Will Wealth Reaching a Record High, and Poverty a Record Low, Silence the Song of Socialism?

Americans are wealthier, and fewer are in poverty, than at any time on record according to Tuesday’s figures from the Census Bureau. The news is a rebuke to socialist candidates, undercutting their siren song that high fuel prices and inflation are evidence that only Marxism can solve the inequities of the free-market system.The Income, Poverty and Health Insurance Coverage in the United States for 2025 calculated the median, inflation-adjusted household income at $87,460 — up 2.6 percent from 2024. Larger paychecks pushed the overall poverty rate down to 10.2 percent and the childhood poverty rate to 13.4 percent, lowest since tallying began in 1967.The Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta had more good news on Wednesday, forecasting GDP growth of 5.1 percent for the third quarter. Americans may not feel these realities. Yet “facts,” President John Adams said in 1770, “are stubborn things.” He made the statement in defense of British soldiers in the Boston Massacre, appealing for jurors to heed their minds over their hearts.Candidates advocating for socialism play to the heart, relying on emotional appeals instead of facts and figures. They point to Scandinavia, hoping that voters imagine travel-brochure images of those nations. The Nordic Model employs free-market capitalism to fund the social nets that leftists admire.Political promises of government spending are appealing until voters consider the price tag. The Cato Institute calculated that implementing the policies of the Democratic Socialists of America alone would mean up to $212 trillion in new federal spending over the next decade — 40 times America’s $5.26 trillion total revenue in 2025.The Forbes 400, America’s richest individuals, have a total wealth of just $8 trillion. When the nation’s 23.6 million millionaires are added, the number rises to between $110 trillion and $120 trillion. Confiscate it all and the socialists are only halfway there — and they’d only be able to seize it once.“Socialism,” Winston Churchill told the Scottish Unionist Conference in 1948, “is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy.” Historical facts prove him right. Take Argentina, one of the ten richest countries in the late 19th Century.A new president, Esteban Echeverria, introduced El Dogma Socialista, the Socialist Dogma, to Argentina and prosperity faded. Promising a socialist utopia for Venezuela, President Hugo Chavez came to power in 1998, seizing private property and putting the state in control of markets.Chavez inherited a country that, sitting on the earth’s largest proven reserves of crude oil, was South America’s wealthiest from the mid-20th century through the 1980s. His “21st Century Socialism” led to starvation so rampant that by 2017, the country resorted to Plan Rabbit — breeding for slaughter animals regarded as pets.Communist China’s dictator, Mao Tse-Tung, drove farmers off their land and launched his Four Pests Campaign in 1958. Among the facts he ignored: The sparrows he ordered killed kept locusts at bay. A 1999 paper in the British Medical Journal put the Great Chinese Famine’s death toll at between 23 million and 30 million, while “unpublished Chinese materials hint at totals closer to 40 million.”After each failure, true believers insisted that “real communism has never been tried” and swarmed a new country like Mao’s locusts. When the Soviet Union fell in 1991, Gus Hall, who between 1972 and 1984, ran for president four times as a Kremlin-backed communist, pointed to the “miracle” of North Korea.”’If you want to take a nice vacation,” Hall said at the American Communist Party’s Manhattan office, “take it in North Korea.” That country’s Arduous March went on to leave up to three million dead between 1994 and 1998. Hunger persists to this day while, across the Demilitarized Zone, free-market South Korea has built the world’s 13th-largest economy.When faced with problems like the high cost of living, it’s tempting to heed the siren song of socialism and bet that, maybe this time, their solutions won’t make things worse. Yet the facts on poverty, income, and GDP are stubborn things. They argue against gambling prosperity on a system whose only “inherent virtue,” as Churchill told the Scots, “is the equal sharing of misery.”

Will Wealth Reaching a Record High, and Poverty a Record Low, Silence the Song of Socialism?

Will Wealth Reaching a Record High, and Poverty a Record Low, Silence the Song of Socialism?

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