A few years ago, I had a long conversation with a close friend who considers himself a communist. He’s smart, well-read, and genuinely motivated by concern for human suffering. That conversation has stayed with me, not because I felt he was malicious — he wasn’t — but because of how clearly it illustrated the intellectual gap between intention and understanding. He wanted a better world. He just had entirely the wrong map for finding it.
This article grew out of that conversation. What started as rough notes has become something I feel strongly enough about to put into proper form. I’m going to make a case against collectivist ideologies — socialism, communism, and their softer modern variants — not as a rant, but as a reasoned argument grounded in history, economics, and philosophy. I’ll also try to defend what I think is the more important and more neglected half of the argument: that the real revolution isn’t political at all.
Strong Opinions, Weakly Held
Before getting into specifics, I should say something about how I approach contested ideas. I try to hold strong opinions weakly — which means I’ll commit to a position, but I’ll revise it when confronted with better evidence or reasoning. That’s different from having no opinions, and it’s different from having opinions so fixed they’re immune to argument.
When I’m uncertain about something, I return to first principles. I look at nature, at animal behavior, at the sweep of human history, at what evolutionary theory tells us about how we’re wired. And one thing that seems incontrovertibly true, across all of these lenses, is that humans are largely self-interested creatures. That’s not a cynical observation — it’s a biological one. It’s also the starting point for any honest analysis of how societies organize themselves.
The collectivist project, in all its forms, has been an attempt to override this. To build systems on the assumption that people will reliably subordinate their own interests to the collective good. The historical record shows how that assumption plays out in practice.
The Body Count Nobody Wants to Talk About
Let’s start with history, because history is the only real test of an ideology.
The 20th century was the great laboratory for collectivist ideas. The results are in. Scholars estimate that communist regimes killed approximately 100 million people in the 20th century — a figure documented in The Black Book of Communism by Stéphane Courtois and colleagues. To put that in perspective: it dwarfs the death toll of Nazism, the other great collectivist catastrophe of the modern era.
In the Soviet Union, Stalinist purges, forced collectivization, and deliberately engineered famines — including the Holodomor in Ukraine — killed tens of millions. Estimates range widely, but a conservative accounting puts the death toll of Stalin’s rule at around 6 to 9 million directly caused deaths, with figures reaching 20 million or more when you include foreseeable deaths from deportation and the Gulag system.
In China, Mao’s Great Leap Forward — an attempt to rapidly collectivize agriculture and industrialize — caused approximately 36 million deaths through famine between 1959 and 1961. As many as 65 million total deaths are attributed to the Communist Party of China’s rule. In Cambodia, the Khmer Rouge, in power for just four years from 1975 to 1979, murdered 1.5 million people — representing, per capita, one of the most devastating democides ever recorded. North Korea has maintained a gulag system for decades. Cuba has imprisoned and persecuted political dissidents continuously since 1959.
These weren’t accidents or aberrations. They were the predictable outcome of a system that concentrates power absolutely, eliminates market prices, abolishes private property, and then tries to govern economic and social life by decree. The people running these regimes were not uniquely evil — many were true believers. The system produced these outcomes because of what it is, not because of who happened to be running it at any given moment.
As Thomas Sowell put it plainly: “Socialism in general has a record of failure so blatant that only an intellectual could ignore or evade it.”
“But Real Socialism Has Never Been Tried”
This is the most common escape hatch, and it deserves a direct response.
The argument goes that the USSR, Maoist China, Cuba, North Korea, Venezuela, and Cambodia weren’t real socialism — they were corrupted versions, hijacked by the wrong people. Real socialism, the argument continues, hasn’t been tried yet.
This argument does several things simultaneously: it insulates the ideology from all contrary evidence, it ignores the structural reasons why socialist systems consistently produce authoritarianism, and it asks us to continue trusting an idea with a catastrophic track record on the grounds that next time will be different.
But notice what it’s actually claiming: that a system requiring the concentration of enormous economic and political power in the hands of the state will somehow, eventually, be run by benevolent and incorruptible people who will yield that power gracefully when asked. This isn’t a practical program — it’s wishful thinking dressed in academic language.
