Who Really Believes This Insanity?
15th September 2026
“You have no debt,” the DSA continues. “You don’t need health insurance. You don’t pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human right. Your retirement is publicly funded. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses; they are common goods and utilities.”
The simplistic response is: if you only have to work as much as you want and housing, food, health care, education, energy, and transportation are all paid for by the government, then why would anyone work? And if no one works, then who pays for housing, food, health care, education, energy, and transportation?
Of course, they envision that people would work, though it isn’t clear how they manage to get quality work out of those workers. But let’s say that people do the work. How does that work out for society?
To answer this question, we don’t have to look at the Soviet Union, China, or even Britain when it was ruled by the socialists between 1948 and 1979. Instead, we only have to look at a socialist institution found here in the good ol’ USA: public transit.
As of 1964, transit was mostly private and the few public agencies that operated transit were funded mainly out of their fare revenues. But starting in 1965, Congress offered to subsidize public agencies that operated transit. Within a decade the transit industry was almost entirely socialized (or, as they called it then, “municipalized”).
Today, thanks to socialism, urban residents can go anywhere they want to go on transit — provided they want to go downtown. Those who want to go almost anywhere can expect to take hours on transit. Transit’s failure to serve anyone other than downtown travelers is shown by the commuters it carries: while around 30 percent of downtown workers in the nation’s 50 largest urban areas commute by transit, less than 4 percent of workers in the rest of those urban areas take transit to work.
Public transit goes from where you aren’t to where you don’t want to be—and takes three times as long.