> “Take from the rich and give to the poor” is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in politics. It is simple, moral and emotionally satisfying. Competing with it has never been easy. And any movement that hopes to win young people must offer a message that sounds just as good.
I would argue Charlie Kirk's advice about investing in yourself, getting married, having kids would be a good alternate message.
If you read Turchin's posts on immiseration you can't fault the younger generation for turning to socialism. People like Mamdani don't know how to build or fix complex systems, so they revert to "solutions" like socialism/communism (because they also likely don't know history like you point out). It would be interesting if people who know better and know history would offer to work with Mamdani to shut down the wealth pump and offer real policies instead of these silly things like free bus rides and centrally run grocery stores.
"Socialism provides a comforting solution. It explains failure as injustice and promises redemption through redistribution."
What would happen if we completely reformed the education system with a primary mission to prepare each and every student for their next step toward a goal of economic self-sufficiency instead of being ideological indoctrination factories?
What if we, at the same time, implemented a new national industrialization economic policy including anything and everything we need to do to promote more domestic business starts and growth... backed by a motivation to increase economic opportunity for citizens? This movement would require tariffs to fix our $1.4 trillion annual trade imbalance. It would also require our government to strike trade deals where countries importing goods to the US would need to move more of their corporate manufacturing to the US.
What if we had the federal government lead a YIMBY national movement for states to lower the barriers to more housing development in areas with severe housing shortage... with a goal to level the cost of housing to reasonable levels with adequate supply?
What if we stopped the flow of illegal immigrants and reformed immigration in general to stop the trend where since 2000 80% of job creation went to immigrants and instead went to citizens?
What if we dealt with waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government where so much of our tax money and debt spending is funneled to programs, projects and grants that benefit the wealthy and their politics over the rest of the citizenry?
What if we reformed entitlement spending where able-bodied people don't work, so they will have to work and fill the millions of jobs currently unfilled... and thus break the cycle of poverty for many families trapped in it?
This is the Trump-MAGA agenda. It is the help for this cohort of idiot, privileged, pampered, pouty and resentful kids. But instead of getting it... they are brainwashed and gaslit to violently oppose and assassinate those that would remedy their misery.
The big missing piece to this is the psychological mess created when people don't have enough real productive work to do. Like all kids, they kick and scream in a tantrum of resistance when required to take a bath and make their bed every day... to clean the garage and help with the housecleaning and yard maintenance chores. But good parents know that doing these things is psychologically healing and developing... that the human animal was built for struggle, strife and toil... that the pursuit of higher-level psychological needs demand productive effort and rewards.
We can fix most of the problems of youth that want to burn down the system by forcing them to work to survive. They won't naturally want to learn how to carry plywood and hammer nails, but they will be saved by doing so.
When I was in college circa 1966, I became enamored of socialism. Not surprising, since I attended the U of Michigan, where there were many leftist professors. On my visits home I started arguing the communist case at the dinner table. My dad said, "Yeah, those ideas sound good but they don't work because of human nature. People won't go along with systems where most of their income is given away to someone else." I gave this comment serious thought, and since I was planning to become a professional with a comfortable income, I lost all interest in socialism.
Perhaps we are reading too much into peoples' responses to a poorly constructed question.
If the rich were taking violent action against me, or my children, or my grandchildren, I would have no qualms about reciprocating. Hence there are circumstances where violence against the rich can be justified, at least in my view. Having said this, I see no evidence that these circumstances now prevail.
I do not want to endorse violence, but I assert that the rich are taking, or tooling up to take, violence against you, your children, and your grandchildren. Between the massive funding of ICE and Trump's attempts to use the military for law enforcement, the systems are being put in place to do precisely that. The "Big Beautiful Bill" is structured to take from the poor and give to the rich, and the rich are smart enough to know that there will be serious resistance. Example: the French Revolution. The systems being constructed will eventually be used to put down the revolution. There is no other explanation for the extraordinary funding being handed to ICE. (Trump is just the puppet in this because he's so easily manipulated. This is Project2025, in partnership with the Heritage Foundation. They already captured the Supreme Court, which was the only questionable obstacle, and many of the lower courts. Trump's murder of Caribbean fishermen is one step in conditioning us to violence, as are the unnecessarily rough ICE escapades.)
I think that it is not so much about "Project2025" as it is about the "Agenda 2030" that is in the works, and many are not aware about this Great Reset. This is why it will be so critical who will win the 2028 election...
Great and illuminating article, Rob!!! I asked Grok, "Tell me about the Tocqueville Paradox and give me some examples from his writings." Wow. Hope you can access this!