Ludwig von Mises saw this coming before most of these experiments had even begun. Writing in 1922 in Socialism: An Economic and Sociological Analysis, he identified the problem at the structural level, not the moral one: “Socialism is the renunciation of rational economy.” His argument — the economic calculation problem — is worth understanding in full, because it’s probably the most devastating intellectual critique ever made of socialist economics.
The Mises Calculation Problem
Here’s the core of Mises’s argument. In a market economy, prices for goods and services emerge from the voluntary decisions of millions of buyers and sellers. These prices carry information — about scarcity, about preferences, about opportunity costs. They tell producers what to make, in what quantities, using which inputs. This information is generated by the market process itself and couldn’t exist without it.
Under socialism, where the state owns the means of production and eliminates market prices for capital goods, this information simply doesn’t exist. Planners have no rational way to decide whether steel should go towards making tractors or railways or buildings — because without prices, there’s no way to compare the relative value of these uses. Every resource allocation decision becomes a guess.
Mises’s conclusion: “Where there is no free market, there is no pricing mechanism; without a pricing mechanism, there is no economic calculation.”
This isn’t a practical complaint about bureaucratic inefficiency — it’s a structural impossibility. You cannot rationally allocate resources in a complex economy without prices, and you cannot have meaningful prices without private ownership and voluntary exchange. The socialist economy doesn’t just work less well than a market economy — it cannot function at the level of rational economic calculation at all.
Hayek’s Knowledge Problem
Hayek extended this critique with his own insight, which he laid out in his 1945 essay “The Use of Knowledge in Society.” His argument was that knowledge in a society is not centralized — it’s dispersed among millions of individuals, each possessing local, specific, often tacit knowledge that no planner can fully access or articulate.
“The peculiar character of the problem of a rational economic order,” Hayek wrote, “is determined precisely by the fact that the knowledge of the circumstances of which we must make use never exists in concentrated or integrated form but solely as the dispersed bits of incomplete and frequently contradictory knowledge which all the separate individuals possess.”
The shopkeeper who knows his customers’ preferences, the farmer who knows his land, the entrepreneur who senses an unmet need — none of this knowledge can be uploaded into a central database or fed into a planner’s model. It exists in the form of personal judgment, local context, and tacit experience. The market aggregates this knowledge automatically, through price signals. Central planning cannot replicate this process, no matter how sophisticated the planning apparatus.
This is why socialist economies have always been characterized by chronic shortages and surpluses — queues for bread, empty shelves, and surpluses of things nobody wants. Not because the planners were bad people, but because no planner can know what the price system knows.
Venezuela: A Modern Cautionary Tale
If the USSR feels like distant history, look at what happened in Venezuela within the last decade.
Venezuela was, not long ago, the richest country in Latin America. It sits atop the world’s largest proven oil reserves. Under Hugo Chávez and then Nicolás Maduro, the state nationalized industries, imposed price controls, and built an economy on petro-socialist redistribution. The results were predictable to anyone who had read Mises.
Between 2013 and 2020, Venezuela’s GDP collapsed by around 73%. Some estimates put the total contraction closer to 88% — surpassing the duration and severity of the United States Great Depression. Hyperinflation reached 300,000% in 2019. As of recent years, over 91% of Venezuelans live in poverty, with 67% in extreme poverty. By 2017, three-quarters of the population had lost an average of over 8 kilograms in body weight due to food scarcity. More than 5 million people — nearly a fifth of the country — fled abroad.
And this wasn’t caused by sanctions, or imperialism, or the price of oil alone. The collapse was engineered by the systematic destruction of market mechanisms, the nationalization of productive enterprises, and the elimination of price signals through currency controls and government mandates. Venezuela is a live demonstration of the Mises calculation problem and what it looks like when it plays out in real time, in a country rich enough that it took decades to fully collapse.
Cuba: Six Decades of Revolution, Still Waiting for the Benefits
Cuba is presented by Western leftists as a success story — universal healthcare, high literacy, defiant independence from American imperialism. But after 65 years of the revolution, Cubans continue to live in poverty, and the gap between the ideology’s promises and daily reality has grown impossible to ignore.
