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# Democratic Socialism: The Lie Behind the Agenda
- URL: https://mike-morrison-public-safety-and-accountability.ghost.io/democratic-socialism-the-lie-behind-the-agenda/
- Published: 2026-08-26T00:48:50.000Z
- Updated: 2026-08-30T16:51:48.000Z
- Author: Michael D. Morrison
- Tags: abuse, Criminal Justice, Fraud, Government Accountability,, Mike Morrison Bail Bonding, News, Public Safety, Socialism, tax's, Theft

***History has already tested what happens when government takes control of resources and production. The results are on the record.***

Turn on the television, scroll through social media, or listen to candidates running for office today and you will hear the same promises repeated over and over again: free healthcare, free college, affordable government housing, government-paid childcare, expanded benefits, more public programs, and somebody else supposedly picking up the bill. It sounds wonderful, particularly when nobody bothers to explain what “free” actually means. But I have spent more than 35 years watching government policy collide with the real world, and one thing has never changed: government does not have its own money. Every dollar government spends first has to come from somebody who earned it, somebody who invested it, somebody who owns a business, somebody who pays taxes, or somebody in the future who will inherit the debt. Before we begin arguing about whether democratic socialism sounds compassionate, maybe we ought to spend a little more time asking what happens after the campaign speech is over and the government actually gets the power it was asking for.

That is where this discussion becomes much more interesting, because the Democratic Socialists of America are not hiding what they believe. Their own constitution speaks of “popular control of resources and production” and “economic planning,” and their materials have discussed public ownership in areas including healthcare, energy, and transportation. I am not suggesting that every person who uses the term democratic socialism wants America to become Cuba, nor am I interested in the lazy argument that every government program is socialism. That would be just as intellectually dishonest as pretending history has nothing to teach us. The real question is much narrower and much more important: what happens when government continually expands its control over production, property, industry, prices, healthcare, investment, and economic decision-making? We have real examples, involving real countries and millions of real people, and the results are considerably less attractive than the campaign literature.

Cuba is one of those examples, and the history is worth remembering because Cuba was not some hopelessly impoverished island waiting for Fidel Castro to save it. Before the 1959 revolution, Cuba ranked among the more prosperous countries in Latin America, with comparatively high income levels and significant economic development. Castro did not rise to power publicly advertising decades of one-party communist rule. He spoke about restoring constitutional government, representative democracy, and elections, promises that sounded reasonable enough that many educated, professional, middle-class, and wealthy Cubans initially supported him. Then the revolution began showing them what those promises actually meant. Businesses were nationalized, private property was seized, political authority became concentrated, and within only a few years approximately 248,000 Cubans, many from the upper and middle classes, had fled the island during what became known as the Golden Exile.

That first exodus should have been a warning, but Castro continued. During the Revolutionary Offensive of 1968, his government eliminated an estimated 55,000 to 60,000 remaining small businesses and service establishments, effectively wiping out most of the private enterprise that remained. Another quarter-million skilled workers and professionals left during the Freedom Flights. By 1980, the people leaving through the Port of Mariel were increasingly ordinary working Cubans, and by the economic catastrophe of the 1990s, desperate people were climbing onto homemade rafts and risking the Florida Straits. There is a pattern here that should not require an economics degree to understand. The people with money, education, professional skills, businesses, and the ability to leave frequently left first. As conditions deteriorated, the desperation moved further and further down the economic ladder until ordinary working families were trying to escape as well. People do not repeatedly abandon their homes, families, businesses, possessions, and country because an economic system is working wonderfully.

Decades later, Cuba still has rationing, chronic shortages, restricted private enterprise, and a government that remains firmly in control. Historical food-supply comparisons have shown that important categories of food availability remained below pre-revolutionary levels decades after Castro took power, while economic research comparing Cuba's performance with other Latin American countries has found substantial long-term economic losses associated with the revolution. That does not mean every economic problem Cuba has ever experienced can be blamed on one cause, and serious analysis should acknowledge the effect of American sanctions and other external forces. But after more than six decades, there comes a point when the government controlling the economy also has to accept responsibility for the economy it controls. The revolution promised equality and prosperity. What it delivered was a political system that survived while generations of Cubans learned to survive shortages.