“The regime which a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately precedes it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself.”
The simple, midwit answer is that some folks have to touch the hot stove to know that it will burn them. Slightly better is the fact that envy as a pathological emotion will always be with us.
The more thoughtful answers include:
1) Taking from the rich to give to the poor sounds great, but assumes the existence of the rich to begin with. Kind of reminds me of step #1 in Steve Martin's plan on how to have a million dollars and never pay taxes. Step 1: Get a million dollars. And, of course, Lady Thatcher's famous comment on the fact that socialism fails when you run out of OPM (other people's money). The song "I Want To Change The World" by Ten Years After has the interesting line:
Tax the rich
Feed the poor
Until there are no
Rich no more
I've always hoped that the irony in that line was intentional.
2) There are a lot of elite professions (Peter Turchin has just entered the chat) that have high prestige but low pay, primarily due to supply and demand and low-ish barriers to entry. Teaching is the canonical example, but there are others such as nonprofit work, the arts, government work, religious workers, and the like. Of course, these typically are the people who want some kind of aggressive redistribution to achieve compensation commensurate with their self-esteem.
As far as making homeownership more affordable, I have long supported phasing out the mortgage interest deduction, perhaps in exchange for lower marginal rates at lower income levels. It subsidizes larger, more expensive homes. I think the USA is the only developed country that has it. Of course the National Association of Realtors(R) would scream bloody murder. That industry is circling the drain anyway, so let 'em holler.
Of course they will take from the rich because the rich is getting killed in the gulags. In a gingerly phase, to keep a human face, they will use any excuse to confiscate the goodies from the "rich". It is happening now in Canada, in British Columbia. The homeowners were told to be ready to leave their homes to be given for free to the natives, because were built on the native land. More on that is explained by the Redacted podcast on YouTube.
See, that was Marx's debate with the French Utopian Socialists in the Preparation Phase I listed under my comments to this excellent article. None of them could see the future structure, and the details of the system immediately after the planned revolution done in the Implementation Phase. Then, Lenin, like Mao thirty years later, came along and created the Leninism terrorizing the population in submission and creating the national bank under the supervision of the State Treasury. They had the gold to cover the printed money, and at that time was not fiat money. For a fact, they also had the extra amount of gold from the Swiss banks, when he was sent back to Russia in an armored train going thru the German lines. Then, large part of the labor was unpaid because it was done by people from gulags, former rich and poor dissidents. They were paying only the guards. That was the incentive for the rest of the workforce to do the assigned work for a fraction of the real value of their labor.
In conclusion, there was a practical way for a country to survive after the rich were gone, banned or demised in horrible ways.
Interesting thought re. mortgage interest deductions. If you get rid of it, paradoxically, it becomes more cost effective to own a rental property, where the mortgage interest can be deducted, and rent the home you live in. Psychologically, not so appealing.
Socialism is a strategy to increase the value of one’s political and personal connections. The Nomenklatura expect to be on top, with fewer of those annoying billionaire upstarts.
Socialism, early on in the Preparation Phase is, in fact a sort of powerful and irresistible form of Mind Control. Once the selected crook, to be elected, is aware of this powerful tool , he/she can play boogie-woogie on the brains of the mass of suckers. The Marquis of Condorcet, being a mathematician proved, theoretically, that masses are stupid. For a practical application, he was starved to death in a prison during the French Revolution... He was the "billionaire" of his time...
The inherent problem with taking from the rich and giving to the poor is who are the takers and what limits, fairness, and means do they use to take as well as, who is in charge of what is taken to be given away. It is for this reason that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat never vanishes, the people are just not trustworthy to use the riches wisely, so a select group must do it for them. Heaven help anyone who thinks people could actually figure things out for themselves and even worse, think for themselves.
Revolution topples a regime but very rarely replaces it with anything better and more often something much worse.
We are hard wired to finding purpose in life ..... the struggle is meant to develop character and perseverance ...... to accomplish a drive for food, clothing, shelter, emotional and social levels of satisfaction. People need to re-hear and know what :)
For Socialism, I lived many years of my life, we could wisely apply the saying used for the Time <It is a teacher that eventually kills his students in a brutal way>, because it has three phases: Preparation, Implementation and Survival. In the Survival Phase that has the terror included is paradoxal and Kafkaesque where the freedom has the boundaries of the defined Matrix. Gone are the dreams of equality, and the personal development. The first echelon to be demised is, in fact, a combined group of former rich and gullible supporters, and the early enthusiasts who brought the Socialist theory to fruition. The screenplay of the events was the same in the past and will be the same in the future... And for a bonus note: In such environment the young people, totally disfranchised, do not wish to have children... From records, after the Russian Revolution so many parents were killed, that Moscow has hordes of orphan, hungry kids roaming around. The Bolshevik government had special squads hunting them like wild animals...