In July 2021, Cuba saw its largest anti-government protests since 1994. Thousands of people took to the streets across the country, chanting “Freedom” and “Down with the dictatorship.” The immediate triggers were shortages of food and medicine, chronic power outages, and the government’s handling of COVID-19. The Cuban economy had contracted by 10.9% in 2020, largely because the collapse in tourism revenue — a symptom of dependence on a state-managed economy that can’t diversify — combined with a decline in Venezuelan oil subsidies exposed how fragile the entire system was.
The government’s response was arrests. At least 710 Cubans were charged with crimes including sedition. Lengthy prison sentences followed. This pattern — the population protests economic failure, the government responds with repression — is not a bug in socialist systems. It’s a feature. When you’ve eliminated the market as a mechanism for registering and responding to economic signals, political force becomes the only remaining tool.
Argentina: The Electorate Votes With Its Feet
It is worth noting what happened in Argentina in late 2023, when the country elected Javier Milei as president on an explicitly anti-Peronist, free-market platform.
Argentina had been subjected to decades of left-populist economic management — currency controls, fiscal deficits, nationalization, and repeated debt crises. Inflation was running at 211% annually when Milei took office. His response was radical: dramatic cuts in public spending, deregulation, and an explicit rejection of the interventionist consensus that had governed Argentina for generations.
The short-term pain was real. But by mid-2025, monthly inflation had fallen to a five-year low of around 1.5%, Argentina had achieved its first fiscal surplus in 14 years, and the country had posted a record trade surplus of $18.9 billion in 2024. Poverty, which had peaked at 52.9%, had fallen to 31.6% by mid-2025. In October 2025 midterm elections, Milei’s party doubled its congressional representation with 41% of the vote.
This is a population that lived through the consequences of Peronist economics and voted — with some urgency — in the other direction.
The Nordic Countries Are Not Socialism
At some point in any debate about these topics, someone will mention Denmark or Sweden. “Look at the Nordic countries,” they’ll say. “They have high taxes, generous welfare states, and people are happy. That’s democratic socialism working.”
This argument rests on a category error. The Nordic countries are not socialist. They are market economies with large welfare states, and the distinction matters enormously.
The former Danish Prime Minister Lars Løkke Rasmussen addressed this directly, stating that Denmark is “far from a socialist planned economy.” These countries have strong private property rights, open markets, free trade, flexible labor markets, and significant deregulation relative to the rest of Europe. According to the Heritage Foundation’s Index of Economic Freedom, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, and Finland consistently rank higher in economic freedom than France, Spain, and Italy — countries nobody would call socialist.
Moreover, the Nordic countries have been moving steadily away from the most statist features of their welfare systems for decades. Sweden in particular — which did lean towards heavy state intervention in the 1970s and 1980s — suffered a severe financial crisis in the early 1990s and responded with liberalization: school vouchers, pension privatization, deregulation, and corporate tax cuts. The model that leftists admire was built on a foundation of capitalist wealth generation and has been sustained through market-friendly reform, not in spite of markets.
If you want to cite the Nordic countries as evidence for anything, the honest argument is: “Look at what you can achieve with a market economy, strong institutions, social trust, and reasonable fiscal management.” That’s a fine argument. It’s just not an argument for socialism.
Capitalism Didn’t Create Global Poverty — It’s Ending It
One of the most persistent claims from the left is that capitalism generates and perpetuates global inequality and poverty. The data tells a different story.
In 1990, approximately 2.3 billion people lived in extreme poverty. By 2024, that number had fallen to around 700 million — a reduction of 1.5 billion people in roughly three decades, during a period of unprecedented global market integration and trade liberalization. The extreme poverty rate fell from 38% of the world’s population to around 8.5%.
China accounts for a large portion of this. Between 1978 and roughly 2013, China lifted more than 800 million people out of extreme poverty — by embracing market mechanisms, allowing private enterprise, and integrating into global trade. Not by following the Maoist collectivization that had caused tens of millions to starve in the 1950s and 1960s. The lesson is not subtle.
