Senator Tom Cotton wants you scared of socialism — scared enough to stop asking who’s actually closing your grocery store, raising your rent, and bankrupting you at the hospital. In a Fox News Opinion column this week titled “Democrats say socialism will help. History says it will hurt,” he runs through Venezuela, Cuba, and the Soviet Union, blames your grocery bill on Zohran Mamdani and Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and warns of bread costing millions of bolívars. The diagnosis is wrong, and the shelves in your town are emptying for a different reason.
Cotton can name his examples. The twentieth century’s communist regimes were a catastrophe — state ownership under one-party rule in Russia, China, Cambodia, and Cuba killed tens of millions and starved the workers it claimed to free. The verdict is in. I’m not here to relitigate the gulag or the ration book.
Now here is the trick, and it is the entire argument. Cotton uses one word — “socialism” — to cover three different things, and the third is the one being used against you.
Soviet central planning and Cuban ration books collapsed those economies. He is not wrong about what happened.
Then he folds the Nordic countries into the case and argues they aren’t really socialist because they have private property, secure rights, competitive markets, and a 25% sales tax that ordinary workers pay. He is right that Denmark and Sweden aren’t socialist. They never claimed to be. They are social democracies — high-tax welfare states built on top of vigorous private markets and organized labor. Conflating Stockholm with Caracas is one move. Stapling Stalin’s corpse to the résumé of a New York city council member is the next.
Then comes the work the column is actually being paid to do. Cotton names a list of policies — universal childcare, government-owned grocery stores, sectoral bargaining, expanded welfare — and says they will turn America into Venezuela. Let me tell you what is actually closing your grocery store, raising your rent, and emptying your shelves, because the list is shorter than his, and it has been there for years.
Four firms — Tyson, JBS, Cargill, and National Beef — process 80 to 85 percent of the beef sold in the United States. Three or four — Kroger, Albertsons, Walmart, and Costco — sell most of the groceries. When those firms merge or squeeze their suppliers, you feel it in the price of hamburger; when they post record margins during an inflation wave, you feel it in the cost of eggs. Federal Trade Commission researchers in 2022 and 2023 found that grocery retailers captured the gap between rising input costs and rising consumer prices. The corporations kept the difference. That isn’t socialism. That is a market with too little competition in it, and the FTC has the brief to show it.
The stores themselves are being strip-mined. Regional grocery chains are bought by private-equity firms, loaded with debt, and broken for parts. Sell the real estate. Lease it back to the grocer. Walk away when the chain can’t pay its own rent. That playbook is so standard it ought to come with sheet music, and if you’ve watched a regional supermarket in your county disappear in the last five years, that is probably why. The private-equity model runs a strip-mine; the asset it strips is not the building but the food supply of a town. Nobody calling that “socialism” has a better story about why the shelves are empty.
Cotton cites Stockholm housing prices to argue the welfare state doesn’t make life more affordable. American housing is expensive for reasons that have nothing to do with Sweden. We don’t have Sweden’s zoning — we have zoning that makes building apartments illegal on most of the residential land in our cities. We have the mortgage-interest deduction, which subsidizes larger houses for households wealthy enough to itemize. We have, increasingly, large institutional investors buying up single-family homes as rental assets and pricing first-time buyers out of the market. None of that is socialism. All of it is what is making your rent go up.
American healthcare, meanwhile, costs about $14,800 per person in 2024 — roughly $5,000 more per person than the next-highest country in the developed world — and it runs as a market. American childcare forces parents to choose between affordability, decent wages for workers, and returns for owners; every other rich country picked the parents and the workers and paid the difference. We picked the spreadsheet and act surprised.
I will give Cotton one piece of honesty and then refuse to let him use it the way he wants to. The Nordic welfare states are paid for with high taxes on ordinary workers, including a 25% VAT on most purchases. Denmark, Sweden, and Norway each collect more than 40 percent of GDP in taxes. The middle-class tax burden is real. The Scandinavian deal is “everybody pays, everybody gets,” and it is worth saying out loud because the American left’s version — “tax the billionaires, free everything” — is not how Copenhagen actually works. So I won’t pretend it is.
