Terence Donnelly

Once you see the world through this lens, a lot of things that looked random suddenly make sense. You understand why Macron recognized a Palestinian state at the UN. Not a state with borders it controls, a single government, or elections. A symbol. A gesture for domestic consumption, performed on the world stage. That's the politics of posture over reality, the obłuda I described earlier: what matters isn't what is true on the ground, it's the narrative you get to emit. You understand why Jean-Luc Mélenchon, the leader of France's hard left and a man trained in Trotskyist organizations in his youth, made Gaza the center of his politics and refused for months to call Hamas a terrorist organization. Look at the mechanism. He doesn't address French Muslims as individuals with their own jobs, families, ambitions and disagreements. He addresses them as a bloc. A mass to be mobilized. That's the collectivist reflex in its purest form: you don't speak to people, you herd categories. Yesterday the proletariat, today identity blocs. The individual disappears every time. You understand why Zohran Mamdani built his rise on the Democratic Socialists of America. The mayor of New York isn't just a progressive Democrat. He's a DSA member, and DSA doesn't hide what it is: an organization that openly calls itself socialist and treats the Democratic Party as a vehicle. His campaign promised a rent freeze, city-run grocery stores, free buses. Every one of those ideas has the same shape: the individual steps back, the city steps in. The price is set by the planner, the store is run by the planner, and voters are addressed as categories, tenants, riders, communities, rather than as free people who can build something of their own. And Mamdani didn't come out of nowhere. The same movement helped send Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez to Congress in 2018, and Bernie Sanders spent decades making the word "socialist" respectable in American politics. Different faces, same software. The lie isn't that they hide their ideology. It's the promise attached to it: that you can freeze prices without killing supply, that the state can run what entrepreneurs run, that someone else will always pay. That promise has been tested on every continent. It has never been kept. And you understand the most important thing: collectivists need chaos. This isn't a metaphor. It's their own doctrine. Lenin's strategy in 1914 was to turn the war between nations into a civil war inside them. The Soviet Union spent decades arming and funding movements across the Middle East and pushed through the 1975 UN resolution equating Zionism with racism. The KGB had an entire doctrine, "active measures," dedicated to amplifying every division inside Western societies. A stable, prosperous, confident society is the collectivist's worst enemy. Chaos is his natural habitat. Why? Because chaos is the perfect justification. It justifies emergency powers. It justifies more state. It turns citizens into frightened masses looking for a shepherd. It replaces individual judgment with tribal loyalty. A society at peace with itself asks the planner: what do we need you for? Look at the two great conflicts of our time through this lens. Russia's war in Ukraine was launched by a former KGB officer who called the collapse of the Soviet Union the greatest catastrophe of the century. A man formed in the exact school that treated chaos as a weapon. He doesn't just wage war on Ukraine. He wages it on Western cohesion, feeding every division he can find in our elections, our streets, our feeds. The Israeli-Palestinian conflict is the perfect fuel for Western politics. It splits every campus, every party, every city. It lets politicians like Mélenchon build an electoral base on permanent outrage. And for everyone who lives off that outrage, a real peace would be a disaster. Ask yourself honestly: who in our political class actually has an interest in this conflict ending? That's the pattern. The people who live off chaos never solve it. They manage it, they feed it, they posture around it. Because a solved problem is a lost lever. Freedom produces order from the bottom up: people who own things, build things, trade with each other and have something to lose. Collectivism produces disorder from the bottom up and then sells you order from the top down. Once you see it, you can't unsee it.