Then there is Venezuela, which may be an even more remarkable case because Venezuela had something Cuba never possessed: enormous oil wealth. Venezuela sits on more proven petroleum reserves than Saudi Arabia. This was not a country searching desperately for a natural resource capable of financing prosperity; it was sitting on one of the largest concentrations of valuable energy resources on the planet. Hugo Chávez took office in 1999 promising to use that wealth to improve the lives of ordinary Venezuelans, and while oil prices were high, government spending allowed those promises to appear sustainable. This is one of the recurring problems with government expansion: almost anything can look successful while revenues are pouring in and nobody is asking what happens when the economic conditions supporting the spending change.

Chávez steadily increased government control over the economy. Taxes and royalties on oil production increased, PDVSA was given majority control over oil projects, nearly 20,000 experienced PDVSA employees were fired after the 2002–2003 strike, and by 2006 foreign oil projects were required to operate through ventures in which PDVSA held at least 60 percent ownership. At the same time, government price controls and currency controls spread throughout the broader economy. Venezuela was becoming increasingly dependent upon oil revenue while simultaneously weakening the very industry responsible for producing that revenue. When oil prices fell dramatically between 2014 and 2016, the weaknesses that government money had temporarily concealed were exposed, and the collapse that followed was extraordinary.

Between 2013 and 2021, Venezuela's real GDP contracted by more than 75 percent. Its own central bank reported inflation of 130,060 percent in 2018 and 9,585.5 percent in 2019\. By the 2019–2020 ENCOVI survey, approximately 96 percent of Venezuelan households were living in income poverty. Hospitals struggled with shortages of medicine and basic supplies, more than half of the country's registered doctors had left by 2017, and oil production itself eventually collapsed from roughly 3.1 million barrels per day in 2008 to under 500,000 by 2020\. Think about the absurdity of that for a moment: one of the most oil-rich countries on Earth managed to preside over the collapse of the industry that should have made the country extraordinarily prosperous.

And once again, watch who left. Entrepreneurs, professionals, educated workers, investors, and people with options began leaving as the government tightened control over the economy. Later came millions of ordinary Venezuelans who were no longer leaving because they disagreed with economic policy; they were leaving because daily life had become unbearable. Nearly 7.9 million Venezuelans have now left the country, roughly one-quarter of the population and one of the largest displacement crises in modern Latin American history. That is what politicians should have to explain when they talk casually about increasing government control over private industry. Capital does not have to stay. Businesses do not have to stay. Professionals do not have to stay. Investors do not have to stay. Eventually government can discover that there is considerably less wealth available to redistribute because the people who were creating much of that wealth have gone somewhere else.

There is another part of this history that I find particularly difficult to ignore: the people running these governments never seem to experience the consequences in quite the same way as the citizens living under them. Cuban families dealt with ration books, shortages, limited economic opportunity, and generations of political control while Castro remained in power until illness forced him to transfer authority to his brother. Venezuelans watched savings become worthless, hospitals deteriorate, businesses disappear, and millions of people leave the country while Nicolás Maduro and the political structure surrounding him remained firmly entrenched. When Venezuela's opposition won control of the National Assembly, Maduro did not respond to the political message by surrendering power. In 2017, the Maduro-aligned Supreme Court moved to strip the opposition-controlled legislature of its authority. That is the part of concentrated government power that should concern people regardless of whether they call themselves Republican, Democrat, conservative, liberal, socialist, or anything else. Once government acquires extraordinary economic and political power, getting that power back can be considerably more difficult than giving it away.

The government never goes hungry. The citizen does.

Healthcare provides another useful example, although Canada needs to be discussed honestly rather than thrown into the same category as Cuba or Venezuela. Canada is a prosperous parliamentary democracy with a market economy, not a communist dictatorship or a collapsed petrostate. But Canada is constantly presented to Americans as proof that government-financed healthcare can provide everyone with healthcare for “free,” and that makes the Canadian experience relevant because it demonstrates that eliminating a price at the point of service does not eliminate the cost of providing the service.

In 2025, the median wait between referral by a family doctor and receiving treatment in Canada was 28.6 weeks, compared with 9.3 weeks in 1993\. Patients waiting for neurosurgery faced a median approaching 50 weeks, orthopedic surgery approached 49 weeks, and millions of Canadians lacked access to a regular family doctor. A 2026 Fraser Institute study estimated that patients waiting for treatment during 2025 lost more than $4.2 billion in wages and productivity. None of this means Canadians receive no benefit from their healthcare system, and it certainly does not mean the American system has no serious problems of its own. It means there is no such thing as a healthcare system without costs and tradeoffs. Doctors still have to be paid, hospitals still have to operate, drugs still have to be manufactured, equipment still has to be purchased, and demand still has to be managed. If the patient is not rationed by price, the system may ration access by time. Calling something “free” does not make the economic reality disappear.