Rob, very interesting article. Thanks for all your good work. One point of possible contention. You characterize Mamdani's campaign success as a function of savvy social media messaging, as have the majority of journalists, pundits, and public intellectuals I follow. However, I just read that Mamdani has had a massive door knocking operation. I'd like to know how that's been organized. The media made it out like he was some unknown, largely unbacked upstart, a David to the Goliath of establishment politics who was only able to gain a foothold in the race because of his social media prowess. I'd like to know if all those door knocking volunteers signed up to campaign for him before or after the primary win, and if perhaps he's had more than just grassroots support since before the primary. Have you read anything like that? (I don't like sounding conspiratorial, but it's the type of thing a lot of media outlets might not mention if they've already constructed a Little Guy narrative about Mamdani.)
Depends on how you define both "action" and "violence." Taxation of anyone entails deadweight social loss economically and a "taking" legally. The way some people with more money than they need react, you would think it is physically painful to them.
These young socialist proponents haven't ever worked. They are all like Zohran. He has no life experiences on which to base being the executive of the world's most important city. He probably couldn't run a successful food truck, because it involves hard work. He is, in a way, a total fraud; simply an actor playing to the crowd of other young elites with no life experience. With one exception: like Marx, his parents paid his way. Marx was a bum and a scoundrel who thought that he could tell people how to run society, having never even successfully run the "society" of his own household. These young "elites" had better have no desires to become rich or they will become the targets of the next generation of do-nothing youngsters who expect income with no output.
> “Take from the rich and give to the poor” is one of the oldest and most powerful ideas in politics. It is simple, moral and emotionally satisfying. Competing with it has never been easy. And any movement that hopes to win young people must offer a message that sounds just as good.
I would argue Charlie Kirk's advice about investing in yourself, getting married, having kids would be a good alternate message.
If you read Turchin's posts on immiseration you can't fault the younger generation for turning to socialism. People like Mamdani don't know how to build or fix complex systems, so they revert to "solutions" like socialism/communism (because they also likely don't know history like you point out). It would be interesting if people who know better and know history would offer to work with Mamdani to shut down the wealth pump and offer real policies instead of these silly things like free bus rides and centrally run grocery stores.
I was going to mention reading Peter Turchin and his theories on elite overproduction.
Awesome! :)
"Socialism provides a comforting solution. It explains failure as injustice and promises redemption through redistribution."
What would happen if we completely reformed the education system with a primary mission to prepare each and every student for their next step toward a goal of economic self-sufficiency instead of being ideological indoctrination factories?
What if we, at the same time, implemented a new national industrialization economic policy including anything and everything we need to do to promote more domestic business starts and growth... backed by a motivation to increase economic opportunity for citizens? This movement would require tariffs to fix our $1.4 trillion annual trade imbalance. It would also require our government to strike trade deals where countries importing goods to the US would need to move more of their corporate manufacturing to the US.
What if we had the federal government lead a YIMBY national movement for states to lower the barriers to more housing development in areas with severe housing shortage... with a goal to level the cost of housing to reasonable levels with adequate supply?
What if we stopped the flow of illegal immigrants and reformed immigration in general to stop the trend where since 2000 80% of job creation went to immigrants and instead went to citizens?
What if we dealt with waste, fraud and abuse in the federal government where so much of our tax money and debt spending is funneled to programs, projects and grants that benefit the wealthy and their politics over the rest of the citizenry?
What if we reformed entitlement spending where able-bodied people don't work, so they will have to work and fill the millions of jobs currently unfilled... and thus break the cycle of poverty for many families trapped in it?
This is the Trump-MAGA agenda. It is the help for this cohort of idiot, privileged, pampered, pouty and resentful kids. But instead of getting it... they are brainwashed and gaslit to violently oppose and assassinate those that would remedy their misery.
The big missing piece to this is the psychological mess created when people don't have enough real productive work to do. Like all kids, they kick and scream in a tantrum of resistance when required to take a bath and make their bed every day... to clean the garage and help with the housecleaning and yard maintenance chores. But good parents know that doing these things is psychologically healing and developing... that the human animal was built for struggle, strife and toil... that the pursuit of higher-level psychological needs demand productive effort and rewards.
