | 68.6 | 71 | 71.9 | 73.6 | 75.7 |
| France | 66.4 | 70.4 | 72.1 | 74.2 | 76.8 |
| Russia | 55.5 | 68.3 | 68.7 | 67.5 | 69.3 |
| Poland | 58.3 | 67.1 | 69.6 | 70.5 | 70.6 |
| Hungary | 62.1 | 68.1 | 69.2 | 69.1 | 69.4 |
“Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.”
Ludwig von Mises, “Economic Calculation in the Socialist Commonwealth,” 1920
Workers do deserve more: more than queues, shortages, and a government nobody can vote out.
“A society that puts equality—in the sense of equality of outcome—ahead of freedom will end up with neither equality nor freedom.… On the other hand, a society that puts freedom first will, as a happy by-product, end up with both greater freedom and greater equality.”
Milton and Rose Friedman, Free to Choose, 1980
“Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
Thomas Sowell, Forbes, 8 September 1997
“The first lesson of economics is scarcity: there is never enough of anything to fully satisfy all those who want it. The first lesson of politics is to disregard the first lesson of economics.”
Thomas Sowell, “Student Loans,” Is Reality Optional?, 1993
For more than forty years America and its allies stood against Communism. Then the other side collapsed, and its captive nations walked free. It is one of the great achievements of modern history, and it has nearly slipped out of memory.
This was not a quarrel over tax rates. Communist states took over the farms, factories, and shops, abolished free elections, ruled through one party and a secret police, and kept their own people in by force. About 18 million people passed through the Soviet Gulag. At least 140 people were killed at the Berlin Wall, most of them trying to escape.
The Marshall Plan rebuilt Western Europe. The Berlin Airlift kept West Berlin alive through the Soviet blockade of 1948 and 1949. NATO, founded in 1949, made an attack on one ally an attack on all. America fought in Korea and Vietnam and lost more than 90,000 of its own there. Presidents of both parties held that line for four decades, and the war everyone feared most, a third world war, never came.
In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and the Communist governments of Eastern Europe collapsed one after another, most of them without a shot fired. The Soviet Union dissolved in December 1991. More than 100 million people in Poland, East Germany, Czechoslovakia, Hungary, Romania, and Bulgaria won the right to vote, speak, worship, and leave, and so did the Baltic nations. Every one of those countries is now in NATO and the European Union, by its own choice.
In a 2025 Cato Institute and YouGov poll, 34% of Americans aged 18 to 29 said they viewed communism favorably. On campus the ideas never went away: in a 2006 survey of American professors, 17.6% of social scientists called themselves Marxists. A generation after the Wall came down, the ideas behind it are back on the ballot under a gentler name.
That is a common answer when people are asked which side they were on. Marxism’s own name for its theory of history is historical materialism, and Soviet planners measured success in tons of steel and grain. They still could not keep food in the shops. The West won on prosperity, but prosperity was not what it was defending. It was defending the right to speak, worship, travel, and vote without asking permission.
It is a fair question for anyone weighing this program. The DSA is not the Soviet Union, and its members run in free elections. But its list starts from the same ideas: public ownership of the largest corporations (point 7), a Congress that chooses the president and the judges (point 2), and food, energy, and medicine run as “common goods,” not businesses (point 10). Those ideas had seventy years and half a continent to prove themselves. The people who lived under them answered the first chance they got.
Ask a socialist for a success story and you will hear about Denmark. Look closer: Denmark is a good place to see what a cradle-to-grave state costs, and who pays.
Bernie Sanders held up Denmark as a model in the October 2015 Democratic debate. Weeks later Denmark’s prime minister, Lars Løkke Rasmussen, answered him at Harvard: “Denmark is far from a socialist planned economy. Denmark is a market economy.” Its biggest companies, Novo Nordisk and Maersk among them, are private and trade on the stock exchange. The DSA program would put companies like that under public ownership (point 7). What Denmark does run is one of the biggest welfare states on earth, and that is the part worth pricing.
Taxes took 45.2% of everything Denmark produced in 2024, the highest share in the OECD. In America the figure is about a quarter. In the same Harvard speech the prime minister named the price himself: “The top income tax in Denmark is almost 60 percent.” And a 25% value-added tax lands on nearly every purchase, groceries included, at least until a promised cut on food in 2028. A sales tax on bread takes the biggest share from the family that spends every krone it earns. A welfare state that size is not paid for by the rich. It is paid for by the cashier.