That is really what bothers me most about the political conversation surrounding democratic socialism. We are too often being sold enormous changes in government authority through slogans instead of serious discussion. If somebody wants government to take greater control of an industry, then explain exactly how that control will work. If somebody promises a new government benefit, explain who pays for it, how much it will cost ten years from now, and what happens when the taxpayers being asked to finance it change their behavior. If a proposal assumes businesses, investors, doctors, entrepreneurs, high-income taxpayers, and skilled professionals will simply continue producing at the same level regardless of taxes, regulation, ownership restrictions, or economic incentives, then that assumption deserves to be challenged before the policy becomes law rather than after the damage has already occurred.

This is also why I do not find the argument “our version will be different” particularly persuasive by itself. Maybe it will be different. Then show us how. Explain the safeguards. Explain the economics. Explain how political power will remain limited once government becomes the dominant payer, owner, regulator, or operator. Explain what prevents shortages, declining investment, capital flight, reduced production, political favoritism, or a bureaucracy protecting itself long after a program has failed. Those are not attacks on poor people, healthcare, education, or anyone who needs help. They are the questions responsible citizens should ask before giving government more authority over the economy and their lives.

Cuba had a developed economy, an educated population, thriving private businesses, and a substantial middle class. Venezuela possessed more proven oil reserves than Saudi Arabia. Canada demonstrates, in a much different democratic system, that even a wealthy country cannot make the economic cost of healthcare disappear simply by moving the bill from the patient to the government. These countries are not identical, their political systems are not identical, and pretending they are would be foolish. What connects them is something much simpler: government promises do not repeal economics.

There is always a bill.

There is always a tradeoff.

There is always somebody who pays.

That is why this is not simply a case study of Cuba, Venezuela, Canada, or any particular political movement. It is a case history of what happens when attractive promises are allowed to substitute for serious questions about cost, incentives, production, accountability, and political power.

Before America buys another promise wrapped in the word “free,” we ought to read the fine print.

Because somebody always has to pay for free, and it is never the government making the promise.

[Mike Morrison | Public Safety & Accountabilityhttps://www.facebook.com/MorrisonBailBondingCo/![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/00/fd/00fd0d7a-5dbf-4abb-b1ce-af93b19f871f/content/images/icon/ChatGPT-Image-Jul-1--2026-at-04_00_17-PM-2-625aa729-b0d4-4e0b-9cc5-b3869fffb0f1.png)Mike Morrison | Public Safety & AccountabilityMichael D. Morrison![](https://storage.ghost.io/c/00/fd/00fd0d7a-5dbf-4abb-b1ce-af93b19f871f/content/images/thumbnail/ChatGPT-Image-Jul-27--2026-at-07_16_44-PM-e3f6c44d-47fb-4093-9c4a-06cbd94bb076.png)](https://mike-morrison-public-safety-and-accountability.ghost.io/)

About the Author

Mike Morrison is the 2026 PBUS National Bail Agent of the Year, President of the Mississippi Bail Agents Association, and a nationally recognized bail educator, speaker, and criminal justice commentator. With more than 35 years of hands-on experience as a licensed Professional Bail Agent and owner of Mike Morrison Bail Bonding Company in Hattiesburg, Mississippi, he brings a practical, real-world perspective to discussions involving bail, criminal justice, constitutional rights, public safety, government accountability, technology, and public policy.

Morrison is recognized as a bail trainer by the Mississippi Judicial College and has been invited to present before judges, justice court clerks, prosecutors, bail professionals, and other criminal justice stakeholders, including as a guest speaker for the Mississippi Attorney General’s Office. He also leads professional education and ethics programs for bail agents across the country through the Master Class Bail Agent Series and other national training initiatives.

He has published nearly 200 articles examining the institutions, policies, and decisions that affect working Americans. His writing is grounded in decades spent inside courtrooms, jails, communities, and the criminal justice system, and his commentary has reached more than one million views across social media in 2026.

Independent, plain-spoken, and focused on accountability, Morrison writes and speaks about the intersection of government, liberty, public safety, professional responsibility, and the real-world consequences of public policy in Mississippi and across the nation.

© 2026 Mike Morrison. All rights reserved.