We can fix most of the problems of youth that want to burn down the system by forcing them to work to survive. They won't naturally want to learn how to carry plywood and hammer nails, but they will be saved by doing so.
When I was in college circa 1966, I became enamored of socialism. Not surprising, since I attended the U of Michigan, where there were many leftist professors. On my visits home I started arguing the communist case at the dinner table. My dad said, "Yeah, those ideas sound good but they don't work because of human nature. People won't go along with systems where most of their income is given away to someone else." I gave this comment serious thought, and since I was planning to become a professional with a comfortable income, I lost all interest in socialism.
There was an old saying in soviet Russia:
The workers pretend to work, and the bosses pretend to pay them.
Right! And the bosses own the means of production so they keep the profits.
Perhaps we are reading too much into peoples' responses to a poorly constructed question.
If the rich were taking violent action against me, or my children, or my grandchildren, I would have no qualms about reciprocating. Hence there are circumstances where violence against the rich can be justified, at least in my view. Having said this, I see no evidence that these circumstances now prevail.
I do not want to endorse violence, but I assert that the rich are taking, or tooling up to take, violence against you, your children, and your grandchildren. Between the massive funding of ICE and Trump's attempts to use the military for law enforcement, the systems are being put in place to do precisely that. The "Big Beautiful Bill" is structured to take from the poor and give to the rich, and the rich are smart enough to know that there will be serious resistance. Example: the French Revolution. The systems being constructed will eventually be used to put down the revolution. There is no other explanation for the extraordinary funding being handed to ICE. (Trump is just the puppet in this because he's so easily manipulated. This is Project2025, in partnership with the Heritage Foundation. They already captured the Supreme Court, which was the only questionable obstacle, and many of the lower courts. Trump's murder of Caribbean fishermen is one step in conditioning us to violence, as are the unnecessarily rough ICE escapades.)
https://issuesinsights.com/2025/10/21/you-are-being-lied-to-about-ice/
Roger is already too far gone.
I think that it is not so much about "Project2025" as it is about the "Agenda 2030" that is in the works, and many are not aware about this Great Reset. This is why it will be so critical who will win the 2028 election...
Great and illuminating article, Rob!!! I asked Grok, "Tell me about the Tocqueville Paradox and give me some examples from his writings." Wow. Hope you can access this!
https://x.com/i/grok/share/uzLx1fi2He2Ate3LG6p8Qovd6
“The regime which a revolution destroys is almost always better than the one that immediately precedes it, and experience teaches that the most dangerous moment for a bad government is usually when it begins to reform itself.”
This is what happened in A Tale of Two Cities
The simple, midwit answer is that some folks have to touch the hot stove to know that it will burn them. Slightly better is the fact that envy as a pathological emotion will always be with us.
The more thoughtful answers include:
1) Taking from the rich to give to the poor sounds great, but assumes the existence of the rich to begin with. Kind of reminds me of step #1 in Steve Martin's plan on how to have a million dollars and never pay taxes. Step 1: Get a million dollars. And, of course, Lady Thatcher's famous comment on the fact that socialism fails when you run out of OPM (other people's money). The song "I Want To Change The World" by Ten Years After has the interesting line:
Tax the rich
Feed the poor
Until there are no
Rich no more
I've always hoped that the irony in that line was intentional.
2) There are a lot of elite professions (Peter Turchin has just entered the chat) that have high prestige but low pay, primarily due to supply and demand and low-ish barriers to entry. Teaching is the canonical example, but there are others such as nonprofit work, the arts, government work, religious workers, and the like. Of course, these typically are the people who want some kind of aggressive redistribution to achieve compensation commensurate with their self-esteem.
As far as making homeownership more affordable, I have long supported phasing out the mortgage interest deduction, perhaps in exchange for lower marginal rates at lower income levels. It subsidizes larger, more expensive homes. I think the USA is the only developed country that has it. Of course the National Association of Realtors(R) would scream bloody murder. That industry is circling the drain anyway, so let 'em holler.
Of course they will take from the rich because the rich is getting killed in the gulags. In a gingerly phase, to keep a human face, they will use any excuse to confiscate the goodies from the "rich". It is happening now in Canada, in British Columbia. The homeowners were told to be ready to leave their homes to be given for free to the natives, because were built on the native land. More on that is explained by the Redacted podcast on YouTube.
But you can only do that once. Once you kill all the rich, then where do you get your money? Money press go brrrrr?
