America has always had radicals who promised that our problems could be solved if the government simply took more control: more control of prices, health care, housing, transportation, food, and ultimately of private wealth itself.
The newest version of that argument is cloaked in deceptive language like “affordability,” “equity,” and “democratic socialism.”
The Democrats’ most prominent messengers are not struggling workers who have been failed by the system they condemn. They are well-connected politicians, highly educated professionals, and celebrity influencers who have benefited from the very economic freedom they denounce.
That is the central hypocrisy of the socialist worldview advanced by Mayor Zohran Mamdani, Abdul El‑Sayed, and Hasan Piker. They portray capitalism as an immoral system built on exploitation, but they enjoy the property, independence, career opportunity, platforms, and social mobility generated by a free-market country.
All three suggest that America’s problems can be solved by placing more life under political control: higher taxes, government-run services, rent controls, and the redistribution of wealth from those who produce it to those who promise to distribute it more fairly.
And all three, importantly, are not bit players in American politics — Mamdani runs America’s largest city; El-Sayed is the Democrats’ nominee for Senate in a pivotal race; and Piker is quickly becoming the Democratic Party’s go-to surrogate. This trio is operating at anything but the fringes of the Democratic Party.
Their styles differ. Their message does not. Theirs is an ideology of grievance sold by those completely insulated from the consequences of their own proposals.
The language is designed to sound painless: free buses, free health care, free child care, affordable groceries, free housing. In fact, just about “free” everything.
But no politician can make a service free. Government can only move the bill.
Socialism’s great rhetorical trick is to call a service “free” after moving its cost out of sight.
In New York City, Mamdani promotes fare-free buses, rent freezes, city-owned grocery stores, expanded public child care, and major public housing commitments. Abdul El‑Sayed has promoted a state-level single-payer health system financed through new and higher taxes. Hasan Piker amplifies the broader anti-capitalist case to millions of young viewers, treating markets and private wealth as central sources of injustice.
Nothing is free. Someone pays. Usually it’s the taxpayer, the small-business owner, the employer, the landlord trying to maintain an aging building, or a family that ends up paying more as government costs raise prices and taxes.
Young people ultimately pay that bill in ways that are easy to overlook:
- Higher payroll taxes reduce take-home pay at the exact stage when young workers are trying to build savings.
- Higher business taxes mean fewer entry-level jobs, weaker wage growth, and fewer opportunities to advance.
- Higher government spending can increase debt obligations that younger taxpayers will carry longer than anyone else.
- Reduced investment means fewer new businesses, fewer apartments, fewer innovations, and fewer paths to economic independence.
- Government programs turn citizens into petitioners — people who must wait for eligibility, approval, and bureaucratic permission.
Another reason to reject socialism is that policies marketed as affordability measures protect insiders while making it harder for young people to enter the market.
Rent control is perhaps the oldest example. It has been tried repeatedly, and its record is clear enough: it benefits a protected set of people while making life harder for everyone who comes after them.
Rent controls shrink supply, reduce investment, and raise rent. In San Francisco, expansion of rent control caused reduced housing options and increased citywide rents as landlords converted or demolished units.
That is not a solution. It is a political allocation system: reward those already inside, punish those trying to get in, and then blame private enterprise for the shortage the government made.
Mamdani proposed city-owned grocery stores. Democrats are good at this kind of fake promise, it sounds compassionate only if one has never run a grocery store.
They face real expenses — food purchasing, refrigeration, leases, staff, delivery, theft, waste, utilities, insurance, and regulation. A city-run store can hide those costs from shoppers only by sending them to taxpayers.
But let’s look at how these ideas fare in the real world. Baldwin, Florida’s city-run grocery store struggled to break even and closed in 2024. Erie, Kansas, operated a municipal grocery at losses before leasing it to a private company in 2024. St. Paul, Kansas ultimately moved toward private management as well. Chicago considered a city-owned grocery model and ultimately backed away from it amid feasibility concerns.
