Trump Dead Wrong on Socialism

By Cliff Montgomery – Jan. 8th, 2025

Well, you can’t expect a man who’s filed for business bankruptcy six times to know much about the economy…

Perhaps the best way to answer Trump on this silly charge is to offer concrete examples of socialism that every American knows, and to just let citizens use their own working knowledge of these examples. Decide for yourselves whether these examples of socialism are destroying your dreams.

Medicare is a socialist program, owned and funded by every American. U.S. citizens own the program as equal stakeholders in an economic partnership, and run it by voting in elections, choosing candidates who promise to run the nationalized insurance program as the people wish.

Your grandmother’s Medicare account? That’s her personal share of the partnership she has with every other American paying into the program. She uses her share of the insurance program she owns to pick the doctors of her choice, and the treatments of her choice. Medicare is not tyrannizing your grandmother, or wrecking her dreams.

Social Security is a socialist program, likewise owned and funded by every American. In short, it is a nationalized pension plan, just as Medicare is a nationalized health insurance program for the aged. It empowers your grandfather, it does not tyrannize him.

Nor is any American tyrannized by a well-funded public infrastructure, public libraries, public parks …

Here’s a fun little truth: In the U.S., politicians and corporate journalists use the word “public” when referring to such enterprises, so they don’t have to use the more descriptive word, “socialist.” That way, many Americans remain ignorant of the fact that – their whole lives long – they’ve worked with socialist forms of self-government and often personally enjoy the benefits that comes with being one of the owners of these enterprises.

Then when they do hear the word, “socialist,” they’re driven to think of something foreign, and usually involving Joseph Stalin. It’s a play on supermarket labels. A similar tactic would constantly refer to banana republics in South America as “centers of capitalism.” It’s technically true, but most would agree that the level of brutality and human rights violations one sees in such places is a rarity in a typical “capitalist” nation.

And then there is the modern myth of the U.S. itself being a capitalist country…

Like every other modern nation, the U.S. possesses a “mixed” economy – that is to say, it is a mixture of capitalist and socialist enterprises. It has been so since the time of the Founding Fathers, who decided that it was in the interests of the people to own their own roads, rather than continually having to pay numerous tolls to the wealthy people who owned the streets leading in to and out of every town and village.

Therefore, socialism in the U.S. goes back at least to the early 19th Century.

According to Google’s AI Assistant, “[President James] Madison believed that roads, canals, and bridges would help democracy by improving communication and political representation across the country.

“He also believed that the federal government should take on a role in building these infrastructure projects,” the Assistant continued.

“In his 1815 annual [presidential] address to Congress, Madison called for public investment in national roads and canals,” making the citizens the equal owners of the roads and canals by nationalizing these projects…an unmistakable mark of socialism.

So our economy has been mixed with some form of socialism almost from the beginning of the republic…Yet Founding Fathers like Madison aren’t normally seen as Murderers of the American Dream either.

The modern mixed economies we know really came into their own after the outbreak of the Great Depression almost 100 years ago. That’s when many of the socialist policies, programs and activities that now are staples of our modern world were needed to save former capitalist economies that no longer worked – this included the U.S. economy, the capitalist country whose hubris created the worldwide economic meltdown.

Now, every modern economy is a mixed economy. True capitalist economies are a thing of the past, for one excellent reason: They simply do not work.

Things like the economic collapse of the U.S. economy in the late 1980s and the Great Recession of 2007-2008 – which each occurred after socialist elements of the U.S. economy were reduced and rolled back – have only underlined and proved anew the need for a strong element of Socialism in any functional modern economy.

The Nordic model – enjoyed by countries like Sweden and Denmark – goes much farther, utilizing a form of mixed economy that could best be deemed market socialism. Its socialist side employs strong elements of anarchism – an anti-state socialism which sees socialism as a personal moral force for the citizens of society, and demands that workers be seen and treated as equals in the business process – and syndicalism, another anti-state form of socialism in which unions act as the catalyst for socialist change.

This has resulted in “ the Nordic countries [having] the highest union density in the world,” as of 2019, according to nordics.info, and forcing companies to place elected union representatives on their board of directors, thus creating “ ‘Co-determination’ – direct union influence on corporate decision-making.”

A lack of government rules and activity does not mean a lack of socialist activity in an economy. So no, U.S. conservatives, the Nordic model does not depend on your so-called “free market” for its high standard of living or the greater freedoms those societies enjoy. Bernie Sanders essentially was right about the Nordic Model serving as a living example of a successful socialist model all along.

A quick aside here, meant as an added emphasis: With the singular exception of the U.S., every other powerful democratic nation enjoys at least one strong socialist political party of some kind. Canada and Britain have the Labour Party. France has numerous socialist parties. All the countries of Western Europe, New Zealand and Australia have powerful socialist parties. And they are practically all considered free nations.

Only the U.S. lacks such a party. But in the 1930s, liberal democrats ushered in a strong mixed economy here to combat and correct the excesses which led to the Great Depression. That mixed economy has been the economy we Americans – including Donald Trump – have known for nearly a hundred years now. And most Americans would consider the U.S. a fairly free nation.

In fact, another – more familiar term for a socialist enterprise of any kind – is cooperative, a term and a form of business organization that is a clear staple in the American way of life.

There is only one final question to ask regarding these socialist enterprises, these cooperatives: If properly funded and run well by the owners themselves – the people who actually work there, or the people who are the actual customers of the business – can their business model compete with capitalism?

To say it truthfully, Capitalism is based on the feudal notion of society, which employs the “Great Person” theory of history. The presumption assumes that the unwashed masses simply are too ignorant to run business concerns without the leadership of the “Great Ones” who rightfully command all the power, all the money, and all the respect due human beings.

We only need the example of one business to destroy that most central of myths Capitalism employs to justify its continued existence: Mondragon.

The Mondragon Corporation is a business and federation of worker cooperatives centered in Spain’s Basque region. Its revenue, in 2015, was €12.110 billion ($13.2 billion, U.S.). In 2014, its total assets stood at €24.725 billion (just over $27 billion, U.S.).

The owners are the workers. There’s no Donald Trump, no Elon Musk. All of the owners count as great people, and run a tremendous business partnership.

The cooperative has four primary divisions: Industry, Retail, Finance and Knowledge.

It was created in 1956 by Father José María Arizmendiarrieta and a number of his students at a technical college he established, in the small town of Mondragón. The company began by selling paraffin heaters.

Its company asset turnover – in short, the efficiency of its asset use in producing sales income or sales revenue to the business – is the seventh-largest in Spain. It is the leading business entity in the Basque Country. In 2016, it empowered and enriched 74,117 business partners in almost 260 groups and companies.

Mondragon cooperatives follow the standards found in the Statement on the Co-operative Identity, a proclamation upheld by the International Co-operative Alliance.

So one suspects that Trump’s notion of freedom is a bit off the mark. It probably follows the notion of freedom that British philosopher Bertrand Russell spoke of when speaking of pure capitalists like Trump:

To spoiled, wealthy people like Trump, the economic tyranny he and his wealthy friends like Elon Musk enjoy is the most sacred liberty of all.

But cooperatives like Mondragon, and socialist entities like Medicare, Social Security, public schools and national parks are the best antidote to their economic tyranny. Bona fide socialism enriches and empowers the people who do the work, and is purposely run on democratic principles. What could be more free – and more American – than that?