Holman Jenkins wants young Americans to shut up about socialism and look in the mirror instead. In his Wall Street Journal column “The Socialism We Already Have”, the editorial-board member argues that the country is already a socialist nation because it subsidizes old homeowners and the well-insured — and that New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s young voters are hypocrites for demanding more of what they already enjoy. He is defending the older half of that bargain. He should be honest about it.
He names the wrong thing. The senior property-tax break he cites is not socialism. It is asset protection for people who already own, and it directly causes the housing crisis he blames on the young. A retired couple in a four-bedroom house in Brooklyn or the San Fernando Valley pays a small fraction of the tax a young family would pay for the same square footage. So they stay. They don’t sell. They don’t move. They don’t add a unit. The housing stock that should be circulating sits still, and the inventory that would have existed — starter homes, in-law apartments, duplex conversions — never gets built. That is not socialism. That is a transfer from future buyers to current owners, written into the tax code.
And the $240 billion tax break for employer-sponsored insurance is not socialism, either. It is a price-blinding subsidy from the early 1940s that the right has defended for the better part of a century. It hides healthcare costs behind a third-party payer, jacks up hospital list prices, and turns the medical bill into something nobody shops for. Jenkins mentions it as if to gesture at fairness, then ducks. If he actually wants young people to stop subsidizing the well-insured, the answer is an old idea from his own side: tear the deduction out, end the employer-pays model, and let individuals buy coverage on a transparent market. He doesn’t say that.
The $376,000 of federal debt per newborn that Jenkins cites — that one I’ll give him. A baby born today does owe hundreds of thousands in unfunded entitlement liability, and the older voters who designed the promises are not the ones who will pay them. The arithmetic is grotesque. Pretending otherwise would be dishonest.
But the column is doing something else, too. It is exonerating a specific coalition — older homeowners, well-insured corporate employees, and people who already own wealth. Jenkins names “existing socialism” like a metaphor. He means: do not touch our property-tax break, do not touch our insurance exclusion, do not touch our capital-gains exemption on the family house. The young can have a more dynamic economy — AI, defense, private rockets, clever schemes for dividing public and private work. That is what “finding new insights in how to divide the public and private sectors” gets you, in the editorial-board voice: a permission slip to leave existing entitlements exactly where they are.
And the Scandinavian dismissal is the giveaway. He says small, homogeneous Nordic countries have “high social trust” and the U.S. does not. Half right. They also have permissive zoning, light-touch permitting, and far more housing responsiveness than American metro areas. They build. We don’t. The trust claim is a way of saying “do not try anything here” without having to look at the building-permit line item.
This is why a billionaire tax won’t fix what Mamdani says he wants to fix. The billionaire’s wealth is, as Jenkins notes, mostly the value of property rights. Confiscating it doesn’t build a single apartment. Even spending the money on subsidized housing won’t help much. When you subsidize demand on a fixed supply, the price rises. Most economists who study housing vouchers — federal Section 8 and the state versions — find that a large share of the subsidy is captured by landlords in higher rents. Mamdani’s rent freezes make this worse. They convert the existing stock into a rationed good, with the windfall going to whoever already holds a lease.
The political economy is straightforward. Each incumbent homeowner captures a large benefit from blocking the new building next door — protected property value, preserved school quality, less traffic. The cost of that block is diffused across millions of would-be renters and buyers who never get to bid on a unit that was never built. Concentrated beneficiaries organize. Diffuse losers don’t. The over-65 property-tax break, the mortgage-interest deduction, and the zoning regime are three faces of the same coalition.
Zoning in most big American cities still forbids anything but single-family houses on the majority of residential land. That isn’t an accident. It’s the result of decades of meetings where neighbors testified that the new apartment building “doesn’t fit the character of the neighborhood.” A young nurse in Austin now spends close to half her gross pay on rent before taxes. A junior employee in the Bay Area can spend more than that. Jenkins would like her to read the federal debt clock and lose sleep. Fine — but she is losing sleep because a postwar ranch house in Sunnyvale lists for well over a million dollars and the lot behind it cannot legally be split into a duplex. The fiscal gap is real. The housing math is the emergency.
Young people who vote for Mamdani are not voting for senior property-tax breaks and employer-payer insurance. They are voting for rent stabilization, public housing, child care, and a check on a private market that has stopped building for them. Jenkins’s strongest move would be to admit that, explain why he thinks it will not work, and offer a different plan. His actual move is to call them privileged kids and recommend the Army for structure. That is a tell. It is what conservatives reach for when the affirmative case has run out.
What would actually work is dull. End the senior property-tax lock-in: convert the exemption into a portable credit that follows the homeowner to a smaller, denser unit, and tax land value instead of improvements, so empty lots and underused single-family parcels cannot hoard supply. Detach health insurance from the employer: take the $240 billion and turn it into a refundable, individual, portable credit, and watch hospital list prices collapse toward what people actually pay out of pocket. Legalize the fourplex by right in every residential zone in any state that wants federal housing money. State preemption of local single-family-only zoning, the way California, Oregon, and Minneapolis have started to do, is the cheapest single reform available. Replace the mortgage-interest deduction with a credit for new construction, so the subsidy follows supply rather than purchase price. Build publicly, where private construction won’t pencil, on land the city already owns.
None of this is exciting. None of it requires marching against billionaires. It requires telling the homeowner coalition that the deal is changing — that the property-tax break that funded their retirement was a loan from their kids, and that the loan is being called in. That is the fight Jenkins won’t name, because naming it would mean conceding that the problem is not “socialism we already have.” It is the homeowners’ cartel, defended by their voters. That is the contract the young are owed.