THE THIRD WAY

Why Socialism Is Not the Answer — And Neither Is the System We Have

This article was inspired by an exchange I had with a father.

He had voted for me. He was thoughtful, clearly well-read, and deeply worried about his son’s future — a young man with a computer science degree watching his industry shed experienced workers by the thousands while artificial intelligence claims territory that once belonged to human expertise. He told me that roughly 60 percent of young people now prefer some form of socialism over the economic insecurity of contemporary capitalism. He considered that hopeful.

It is an understandably visceral response to a broken promise — one rooted in the most human of desires: to feel safe, to feel free, and to know that real opportunity exists to build something meaningful with your life.

The current conditions driving young people toward that conclusion are real. A generation that studied hard, accumulated debt, worked hard, did everything the system asked of them, and still cannot afford a home or a doctor or a retirement has every right to question the system that produced that outcome.

My response, however, is different from his. Not because I disagree about the problem, but because I believe the diagnosis points in a different direction — and the direction matters enormously when we are talking about what to build next.

Socialism, in its fully realized form, has not delivered the outcomes its proponents hope for. This is not a theoretical observation. It is a historical record. The Soviet Union. Cuba. Venezuela. North Korea. In each case, concentrating economic and political power in the hands of the state produced not equity but a different kind of elite — one with no market accountability, no democratic check, and no mechanism for the ordinary person to push back against decisions made in their name. The people who suffer most under those systems are the same people the system was built to protect.

I have a close friend who grew up in Eastern Europe under socialism. He does not romanticize it. He speaks about it with a weariness that only comes from having lived inside a system that promised equality and delivered control. The frustrations he describes are practical and relentless — shortages of basic supplies, limited access to opportunity, careers determined not by talent or drive but by proximity to those with party influence. The ceiling was low and it was enforced. There was no freedom to build something of your own, no real path to rise beyond what the state decided was your station. He came here because here, at least, the possibility existed. His point, and it is a serious one, is that concentrated power produces the same outcome regardless of the ideology that justifies it. The uniform changes. The dynamic does not.

The Scandinavian countries most often cited as proof that socialism works are not, in fact, socialist states. They are robust capitalist economies with high taxes, strong labor protections, and generous social safety nets, supported by a level of civic trust and institutional accountability that took generations to build. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway protect private property, support free markets, and have thriving business sectors. What they have that we do not is a political culture that has, so far, prevented the capture of those institutions by narrow private interests. That is a meaningful distinction.

Here is what I actually believe went wrong in America — and it is not that we had too much capitalism or too little socialism.

Whatever label you choose — mixed economy, regulated capitalism, social democracy — the label itself is part of the problem, because labels are what politicians use to divide us instead of govern us.

What matters is not what we call the system. What matters is what the system was designed to do: reward ingenuity, protect freedom, and ensure that markets serve people, not the other way around. Private markets, when functioning properly, have always outperformed government bureaucracy in driving innovation, efficiency, and creative solutions.

That is not ideology. That is what history has shown us.

The goal was never to replace the market. It was to make sure the market answered to the people living inside it. That compact was corrupted the moment corporations were granted the rights of people and money was granted the rights of speech — because from that moment forward, the market stopped answering to the people and started answering to the highest bidder.

America was never meant to be a pure market state where profit is the only organizing principle and the vulnerable are left to manage on their own. It was designed with the understanding that rewarding ingenuity and protecting the common good are not opposing forces — they are complementary ones.

Public schools, roads, a safety net for those who fall — these were not concessions to socialism. They were the architecture of a society that understood a rising tide has to actually lift the boats, not just the yachts.

The corruption came in stages.

In 1886, the Supreme Court effectively treated corporations as legal persons, granting them constitutional protections never intended for entities whose only legal obligation is to generate profit for shareholders.

In 2010, Citizens United opened the floodgates of unlimited money into political campaigns, allowing the wealthiest private interests to purchase the legislation they needed.

The result is a government that increasingly governs for the people who fund it rather than the people who elect it.

That is not a failure of capitalism as an economic system. It is a failure of democracy as a political one. Politicians chose power over people, cycle after cycle, until the distance between the two became the defining condition of American civic life.

The real question before us is not socialism versus capitalism. It is something more urgent and more specific — and to understand it we have to be honest about where we actually are. We are living through the highest concentration of private wealth in the history of this country. In 1989 there were 66 American billionaires.

Today there are more than 900, with a combined wealth of $7.8 trillion. The richest 1 percent now hold nearly 31 percent of all wealth in this country, while the bottom 50 percent of American households — 66 million families — share just $4.1 trillion between them. A small group of tech moguls now hold unprecedented economic power, technological reach, and political influence simultaneously — owning the platforms through which billions of people communicate, the AI infrastructure that will shape the next economy, and in some cases direct access to the highest levels of government. This is what oligarchy looks like when it arrives not through revolution but through innovation.

Now, I understand why this data makes socialism feel like the answer. When power and wealth concentrate this dramatically in private hands, the instinct is to transfer that power to the state. However, that instinct trades one concentration of unaccountable power for another. The real question is this: how do we level the playing field and create a genuinely just economic system — one that breaks up the concentration without replacing it with government control, that rewards ingenuity without abandoning the people that same ingenuity displaces?

That question becomes even more urgent when you consider what artificial intelligence is already doing to the workforce. McKinsey projects that 30 percent of current work hours in the United States could be automated by 2030. The World Economic Forum estimates 92 million jobs will be displaced globally in that window. If that displacement happens without a serious, visionary policy response, the economic anxiety driving young people toward socialism will become economic despair. We will be heading toward a social breaking point that makes the current moment look stable by comparison.

The honest answer to that challenge is not a return to full state control of the economy. It is a radical reimagining of how we distribute the gains of technological productivity. When machines do the work that human beings used to do, who captures the value of that work? Right now, the answer is predominantly the shareholders and executives of the companies that own the machines.

The workers whose labor those machines replaced receive nothing — not severance, not retraining, not a share of the productivity they helped build before they were displaced.

Universal basic income is part of the conversation we need to have seriously and urgently. Not as charity or a political concession. It is a structural inevitability when the acknowledgment of human labor is no longer the primary driver of economic value, the people displaced by that transition deserve a share of what the machines now produce.

This is not socialism. It is an updated social contract for an economy that no longer resembles the one the current contract was written for– or has ever existed in modern society.

The father I was speaking with is right that the current system is failing his son.

He is right that the political establishment — left and right — has not risen to the scale of the challenge. He is right that something fundamental has to change. Where I part ways with him is in the conclusion that socialism is the vessel for that change. The vessel I believe in is a genuinely reimagined republic — one that restores the balance between freedom and responsibility, between individual effort and collective investment, between the rights of people and the unchecked power of concentrated wealth. One governed by compassionate visionaries rather than blind leaders of the status quo.

The genie is out of the bottle. We need leadership that can navigate the AI revolution not as a threat to be managed but as an opportunity to redesign the social contract in ways that could finally deliver on the promise this country has been making and failing to keep for too long.

The old thinking is imploding. You can feel it in every direction you look. The question that will define the next chapter of this country is not whether the old system survives, because it will not. The question is what we build in its place, and whether we build it with wisdom and intention or stumble into it in the aftermath of collapse.

That is the conversation I am committed to having. For as long as it takes and in whatever form it needs to take.

With clarity and conviction about what is possible --

Nina Linh

True North | WonderSeed Foundation | A New Way Forward