Socialism at Its Finest: The U.S. Transit Industry
13th October 2026
A recent Gallup poll found that 43 percent of Americans have a positive view of socialism, the highest share since the polling firm began asking the question in 2010. The greatest support, 57 percent, comes from people under age 35 who weren’t yet born when the fall of the Soviet Union uncovered how socialism treated the people of Russia and eastern Europe.
Decades of propaganda about how well socialism was working were swept away with the collapse of the soviet government revealing instead industries that made bad products in response to perverse incentives; grocery stores with only a handful of consumer goods on their shelves; and elite bureaucrats, or nomenklatura, who controlled the system for their own benefit.
We don’t have to look overseas to learn how poorly socialism works. The United States has its own experiment in pure socialism: the urban transit industry. This $100 billion a year industry produces about $10 billion in annual benefits to consumers (as measured by the amounts they were willing to pay in transit fares) and $90 billion in annual costs to taxpayers that end up in the pockets of agency bureaucrats, employees, and contractors.