See, that was Marx's debate with the French Utopian Socialists in the Preparation Phase I listed under my comments to this excellent article. None of them could see the future structure, and the details of the system immediately after the planned revolution done in the Implementation Phase. Then, Lenin, like Mao thirty years later, came along and created the Leninism terrorizing the population in submission and creating the national bank under the supervision of the State Treasury. They had the gold to cover the printed money, and at that time was not fiat money. For a fact, they also had the extra amount of gold from the Swiss banks, when he was sent back to Russia in an armored train going thru the German lines. Then, large part of the labor was unpaid because it was done by people from gulags, former rich and poor dissidents. They were paying only the guards. That was the incentive for the rest of the workforce to do the assigned work for a fraction of the real value of their labor.
In conclusion, there was a practical way for a country to survive after the rich were gone, banned or demised in horrible ways.
At least until the hard assets run out...
Interesting thought re. mortgage interest deductions. If you get rid of it, paradoxically, it becomes more cost effective to own a rental property, where the mortgage interest can be deducted, and rent the home you live in. Psychologically, not so appealing.
Socialism is a strategy to increase the value of one’s political and personal connections. The Nomenklatura expect to be on top, with fewer of those annoying billionaire upstarts.
Socialism, early on in the Preparation Phase is, in fact a sort of powerful and irresistible form of Mind Control. Once the selected crook, to be elected, is aware of this powerful tool , he/she can play boogie-woogie on the brains of the mass of suckers. The Marquis of Condorcet, being a mathematician proved, theoretically, that masses are stupid. For a practical application, he was starved to death in a prison during the French Revolution... He was the "billionaire" of his time...
The inherent problem with taking from the rich and giving to the poor is who are the takers and what limits, fairness, and means do they use to take as well as, who is in charge of what is taken to be given away. It is for this reason that the Dictatorship of the Proletariat never vanishes, the people are just not trustworthy to use the riches wisely, so a select group must do it for them. Heaven help anyone who thinks people could actually figure things out for themselves and even worse, think for themselves.
Revolution topples a regime but very rarely replaces it with anything better and more often something much worse.
Carpenters, electricians, plumbers, brick layers, come one come all, lol, no takers, eh?! Are you teaching your kids to be entitled little shitheads?
We are hard wired to finding purpose in life ..... the struggle is meant to develop character and perseverance ...... to accomplish a drive for food, clothing, shelter, emotional and social levels of satisfaction. People need to re-hear and know what :)
For Socialism, I lived many years of my life, we could wisely apply the saying used for the Time <It is a teacher that eventually kills his students in a brutal way>, because it has three phases: Preparation, Implementation and Survival. In the Survival Phase that has the terror included is paradoxal and Kafkaesque where the freedom has the boundaries of the defined Matrix. Gone are the dreams of equality, and the personal development. The first echelon to be demised is, in fact, a combined group of former rich and gullible supporters, and the early enthusiasts who brought the Socialist theory to fruition. The screenplay of the events was the same in the past and will be the same in the future... And for a bonus note: In such environment the young people, totally disfranchised, do not wish to have children... From records, after the Russian Revolution so many parents were killed, that Moscow has hordes of orphan, hungry kids roaming around. The Bolshevik government had special squads hunting them like wild animals...
John Stossel has a great video on the myth of home ownership. It's illuminating
Rob, very interesting article. Thanks for all your good work. One point of possible contention. You characterize Mamdani's campaign success as a function of savvy social media messaging, as have the majority of journalists, pundits, and public intellectuals I follow. However, I just read that Mamdani has had a massive door knocking operation. I'd like to know how that's been organized. The media made it out like he was some unknown, largely unbacked upstart, a David to the Goliath of establishment politics who was only able to gain a foothold in the race because of his social media prowess. I'd like to know if all those door knocking volunteers signed up to campaign for him before or after the primary win, and if perhaps he's had more than just grassroots support since before the primary. Have you read anything like that? (I don't like sounding conspiratorial, but it's the type of thing a lot of media outlets might not mention if they've already constructed a Little Guy narrative about Mamdani.)
Depends on how you define both "action" and "violence." Taxation of anyone entails deadweight social loss economically and a "taking" legally. The way some people with more money than they need react, you would think it is physically painful to them.
These young socialist proponents haven't ever worked. They are all like Zohran. He has no life experiences on which to base being the executive of the world's most important city. He probably couldn't run a successful food truck, because it involves hard work. He is, in a way, a total fraud; simply an actor playing to the crowd of other young elites with no life experience. With one exception: like Marx, his parents paid his way. Marx was a bum and a scoundrel who thought that he could tell people how to run society, having never even successfully run the "society" of his own household. These young "elites" had better have no desires to become rich or they will become the targets of the next generation of do-nothing youngsters who expect income with no output.