The Democratic Socialists of America invites Americans to imagine life without bills: no mortgage, landlord, health insurance premiums, college debt, grocery anxiety, or transportation costs. It sounds like a brightly colored water slide — fast, easy, exciting, and open to everyone.
What the advertisement does not show is where the water ends.
Bills do not disappear when politicians declare housing, healthcare, food, education, energy, and transportation to be rights. Doctors must still be trained, houses built, food produced, medicines developed, and power generated. The cost is not eliminated; it is transferred to taxpayers, borrowers, businesses, and future generations.
The DSA program is not simply a larger safety net. Its own platform calls for public ownership of the largest corporations and essential industries, aggressive wealth taxes, universal rent control, a federal jobs guarantee, a 32-hour workweek at full pay, free college, and cancellation of student debt.
Its political agenda is even more radical. It proposes abolishing the Senate and Electoral College, replacing the president and Supreme Court with bodies chosen by and subordinate to Congress, abolishing Immigration and Customs Enforcement, granting amnesty regardless of immigration status, and moving toward abolishing the police and prison system. The program openly says complete victory requires a new Constitution and a “democratic socialist republic.”
That is not reform. It is replacement.
Socialism’s basic error is treating prices as the cause of scarcity rather than information about scarcity. Government can order rents lower, but it cannot order lumber, land, electricians, and apartment buildings into existence. A major study of San Francisco’s rent control found that affected landlords reduced rental supply by 15%, ultimately working against affordability.
The same problem follows every promise of “free.” Someone must produce before government can distribute. If investment, entrepreneurship, and ownership become politically insecure, capital and talent adjust. People relocate, businesses invest elsewhere, and fewer risks are taken.
This is not an argument against every public program or reasonable safety net. It is an argument against promising unlimited benefits while attacking the productive base expected to finance them.
Capitalism is not perfect. It can be corrupted by monopoly, fraud, cronyism, and greed. Markets require honest courts, enforceable contracts, competition, and moral restraint. But transferring ownership to government does not remove selfishness or incompetence. It concentrates both economic and political power in institutions that are harder to escape and less accountable to competition.
Supporters often point to Denmark as proof that socialism works. But Denmark’s own government says its welfare model is not based on a socialist planned economy; it was built to facilitate a capitalist market economy. Large benefits are financed by productive businesses and broad taxation — not by abolishing private enterprise.
The constitutional danger is just as serious. America divides authority among the House, Senate, presidency, courts, states, and people because human beings are fallible and concentrated power is dangerous. Making the executive and judiciary subordinate to Congress would allow one political majority to write, administer, and interpret the law.
Police reform is legitimate. Police abolition is reckless. Poverty, addiction, and mental illness can contribute to crime, but rape, trafficking, domestic violence, organized theft, and murder cannot be counseled out of existence. A government that refuses to restrain violent wrongdoers abandons its victims.
Biblically, compassion for the poor is mandatory, but compulsory state ownership is not the same as generosity. Scripture affirms voluntary giving, honest work, property boundaries, impartial justice, and civil authority that restrains wrongdoing.
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The DSA offers an exhilarating ride by hiding its destination. It promises abundance while weakening the engine that creates it, democracy while concentrating power, and safety while dismantling enforcement.
The water eventually runs out. The rocks at the bottom remain.
Mark Mundy is a South Florida Christian ministry teacher and former law enforcement officer, firefighter, EMT, and small business owner. He writes about faith, constitutional government, culture, and public policy.