Before continuing, it’s necessary to clarify what I mean here by “socialism.” Socialism is any ideology that favors subjecting economic production to democratic control, whether representative or more direct democracy. That is, rather than individual economic actors–with secure rights to their labor and their property–making decisions about what to produce and how, such decisions are made politically. There are grey areas here. Most real‐​world economies are “mixed economies,” having socialist and capitalist elements. If we must draw a bright line, there are good reasons to follow Ludwig von Mises, who said “the key is whether the economy has a stock market.” 1 Cuba, for example, has not had a stock exchange since the revolution. Venezuela’s exists but is at this point nearly vestigial, having only a few dozen listings, with low trade volume and the threat of nationalization always looming. 2 As I’m using the term here, though, I mean to include not only socialists in the narrowest sense of the word–those that are on the socialist side of Mises’s bright line–but also people like Bernie Sanders who want to push things further toward the socialist end of the spectrum. The argument I’m offering applies even to relatively moderate people, like Elizabeth Warren, who hector us about the need for private enterprise to be held (legally) responsible to “the public interest” as they conceive it.

Socialists are not well‐​intentioned. This doesn’t mean they’re malevolent in the same way that fascists are, to be sure, but nevertheless, socialists are essentially malicious. That’s true even if they genuinely believe, contrary to all evidence, that socialism would make people materially better off. Because fascists have evil ends in mind, like ethnic cleansing, their malevolence is obvious. In the case of socialists however, their ill intent is more insidious.

Socialists constantly point to their desired ends as evidence of their virtue, but as Jason Brennan put it in Why Not Capitalism? :