The money does not come from billionaires. In 2023, the OECD found, income tax took 35.8% of what it cost to employ a Dane on the average wage. For the average American worker, income tax took 15.3%, and Social Security and Medicare another 7.1%. An American politician who proposed taking a Danish share of a nurse’s or an electrician’s paycheck would not survive the next election. That is why American socialists sell Denmark’s benefits and promise that billionaires will pay for them. Denmark scrapped its own wealth tax in 1997.
Danes have a name for the culture that keeps everyone level: the Law of Jante, from Aksel Sandemose’s 1933 novel, whose first rule is “You are not to think you are anything special.” The tax code levels incomes from above, and the benefits system decides how far anyone may fall. The state stands at both ends of the ladder and sets the range. That is security of a kind. It is not freedom, and it suits a small country of six million, the size of metro Atlanta, far better than a continental one of 340 million.
Denmark is small, homogeneous, and high-trust. About 84% of its people are of Danish origin, and more than six in ten Danes tell surveyors that most people can be trusted, among the highest shares in the world. Rules built for a nation of near-neighbors do not scale to a continent of 340 million from every corner of the earth. And measure Denmark against places its own size, not against all of America. Of the ten U.S. metro areas closest to Denmark in population, nine produced more per person in 2023, most of them far more, and they did it without Denmark’s tax bill.
| Place | Pop., Million | GDP per person |
|---|---|---|
| Metro San Francisco | 4.6 M | $171 K |
| Metro Boston | 4.9 M | $124 K |
| Metro Washington | 6.3 M | $113 K |
| Metro Houston | 7.5 M | $93 K |
| Metro Atlanta | 6.3 M | $90 K |
| Metro Philadelphia | 6.2 M | $89 K |
| Metro Miami | 6.2 M | $86 K |
| Metro Phoenix | 5.1 M | $79 K |
| Metro Detroit | 4.3 M | $76 K |
| Metro Nashville (smaller) | 2.1 M | $97 K |
| Denmark | 5.9 M | $68 K |
A cradle-to-grave state only works if it controls who climbs into the cradle. Denmark’s Finance Ministry put the net cost of immigrants from non-Western countries and their descendants at 31 billion kroner, about $5 billion, in 2018. The Social Democrats, Denmark’s own party of the left, won the 2019 election on tight immigration rules, and in 2021 Prime Minister Mette Frederiksen set the goal of zero asylum seekers: “We cannot promise zero asylum seekers, but we can set up that vision.” A welfare state is a promise to everyone inside the line, paid for by everyone inside the line. Erase the line and the promise has no limit, but the people paying for it still do. The DSA program wants Denmark’s welfare state with no border at all (point 4). Denmark’s own left says you cannot have both.
“You cannot simultaneously have a welfare state and free immigration.… When my parents came to the United States at the end of [the] 19th century, they didn’t get any welfare when they got here.”
Milton Friedman, who otherwise favored free immigration, in a 1999 Q&A with the International Society for Individual Liberty
“…it does not tyrannize, but it compresses, enervates, extinguishes, and stupefies a people, till each nation is reduced to be nothing better than a flock of timid and industrious animals, of which the government is the shepherd.”
Alexis de Tocqueville on the gentle despotism of an all-providing state, Democracy in America, vol. 2, 1840 (Henry Reeve translation)
Credit where it is due: Danes live well, and they ranked third in the 2026 World Happiness Report. But a good life arranged from above is not the same as a free one. The gap between Denmark and America is a matter of degree, and Americans prefer the freer, less managed end. When Pew asked in 2011 which mattered more, being free to pursue your goals without interference from the state or the state guaranteeing that nobody is in need, 58% of Americans chose freedom. In Spain, France, Germany, and Britain, majorities chose the state. Americans would rather run their own lives, mistakes included, than have them run well for them.
A decent country keeps a floor under the destitute, so nobody starves or dies of cold in the street for lack of help. Above that floor, your life is your own: your money, your risks, your mistakes, and your rewards. That includes the freedom to fail, and to try again, without asking a caseworker’s permission.