Frédéric Bastiat, the 19th-century French economist, gave us the essential tool for thinking about government intervention: the distinction between what is seen and what is not seen. “Between a good and a bad economist, this constitutes the whole difference — the one takes account of the visible effect; the other takes account both of the effects which are seen, and also of those which it is necessary to foresee.”
When people look at inequality under capitalism, they see the seen — the wealthy tech entrepreneur, the hedge fund manager. They don’t see what isn’t there: the billion people who no longer go to bed hungry because markets coordinated the production and distribution of food across continents. They don’t see the counterfactual — what poverty and deprivation look like when markets are suppressed, as Venezuela, Cuba, and North Korea demonstrate in real time.
Workers Aren’t Exploited — They’re Participating in Voluntary Exchange
The Marxist concept of exploitation holds that workers are robbed of the “surplus value” they create because capitalists own the means of production and capture the difference between what workers produce and what they’re paid. This is the basis of the labor theory of value, and it gets things backwards.
The labor theory of value holds that goods are worth what it costs in labor to produce them. But this is obviously false. A badly designed product that takes a lot of labor to make isn’t worth more than a well-designed product made efficiently — the market is indifferent to the effort involved. Value is determined subjectively by buyers, not objectively by hours worked. This is the core insight of the Austrian and marginalist tradition in economics.
When a worker and an employer agree on a wage, both parties benefit — otherwise neither would enter the exchange. The worker gets compensation that they judge worth more than their time and effort; the employer gets labor they judge worth more than the wage. This is the logic of all voluntary exchange: it’s positive-sum, not zero-sum.
Exploitation, properly understood, involves coercion — one party being forced into a transaction against their will. The market doesn’t coerce. Socialism, on the other hand, by definition requires coercion: conscription of resources, abolition of private property, and ultimately enforcement by the state of rules that people would not voluntarily follow. As Sowell noted: “If you give the government enough power to create ‘social justice,’ you have given it enough power to create despotism.”
The Authoritarian Logic at the Heart of Collectivism
Here’s an observation worth sitting with: every socialist regime in history has needed to control its borders to prevent people from leaving. Not to keep enemies out — to keep its own citizens in.
The Berlin Wall wasn’t built to stop West Germans from flooding into East Germany. The Cuban government doesn’t shoot people for trying to swim into Cuba. North Koreans who escape face imprisonment or execution, as do their family members. The fact that socialist states must resort to caging their populations to maintain the system is the most damning possible indictment of those systems’ actual performance relative to their promises.
And this isn’t incidental. It flows from the structure of the thing. When you abolish voluntary market exchange, the only mechanism left for directing economic activity is compulsion. When your system produces results that rational people would reject if given the choice, you must prevent them from choosing. The gulag, the secret police, the travel restrictions, the show trials — these aren’t aberrations from a good idea gone wrong. They’re the load-bearing walls of the collectivist project.
The COVID-19 pandemic provided a smaller-scale but instructive demonstration of this tendency even in nominally liberal democracies. Governments around the world seized emergency powers with remarkable speed and held them longer than circumstances warranted. In some jurisdictions — particularly parts of Australia and Europe — these powers persisted for years, used to restrict movement, mandate medical procedures, and criminalize dissent. The experience reminded anyone paying attention how quickly the apparatus of state control can expand when given a crisis to justify it, and how reluctant governments are to relinquish powers once acquired.
The Cultural Capture: Collectivism in a New Wardrobe
The collectivist impulse hasn’t disappeared — it’s found new institutional homes. Universities, media organizations, large HR departments, and international bodies have increasingly adopted frameworks that prioritize group identity over individual rights, enforce ideological conformity, and treat disagreement as harm.
The proliferation of DEI bureaucracies in corporations and institutions isn’t just an HR trend — it represents a form of collectivist thinking applied to cultural life. People are categorized by their group memberships first and assessed as individuals second, if at all. Speech that challenges the approved taxonomy is suppressed, often not by law but by social and professional sanction that functions like law.
