Posted on July 23, 2026
Money From Nothing
Who does the DSA think will fund its
plans?
by
Daniel Clark
Ever since
the Democratic Socialists of America published their 2026 platform, a lot of
energy has been wasted railing against their unattainable fantasy of
eliminating two and a half branches of our government, while comparatively
little has been said about their far more threatening economic policies.
The DSA instructs you to "Imagine
taking a day off from work in a future without capitalism." At this point, you might be thinking that in
a world without capitalism, every day would be a day off from work,
which in fact is the conclusion the DSA is leading you to draw. "You work as much as you are able and no more
than needed," it says, "and you would control your own labor and see it is
going to good use." So, you are your own
boss, only without the pressure of having to run a business, or anything. If you don't feel the need to work on Monday,
then don't. Ditto that on Tuesday. Do you ever need to work again? You make the call.
"You have
no debt," the DSA promises. "You don't
pay a mortgage or have a landlord, because comfortable housing is a human
right. Your retirement is publicly
funded. Food, education, energy,
medicine and transportation aren't for-profit businesses; they are common goods
and utilities." Wait a minute,
retirement? Work is optional every day
of your life, and then you retire? You
might as well do it early, then, as long as there is no need to save up for it. If you're confident that you can be content with
what you're given to live on, that you'll agree with the DSA's definition of
"comfortable," and that you can eat whatever is left once the profit motive has
been eliminated from food production, then it doesn't sound like such a bad
deal.
In the
domestic policy section of the platform, entitled "Thriving Working Class
Communities," the DSA promises to establish "paid family leave for all workers,
a 32 hour work week with full pay and benefits, and a living minimum wage." Oh, so you can take days off from your 32
hour work week at your own discretion, and you can go on
extended leave, and then you retire, and get paid for it. Why a living minimum wage, though? If it's up to you to subjectively determine
the value of your own work, then who's to say that anyone deserves to be paid
any more or less than anyone else? It's
a bit of a moot point, because people will have little use for money anyway.
From
there, the DSA pledges to cancel all student debt, provide universal health
care, including free abortion and genital mutilation, build enough
"comfortable" new housing units for everybody, hand out reparations for slavery
and colonialism, guarantee federal jobs to those who need them, and make
"massive" investments in "green" energy and mass transit.
Assuming you are smarter than the
rhetorical "you" from the DSA platform, you have probably detected a critical
flaw in this plan. In the absence of
free enterprise, who, outside of government, is expected to provide all of
these 32 hour a week jobs? Who is going
to pay for everybody's retirement benefits and family leave? Who is going to put all the hard work and
long hours into farming, ranching, mining and drilling, when those ventures
have been rendered unprofitable? When it
no longer pays to be productive, where will the tax revenue come from to allow
the government to provide for everybody?
The DSA says it will raise federal revenues by nationalizing
corporations and imposing "aggressive wealth taxes," but for how many years can
that keep up before it has consumed the resources that are no longer
regenerating themselves?
The answer
is that it doesn't matter, because these promises of easy living from the
Democratic Socialists are totally insincere.
That's why it makes no impression on them to argue that socialism has
failed everywhere it's been tried. You
and I might look at the people of North Korea and Venezuela suffering through lives
of deprivation and squalor and call that failure, but the DSA doesn't, because the
prosperity of a nation's people is not how it defines success.
These are
people whose aims are purely destructive.
Your happiness and comfort are of no concern to them, to say nothing of
your freedom and self-respect. Stamping
out capitalism is their endgame, and not the means of accomplishing something
else. As for what follows, they just
don't care enough to have bothered thinking it through.
The Shinbone: The Frontier of the Free Press