Rather than inevitable, as Marx claimed, what defines socialism are its inescapable aspects. The hallmarks of socialism are its inescapable economic failure and social oppression. These are not coincidental but simultaneous and reinforcing.
Marx claimed that socialism was the inevitable final development of capitalism. For Marx, socialism and communism would occur as the culmination of economic development; eventually, too, the need for the state (viewed by Marx as the means by which the bourgeoisie held the proletariat in check) would wither away.
Of course, neither of has occurred; instead, the opposite has. Socialism has only occurred when it has been imposed, and socialism’s presiding state apparatus has only become more powerful and authoritarian.
The inescapable aspect of socialism’s economics is its failure; this failure arises from socialism’s abandonment of free markets for government planning. As the Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises explains, “Where there is no market there is no price system, and where there is no price system there can be no economic calculation.”
Without a free market, it is impossible to determine prices. Without prices, it is impossible to balance supply and demand for a single product; it is also impossible to determine value between products. The result: misallocation of resources.
The economy underperforms versus a free market. Where there is a free market for comparison, either within the socialist economy in certain sectors or outside the socialist economy (West and East Germany; South and North Korea), the divergence is evident early and grows over time.
The result is that people seek to leave. This impulse raises socialism’s inescapable social aspect: Socialism is oppressive. It must require people to do what they do not want to do and otherwise won’t do. And it requires keeping people from trying to escape it.
At the outset, socialism takes the resources of those it deems to be capitalists. You cannot “socialize” the means of production (where the term socialism comes from) without taking the means away from those who currently own them. Think such expropriation is a thing of the past? Look at the Billionaire Tax on California’s ballot and the growing number of wealth taxes proposed by so-called “progressives.”
Those who are targeted for expropriation want to leave immediately: see the exodus already underway in California even before its wealth tax is voted on. Socialism must therefore stop these individuals’ exit.
Next, those who are cheated by Marx’s dictum of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” want to leave next. These are the individuals who outperform their comrades and lose in socialism’s enforced “equality.”
As socialism’s economy founders—as it inevitably does when society’s top performers are expropriated and remunerated at less than their work is worth, and as its central planning misallocates resources—everyone not a privileged member of the party wants to leave. To keep them from leaving, to keep them working, and to silence their grumbling, socialism’s oppression grows.
The perpetual social hallmark of socialism is that people are not allowed to leave. Socialism’s walls are built to keep people in, not keep people out; its prisons populated not as much by criminals as political dissenters.
Cuba, North Korea, and China are examples today—what’s more, they have been for decades. In the past, the U.S.S.R., Eastern Bloc, and Kampuchea were examples. Yet regardless of present or past, they exhibit the same thing.
Though on a smaller scale, the same dynamic is occurring less dramatically in blue states where their policies (higher taxes, opposition to the competition that school choice offers) are driving a migration to red states.
It is a good reminder that socialism on a smaller scale still moves in the same direction, albeit more slowly. Socialist policies result in economic inefficiency and lower growth than what would occur with free markets. To impose their policies, socialist governments must restrict the abilities of its citizens to escape them: There is a reason why California’s Billionaire Tax is intended to be retroactive so that even Californians who move cannot avoid it.
The deluded souls who voted for Mamdani in New York, Wilson in Seattle, and plan to vote for a Billionaire Tax in California will find out soon enough that elected “gradual” socialism results in the same failure as comprehensive socialism. The effects just take longer to manifest themselves and, unless prevented, people will flee them.
Economically, socialism inevitably fails; it is inescapable. Socially, socialism inevitably represses; it is inescapable. The two go hand in hand with socialism, each cause and effect, each reinforcing the other.
Regardless of socialism’s utopian promises—yesterday, today, and tomorrow—its dystopian results remain immutable. They are inescapable.
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