No, Public Goods Are Not Socialism

Every time the word socialism comes up on social media, someone says it, almost by reflex: “We already have socialism. It’s roads. It’s the police. It’s the fire department.”

It sounds clever. It isn’t.

Those things didn’t come from socialism. Socialism came long after them.

Roads, law enforcement, and fire brigades existed centuries before socialism ever became a political theory. Ancient cities had roads. Medieval towns had watchmen. Early American communities organized fire companies and militias long before anyone was writing manifestos about collective ownership.

They weren’t experiments in socialism. They were basic acts of civilization.

Socialism didn’t emerge as a theory about who should own and control productive life, land, industry, and capital until the nineteenth century. It wasn’t about whether communities could organize common services. It was about transferring economic power upward and concentrating it in the state.

That distinction matters.

Public services don’t abolish private ownership. They don’t replace markets. They don’t tell you where you may work, what you may produce, or what you may keep. They exist to protect life and property so free people can go about their business.

That’s not socialism. That’s the groundwork that made freedom possible in the first place. The founders called it ordered liberty.

But here’s the rub.

The problem isn’t that government exists. It’s that the government never knows when to stop.

Some government is necessary, of course. Conservatives have always understood that. Law. Courts. Basic order. Without them, liberty can’t survive. But government intervention works the same way sugar does in the human body.

A little gives you energy. Too much makes you sick. And a steady diet of it eventually does real damage.

When the government moves from setting boundaries to managing outcomes, the harm begins. That’s when incentives break. Work stops paying. Responsibility erodes. Families adapt to systems instead of building independence. Communities crumble. And local solutions disappear because distant planners insist they know better.

The danger doesn’t come all at once. It accumulates. Program by program. Rule by rule. All of those good intentions. Until the system, like a body flooded with sugar, can’t regulate itself anymore.

That’s why socialism is so dangerous. Because it refuses to accept limits, driven by the ambitious politicians who always push it too far. It assumes control can replace judgment, and that human nature will cooperate if the plan is clever enough.

It never does.

Because socialism’s fatal flaw isn’t that it misunderstands people.

It assumes power can be centralized without being abused. That ambition can be managed. That dependency can be called dignity. That human nature will quietly submit to planners who promise fairness and deliver control.

History has rendered its verdict time and time again.

Every society that ignored limits, every system that believed it could override incentives and restrain corruption by decree, paid the same price. First in prosperity. Then in liberty.

Socialism doesn’t fail because people are bad. It fails because people are human. And when its promises collide with reality, it doesn’t retreat. It always tightens its grip.

That’s the problem at its core.

It’s a flawed theory that demands better angels than human beings have ever possessed, and punishes a nation when they fail to appear.