But Cotton uses that bit of honesty to write that the Nordic model “offers no evidence that an expansive welfare state makes life more affordable for average citizens.” That sentence is true the way your car’s speedometer is evidence you can win the Monaco Grand Prix. The point of the Nordic welfare state isn’t cheap groceries. The point is that a layoff doesn’t end on the street, a hospital visit doesn’t end in bankruptcy, a year of parental leave doesn’t end in a choice between the baby and the paycheck. By that test the United States is failing cheaply: we pay less in taxes and get less in security, and the senator is welcome to argue we are getting the better deal. He’d just have to argue it.
The current arrangement, meanwhile, is not — despite Cotton’s framing — “free of socialism.” America’s most popular programs would all be denounced as socialism if anyone proposed them tomorrow. Social Security sends a monthly check to more than 67 million Americans; Medicare covers roughly 65 million. Rural electric cooperatives, owned by their members, wired the countryside in the 1930s and 1940s when investor-owned utilities refused. Credit unions now serve roughly 145 million members. The Bank of North Dakota has been profitable every year since it opened in 1919, and nobody ever called Bismarck the Kremlin.
So when Cotton warns that American “democratic socialist” proposals — universal childcare, sectoral bargaining, public-option groceries — will turn us into Venezuela, he is warning that Denmark-grade welfare policies will turn us into Caracas. The argument requires you not to notice that the actual danger is the one we are already living in: a country that has refused to build the institutions that make life affordable, and is now staring at the consequences.
The reason Americans do not have universal childcare is not because the Swedes are secretly running a failed state. It is because the math does not close without public subsidy, and we would rather spend the political capital warning about Havana than solve the problem.
The reason healthcare costs what it costs is not because the Danish model collapsed. It is because sick people make terrible shoppers — you do not price-compare an ambulance — and the American insurance system has spent forty years inserting itself between patient and care to skim the difference.
The reason housing eats a third of a working paycheck is not because Sweden ran out of apartments. It is because we stopped building them and let the existing stock become an asset class.
The conflation is not just an analytical trick. It is how you refuse to look at what is actually broken.
The fix for the grocery problem is antitrust. The Biden-era FTC sued to block the Kroger-Albertsons merger and won in court — Judge Adrienne Nelson ruled in December 2024 that the deal was “presumptively unlawful” and would remove direct competition between the two grocers, and Albertsons terminated the deal after the ruling. That fight has to keep being fought, and the next ones need to win. The private-equity strip-mine gets fixed by closing the loopholes that make it tax-free and by giving workers and communities the chance to bid on the firm when the buyers show up to gut it. Boring fixes. Working fixes.
The housing problem gets fixed by building, in places, by everyone. Zoning reform is finally beginning in California, Oregon, Texas, and a few other states; the supply has to come up. The institutional-buyer problem gets fixed by taxing speculative holdings at a rate the speculator doesn’t want to pay, and by treating housing as the infrastructure it actually is instead of the asset class it has become.
And the welfare-state problem — the one Cotton says he is worried about — gets fixed by doing what a child allowance did in 2021, when the expanded Child Tax Credit cut child poverty by 46 percent in a single year under the Census Bureau’s Supplemental Poverty Measure, and then by doing it again and not letting it lapse. By public banking the way North Dakota has run one since 1919. By cooperative home care the way Cooperative Home Care Associates in the Bronx has run one since 1985. By sectoral wage boards for the lowest-paying industries, legal under existing state law. By a sovereign wealth fund that owns a piece of the country’s resources and shares the gains with everyone, the way Norway has done since 1990 with its trillion-dollar oil fund.
Not the gulag. Not the strip-mine. A working alternative that is already working, in places both red and blue, that we would rather not call by its name because naming it would make us responsible for building it.
Cotton is welcome to keep writing about the Soviet Union. Some of us have groceries to buy.