ESG (Environmental, Social, and Governance) frameworks apply similar pressure to capital markets, directing investment based on political criteria rather than financial returns or voluntary customer preference. The mechanism is different from Soviet central planning, but the underlying impulse — to override voluntary individual choices with centrally determined “correct” outcomes — shares a family resemblance.
I’m not suggesting these things are morally equivalent to gulags. They aren’t. But the logic is continuous, and the direction of travel matters.
Three Pillars of the Only System That Works
Capitalism rests on three structural features that make it function where collectivism fails. They’re worth stating clearly.
Market-determined prices. Prices that emerge from voluntary exchange carry information about scarcity and value that no planner can generate or replicate. They coordinate the decisions of millions of people who have never met and share no central authority. Remove them, as Mises showed, and rational economic calculation becomes impossible.
Profit-and-loss accounting. Profit signals that resources are being used in ways people value; loss signals they aren’t. This is the feedback mechanism that drives adaptation and improvement. In socialist systems, enterprises don’t go bankrupt because there’s no market feedback — they persist indefinitely, consuming resources, regardless of whether they serve any genuine need. This is why Soviet industry produced things nobody wanted and couldn’t produce enough of the things people desperately needed.
Private property rights. When people own things, they have an incentive to maintain and improve them, and to bear the costs of their decisions. When property is collective, incentives are diffused, accountability disappears, and Garrett Hardin’s “tragedy of the commons” plays out — shared resources are overused and degraded by individually rational actors.
These aren’t ideological preferences — they’re structural features of systems that work, identified by examining what happens when you remove them.
The Moral Case for Liberty
Economics aside, there’s a moral argument for individual liberty that doesn’t depend on efficiency.
A person who is compelled to work for the collective against their will, who cannot own the fruits of their labor, who cannot exit a system they find unjust — that person has had their dignity violated in a fundamental way. Liberty isn’t just instrumentally valuable because it produces better economic outcomes (though it does). It’s intrinsically valuable because human beings are ends in themselves, not inputs to a social program.
Good intentions don’t justify bad outcomes. A planner who engineers a famine in pursuit of collective agricultural targets is not absolved by sincerity. A government that imprisons dissidents in the name of social harmony is not morally redeemed by the social harmony it claims to pursue. The road to most of the last century’s worst atrocities was paved with genuine belief in the justice of the collective cause.
This is what Bastiat meant by the seen and the unseen. The seen is the equality and solidarity promised by the ideology. The unseen is the impoverishment, the coercion, and the death that follow from building an entire social order on the systematic suppression of voluntary exchange and individual choice.
The Revolution Within
After all of that, I want to come back to where I started — because I think the political and economic arguments, while important, are ultimately secondary to a more personal one.
The impulse that drives people towards collectivist ideologies is often a genuine desire to fix something — to address injustice, alleviate suffering, build a better world. I don’t doubt the sincerity of that impulse in most of the people who hold these views. What I question is the target.
External political systems — even good ones — cannot substitute for internal transformation. Viktor Frankl, who survived the Nazi concentration camps, wrote about finding meaning and dignity even in the most brutal circumstances imaginable. His observation was that the one freedom no regime could take from him was the freedom to choose his response to what happened to him. Even those with no external freedom can have very different experiences depending on their interior life. That’s not a justification for oppression — it’s a statement about where the deepest human capacities are located.
The left promises external solutions to what are fundamentally internal problems: meaning, purpose, dignity, belonging. It promises that if we arrange society correctly, these needs will be met. The Stoics, the Buddhists, and most serious contemplative traditions say the opposite: these things come from within, and no arrangement of society can provide them.
This is the revolution I’m interested in. The one that starts with taking responsibility for your own life — not as an abdication of concern for others, but as the precondition for genuinely helping them. You cannot pour from an empty cup. The person who is still waiting for the external revolution to fix their internal chaos is waiting for something that will never arrive.
Work on yourself. Build something. Help the people around you, voluntarily, out of genuine care rather than coerced obligation. Cooperate, trade, exchange — not because the state says you must, but because voluntary exchange is the natural expression of social beings who respect each other’s autonomy.
That’s not a political manifesto. It’s a way of living. And in my experience, it’s considerably more effective than waiting for the revolution.
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