Most of the rest is better done by people than by the state: families, churches, charities, mutual-aid societies, and neighbors who know the person in front of them. Tocqueville saw it in 1830s America: “Americans of all ages, all conditions, and all dispositions, constantly form associations.” A charity that wastes money loses its donors. A government program that wastes money asks for a bigger budget.
A government big enough to look after everyone has to be big enough to manage everyone, and a budget that size draws the corrupt like moths to a flame. Denmark regularly tops Transparency International’s ranking of the least corrupt countries. America is not Denmark. During the pandemic, federal auditors estimated, fraudsters took $100 billion to $135 billion from unemployment benefits alone.
The OECD’s Better Life Index counts free public services, such as health care and schooling, as part of household income. Even counting them, it puts American household income after taxes at $51,147 per person a year, the highest in the OECD. In Denmark it is $33,774.
“A government big enough to give you everything you want is a government big enough to take from you everything you have.”
Gerald Ford, address to a joint session of Congress, 12 August 1974
A month into his presidency, Argentina’s new leader tells the world’s elite to their faces that the West is drifting toward socialism, and that free-market capitalism is the only tool that has ever ended poverty. In English.
Watch on YouTubeA Swedish historian on his own country, in twelve minutes: “We have been socialists in Sweden and we have been successful, but never at the same time.” The Nordic model, explained by someone who grew up in it.
Watch on YouTubeBorn in Venezuela in 1999, the year Chávez took power, he grew up through the inflation, blackouts and food shortages, and left in 2016. Now an economist, he traces how one of Latin America’s richest countries was run into the ground.
Watch on YouTubeThe full interview. Friedman’s answer: greed is universal, and competitive markets are the system that channels it into serving other people.
Watch on YouTubeAt 93, Sowell takes apart the idea that unequal outcomes prove unfair treatment, and asks the question this program never does: what actually happens after the policy passes?
Watch on YouTubeWhy gaps between groups are the norm across history and around the world, not proof of discrimination, and why the “disparate impact” standard turns the burden of proof upside down.
Watch on YouTubeA Democratic president, to a joint session of Congress. His next line: “But we cannot go back to the time when our citizens were left to fend for themselves.”
Watch on YouTubeReagan at the Brandenburg Gate, 12 June 1987. The wall came down in November 1989.
Watch on YouTubeThe first episode of Friedman’s PBS series. Prices coordinate millions of strangers who never meet.
Watch on YouTubeHer first conference speech as party leader. Socialists, she said, treat people as “numbers in a State computer.” Conservatives see individuals.
Watch on YouTube1 of 6 · Easy
Judge a policy by all its effects, including the ones nobody photographs. Short, plain, and the best place to start.
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Law exists to protect life, liberty, and property. When it starts taking from some to give to others, Bastiat calls it what it is: legal plunder.
Free PDF3 of 6 · Moderate
The companion to the 1980 PBS series. Markets, prices, and the cost of government, explained for people who never took economics.
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Scarcity and trade-offs, explained with examples from ordinary life. Every policy has costs, and somebody always pays them.
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Central planning does not stay in the economy. Power over how people earn a living becomes power over everything else.
Free PDF6 of 6 · Hardcore
The calculation argument: without market prices for capital and goods, a planned economy cannot tell what anything is worth. Dense, and the hardest read here.
Free PDFWestern civilization built the freedom, the science, and the full shelves. The left is at war with that inheritance, and this program is its battle plan.
The anger on this site is real, and it is not aimed at the people tempted by this program. Most of them want what everyone wants: a decent life, a fair shot, and a better world for their children. That is exactly why it is so hard to watch. These ideas have been tried for seventy years, on hundreds of millions of people, and they have never once built the world they promise. Where is the gleaming city of free, prosperous, well-educated people that central planning built? There is no such place. There are only the people who left, and the walls that were built to stop them. The planners were never going to build anyone a flying car. East Germans waited about ten years for a Trabant.
The politicians selling this program know that record, or should. They promise free everything and never say who pays, because the honest answer is you: in taxes, in queues, and in freedoms you will not get back.
We are not as strong as we were. We are more divided, we trust each other less, and we are having fewer children than it takes to replace ourselves. A civilization in that state cannot afford to gamble its inheritance on an experiment that has failed everywhere it was tried. Our children will live in whatever we choose now. The picture below is satire. The worry behind it is not.
