In this American Thinker article, Raushan Gross argues that the “new” socialism gaining traction among younger Americans is essentially old socialism repackaged with a more self-focused, subsidy-driven pitch.
- Gross says the latest socialist impulse is built around what he calls a “Me-First” perspective: using government power to satisfy one group’s wants with everyone else’s resources.
- The article argues that modern socialists still rely on capitalist production while trying to dismantle the incentives that make that production possible.
- Gross contends that price controls, higher minimums, wealth confiscation, overregulation, and caps on profits are not a coherent alternative economic system but interventions imposed on an existing market system.
- A central point is that socialism lacks its own productive mechanism to replace private property, entrepreneurship, profit, pricing, and market signals.
- The author uses the example of the butcher to argue that food appears on the table because people are incentivized by market forces, not because production happens automatically.
- Gross warns that removing incentives while expecting abundance is economically unrealistic and would lead to scarcity rather than fairness.
- The article also questions who would control distribution under socialism and why that “third party” would be less self-interested than anyone else.
- Gross argues that prices communicate scarcity, demand, and allocation across society, while socialist planners cannot replicate that information effectively.
- The conclusion is that younger socialists want to overturn capitalism but have no workable tools to replace it, making the movement “hot air” rather than a viable economic model.
Read the full story: https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/06/how_the_new_socialism_falls_apart.html