Right now in the US, part of the Democratic Party has decided to play the "socialist" card. Days before the midterms, DSA candidates are winning primaries and the word isn't taboo anymore. So today I'm going to show you why socialism never works. Not with ideology. With mechanics. Let's start with a dumb question. How much should a loaf of bread cost? You don't know. Neither do I. Nobody does. And that's exactly the point. The price of a loaf of bread is the instant synthesis of millions of pieces of information that no single person holds: the wheat harvest in Kansas, the price of gas for the oven, the baker's wages, the shop's rent, a drought in Argentina, a war on the Black Sea, whether people feel like bread this morning or a bagel. In 1920, Ludwig von Mises published a paper that should have ended the debate. His argument: without private ownership of the means of production, those means are never exchanged. No exchange, no prices. No prices, no economic calculation. The planner can't know whether a steel mill is worth more than a dam or a hospital. He's flying blind. He can't even tell that he's wrong. In 1945, Friedrich Hayek drove the point home in "The Use of Knowledge in Society." Useful knowledge is scattered across millions of minds. The baker knows things about his neighborhood that no ministry ever will. Prices are a telecommunications system: when tin becomes scarce somewhere in the world, its price rises, and millions of users economize on it without even knowing why. No committee, no ministry, no plan can replicate that. The market isn't an ideology. It's a distributed information processor. Then Milton Friedman picked up a simple pencil. The wood comes from Washington State, the graphite from South America, the rubber from Malaysia. Thousands of people who don't know each other, don't speak the same language, maybe even hate each other, cooperate to make something none of them could make alone. Nobody gave them orders. Prices were enough. Now run the experiment in reverse. Set the price yourself. Cap rents below market: landlords stop maintaining, stop building, housing disappears. Swedish economist Assar Lindbeck, a man of the left, said rent control is the most efficient technique known for destroying a city, short of bombing it. Cap the price of flour: shelves empty, lines form, the black market takes over. Venezuela, 2016. The country with the largest oil reserves on earth, and people standing in line for hours to eat. Nearly 8 million Venezuelans eventually fled. Socialism smashes the thermometer and then acts surprised that the fever keeps rising. And this is where it gets serious. Because when the plan fails, and it always fails, the planner has two options. Admit the plan is wrong. Or blame the people. Saboteurs, speculators, kulaks, enemies of the people. He always picks the second one. Hayek saw it in 1944 in The Road to Serfdom, in a chapter with a chilling title: Why the Worst Get on Top. A central plan requires central power. Central power attracts those who crave power. And when reality resists the plan, reality has to be broken. Which means people have to be broken. Stalin. He collectivizes the land. Output collapses. He blames the peasants and seizes the harvests. The Holodomor, 1932-1933: millions starved to death in Ukraine, the breadbasket of Europe. Add the Gulag, the purges, the deportations. Mao. The Great Leap Forward, 1958-1962. Backyard furnaces producing useless steel, insane grain quotas, local officials inflating numbers to avoid punishment, and the state requisitioning food based on those fake numbers. The result: the worst famine in human history. Estimates range from 30 to 45 million dead. Pol Pot. The Khmer Rouge abolish money, markets, property, and empty the cities. The dream of total planning, carried all the way. In four years, roughly one in four Cambodians dies. Hitler. He sent communists to the camps, but his party called itself National Socialist and the economy answered to the plan and the party. Companies stayed private on paper, but the state decided what to produce, at what price, and for whom. Hayek dedicated The Road to Serfdom "to the socialists of all parties" precisely because he saw the same root: the idea that the state must steer society toward a collective goal, and the individual must step aside. Different eras. Different continents. Different cultures. Same mechanism. Same ending. This isn't a bug. It's a feature of the system. Remove prices and you remove information. Remove information and you remove the ability to correct. And when you can no longer correct through prices, you correct through force. So let me say it plainly. Socialism always starts nice. A rent freeze. Public grocery stores. Make "the rich" pay. Nobody promises the Gulag on day one. But if America truly goes down this road, the rest of the story is already written. The plan will fail. There will need to be culprits. There will need to be power to punish them. And a socialist government holding the American state apparatus, its surveillance capabilities, its technology, its military, wouldn't be a regional tragedy. It could be the greatest tragedy in history. The 20th century paid for this lesson with tens of millions of lives. We don't get to forget it in one generation. Prices aren't the enemy of the people. Prices are the voice of the people.