The thing killing American enterprise isn’t socialism. It’s the monopoly that controls the marketplace itself and calls it “success.” Ronna McDaniel’s recent Fox News opinion piece, Socialism’s war on success has a new champion — and he’s running for Senate in Michigan, argues that Abdul El-Sayed’s Senate bid and his support for the American Innovation and Choice Online Act represents a punitive, European-style threat to American business. The piece names Lina Khan’s FTC as proof that the left wants to weaponize government against successful companies. It’s the same frame every time: regulation is punishment, free markets are freedom, and anyone who wants rules is a socialist.
I’ll grant the piece its strongest honest point, because the piece earns it: regulation can impose real costs. Compliance has a price tag. Some investigations do chill investment, and the scope of some of Khan’s FTC actions was genuinely contested — serious people argued the agency overreached in specific cases. That’s real. I’m not going to pretend it isn’t.
But the piece then does something it never acknowledges: it frames market concentration as “success.” When a company controls enough of a market — think Amazon, Google, or the big hospital chains — it can raise prices, squeeze suppliers, buy up competitors without fear of losing customers, and lock users into its own products. That’s not innovation. That’s extraction. The Microsoft antitrust case in the 1990s proved that enforcement can open the door for competitors — Google itself rose in the space Microsoft had stifled. And when the piece calls any regulation of that dominance “punishment,” it has left out the cost that concentration imposes on everyone else — the small business that can’t compete, the worker who has no alternative employer, the family paying monopoly markups at the grocery store. The “free market” the piece defends is one where the biggest players have already bought the rules. That’s like saying the speed limit punishes fast cars. It punishes reckless driving.
Take the piece’s own proof text. The American Innovation and Choice Online Act doesn’t touch small businesses. It sets a financial threshold high enough to reach only the handful of companies that control the platforms everyone else depends on. The bill says: if you’re big enough to be the gatekeeper, you can’t use that position to crush the people walking through your gate. McDaniel calls that “punitive, European-style regulation.” But the European Union now has the largest free-trade market on earth, and its Digital Markets Act hasn’t stopped a single European from buying an iPhone. What the bill actually does is enforce competition — the thing free markets are supposed to have.
I keep being told that any regulation is socialism. Walk me through it slowly. Start with why Denmark — which operates under stricter platform rules than America through the EU’s digital framework — ranks fourth globally in competitiveness according to the IMD’s 2025 index. Then explain why Mondragon, a cooperative in the Basque Country with roughly seventy thousand worker-owners, has been competing in global markets since 1956 with an average pay ratio of five to one between its highest and lowest earners. Then explain why North Dakota has run a state-owned bank, profitably, since 1919 — marking its fifteenth consecutive year of record profits in 2018 — and nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin.
The word “socialism” does all the work here, so you never get around to asking whether the boring thing it’s attached to already exists. In America, you belong to a credit union — a member-owned cooperative. Your rural electric cooperative wires your town. Social Security insures your grandparents. Medicare is single-payer healthcare for everyone over sixty-five. These aren’t socialist. They’re American. They’ve been here the whole time.
McDaniel spends several paragraphs attacking El-Sayed’s personal finances — his income puts him in the top one percent, his wife’s practice allegedly doesn’t accept Medicare. Setting aside that the piece provides no source for the wife’s billing practices beyond “allegedly,” personal wealth has never invalidated a policy position. Every Republican who has ever cut taxes for the rich while claiming to represent working people has proven that. The question isn’t whether El-Sayed makes money. The question is whether his policy ideas would make markets more competitive.
I’m not here to defend El-Sayed. I’m here for the question the piece never asks: what would actually make American markets more competitive? Not the “free market” of monopolies and oligopolies, but a market where the rules don’t favor the biggest player. That means antitrust enforcement with teeth — the kind that opened space for Google to challenge Microsoft. It means interoperability mandates that let small businesses compete with platforms. It means worker ownership — the co-op, the ESOP, the Mondragon model — that puts the people who actually work in the building at the table where decisions are made. The Nordic countries built this on a foundation of high union density and organized employers that America doesn’t have. That’s the hard part. But we do have credit unions, rural electric co-ops, and a hundred-year-old state-owned bank in North Dakota. We already do this. We just won’t say the word.
The piece warns that Democrats will “replace optimism with fear tactics.” But calling any regulation “socialism” is the fear tactic. Because once you’ve named the monster, you never have to explain why the market isn’t actually free — or why what you call “success” is somebody else’s rent.