The socialist response to a market failure is almost always to replace it with a government monopoly. The predictable result is not abundance. It is subsidy, politicization, inefficiency, and rationing.
A third reason to reject socialism is that it places more of our lives under the control of institutions we do not run.
El‑Sayed mirrors the same theory through health care. His “Michicare” proposal would have created a statewide single-payer health-care system, financed through higher taxes on workers and businesses. The pitch, as always, is that the government can provide universal care without the inconvenience of costs, tradeoffs, or scarcity.
But health care is not free merely because patients do not see the bill at the point of service. Somebody still pays. And when the government becomes the dominant payer, it does what governments do when demand exceeds the politically acceptable budget: it delays, restricts, and rations care.
That is the real-world version of “Medicare for All.” No timely care; not lower costs, costs shifted into taxes and wait lists; not equality, but a two-tier system where those with means find private alternatives while ordinary families wait.
And then there is Hasan Piker — the movement’s loudest megaphone and its most clear contradiction. Piker rails against capitalism while having built an enormously lucrative career inside one of the most successful capitalist systems ever devised: the digital attention economy.
His brand rests on voluntary audiences, subscriptions, media platforms, advertising, and the scalable rewards that come from owning an audience.
In 2021, Piker bought a 3,800-square-foot, five-bedroom Los Angeles-area home for approximately $2.74 million.
Conservatives don’t believe that earning money or owning a home is morally suspect. But Piker does. He says wealth, markets, and private ownership are morally suspect when other people possess them.
That is the hypocrisy.
Piker’s politics tell young Americans that capitalism is a rigged system of exploitation. His lifestyle demonstrates that capitalism hands extraordinary rewards to people able to cultivate talent, build an audience, take risks, and meet consumer demand. He wants the prestige, autonomy, and financial security that markets made possible — while encouraging his audience to regard the system that enabled all of it as fundamentally illegitimate.
El‑Sayed’s financial-disclosure placed his net worth in a range from roughly $580,000 to over $2 million, including investments, consulting-related income, and real estate. He enjoys financial security that higher taxes and more government control to him are ideas on paper, not personal burdens.
But for a restaurant owner, a new business tax can mean cutting staff or raising prices. For a small manufacturer, it can mean deciding not to hire another worker. And for a young couple looking for an apartment, rent controls mean fewer homes are available and prices stay high.
Personal wealth is not the only form of privilege. Mamdani comes from extraordinary cultural and institutional advantages: an elite educational environment, a Columbia professor father, a prominent filmmaker mother, and access to the networks that make it possible to enter politics with a ready-made platform and ideological constituency.
A remarkable vantage point from which to lecture working people about the virtues of economic experimentation.
The defining hypocrisy of this movement is not that its leaders have money, homes, assets, fame, or elite connections. It is that they have used the opportunities of the free market to build comfortable, secure lives, but support and implement policies that make it harder for Americans to earn, save, own property, and get ahead.
Piker, El‑Sayed, and Mamdani do not offer a politics of opportunity. They offer a politics of managed decline: freeze prices instead of increasing supply; tax investment instead of encouraging production; expand bureaucracy instead of empowering families; replace choice with dependency; and call the result justice.
A better future is not built by making Americans permanent clients of the state. It is built by expanding the chance to own something, build something, earn something, save something, and pass something on.
Alexa Henning is a senior communications, public affairs, and political strategist with extensive experience across the Intelligence Community, White House, U.S. Senate, state government, and national political campaigns. She most recently served as Chief of Staff at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence, advising senior leadership on national-security strategy, congressional and interagency engagement, crisis response, and organizational operations. Previously, she led communications for Gov. Sarah Huckabee Sanders (R., Ark.), served as Deputy Chief of Staff and spokesperson for Chairman Ron Johnson (R., Wis.), and held senior media and communications roles in the Trump White House and presidential campaigns.
