Wait… So Socialists Are Just Liars?

By now, you probably know the democratic socialist sales pitch. Bernie Sanders has been running it for decades and NYC Mayor Zohran Mamdani copied his strategy on the campaign trail.

When they want to sound reasonable and moderate, they point to Scandinavia. Denmark, Norway, Sweden. Bike lanes and free college and happy people who trust their government. “We just want to be more like that,” they say. “What’s wrong with that?”

When they’re being a little more honest about what they actually admire, they point to China. Eight hundred million people lifted out of poverty, the most dramatic economic transformation in human history, offered as proof that a strong centralized state can build something great.

Two countries, two versions of the sales pitch. One for polite company, one for the college lecture hall. And here’s the thing: both stories are wrong. Scandinavia and China are, at their core, stories of free market success. The left has just been saying the opposite for so long that almost nobody stops to check.

So let’s check.

The Scandinavia Lie

Here’s the reality in Scandinavia. The Nordic model is a large welfare state funded by a relatively free-market economy.

In Denmark, unlike most other European countries, you can hire and fire with ease. There is no minimum wage, and yet McDonald’s employees make almost $20 an hour. And in recent years, they’ve had to cut back their generous unemployment benefits because, even in a country as homogenous and high-trust as Denmark, it was being abused.

Norway is ideologically closer to how democratic socialists portray it, but there’s a catch. Like the Soviet Union and Venezuela, it’s a petrostate. When you have massive natural resources to spend down over decades, you can get away with a lot more economic lunacy before paying the price.

Sweden is the real nail in the coffin for Bernie Sanders. Nearly half of its healthcare clinics are privately owned. A third of public high schools are privately operated. Sweden has a universal school choice voucher program, the exact policy American progressives fight tooth and nail at home. Over the past decade, Sweden saw more IPOs than Germany, France, the Netherlands, and Spain combined. It also has more billionaires per capita than the US.

Read that last one again. The model country for democratic socialism has more billionaires per capita than the country where the “billionaire class” supposedly reigns supreme.

But the more important question is how Sweden got to where it is today. Up through the mid-20th century, Sweden built its prosperity on limited government and strong property rights, with the government spending a lower share of GDP than the average Western country. Sweden started increasing government spending in the 1960s, but even by 1970, it still spent a lower share of GDP than the US.

Then it went left. Hard left. By 1993, roughly 70% of all spending in the Swedish economy flowed through the government, taxes had exploded, and the result was a catastrophic financial crisis that nearly broke the country. So Sweden reversed course, cutting spending, lowering taxes, and privatizing industries. Today, its public social spending as a share of GDP is virtually identical to the US. That’s not what the campaign slogans will tell you, but that’s the Sweden that actually exists.

One more thing, because this underlies the entire democratic socialist pitch: the idea that you fund a generous welfare state by taxing the rich. Sweden’s sales tax is 25%, second highest in the industrialized world, and everybody pays it. Sweden’s top income tax bracket isn’t $200,000 or $500,000, but under $70,000. The middle class funds the welfare state. When democratic socialists say they want to tax the rich so they can bring the Nordic model to the US, they are describing something that has never existed anywhere on earth.

The China Lie

When democratic socialists drop the Scandinavian pleasantries and reveal what they genuinely find inspiring, China comes up. It is true that nearly a billion people living under the CCP regime have escaped extreme poverty in only a few decades. The socialist narrative is that the Chinese government accomplished this through central planning and state-directed development, proving that a strong enough state can engineer prosperity.

This is not just wrong. It is, as a matter of documented history, the exact opposite of what actually happened.

Mao’s China was a catastrophe, one of the worst governments in human history by any honest accounting. His collectivization policies triggered famines that killed tens of millions, and his Cultural Revolution purged intellectuals, landowners, and anyone deemed insufficiently loyal, including the father of current President Xi Jinping.

Then Mao died, and something remarkable happened, though not what the left claims.

China’s growth wasn’t top-down or planned. It was driven by small, unauthorized, often illegal acts of capitalism bubbling up from the bottom while the government wasn’t looking. The clearest example is a group of farmers in Anhui province who secretly divided their land into individual plots and started keeping their surplus. They reinvented private property under threat of death and output exploded. By the time the government caught wind of this practice and adopted it as official policy, it was already widespread across China.

What followed was more of the same logic at a larger scale. Price controls were lifted, taxes were reduced, and state enterprises were gradually privatized through the 1990s. The boot came off the neck, and the human spirit did what it always does when it gets the chance. That’s the China miracle. Not a triumph of central planning, but a triumph of people released from bondage.

Behind the Sales Pitch

Both of these lies are strategic. Scandinavia is the version of the pitch tailored to normie sentiments, and China is the version for edgier, burn-it-all-down people who welcome the excuse to embrace something more radical.

But follow either story to its logical end and you arrive at the same place: they can’t all be this ignorant. They must be angling for something else. When they proudly identify as democratic socialists, zoom in on the socialist part. Bernie Sanders and Zohran Mamdani may be willing to settle for taxing the rich and “free” healthcare for now, but that’s just the first step.

Whether you call it progressivism, democratic socialism, or any other euphemism, it’s all the same thing. Socialists are just progressives in a hurry, and communists are just socialists in a hurry.