Crack a history book, go on a ride-along with your local police department: Socialism doesn't work because human nature is imperfect and immutable.

“Bill Maher drops a reality bomb on Zohram Mamdani voters with a brutal history lesson on socialism,” crowed conservative social media influencer Vigilant Fox on X this week. 

“We’ve run this experiment many times, and the results are always obvious,” Maher said during a recent episode of Real Time. 

“Democrats must recognize that Zohran Mamdani is the future of the party. Unfortunately, it’s the Republican Party,” Mr. Mahr said. “Here’s capitalist South Korea at night from space. Here’s socialist North Korea. Yeah.”

“In 1990, Venezuela was wealthier than Poland,” Mahr continued. “But then Poland, finally free of Soviet style economics, went all in on capitalism and now their economy is as big as Japan and people there have high wages, low inflation, cars, vacations, homes.”

“Meanwhile, Venezuela traded capitalism for Hugo Chavez’s socialism for the 21st century, which turned out to be like socialism in the last century or any century, a f*cking mess,” Mahr added. “It turned one of Latin America’s richest countries into one of its poorest. Low wages, high inflation, shortages, outages, 8 million people fleeing. If you think New York can somehow reinvent this wheel, you’re in for a rude awokening.”

The election of self-avowed Democratic Socialist Zohran Mamdani has drawn socialism into the forefront of American politics. 

Initially, there was much celebration over Democratic Party victories on Election Day last Tuesday. Nearly two weeks later, party analysts don’t seem so sure.

All the people could share all the world —  if anyone could be counted on to administer it properly.

Or at all.

Which they can’t. No someone, or collection of someones, in the history of the world, however well intentioned, has been able to make it work. And take “not make it work” to mean mass starvation, engineered poverty, and tectonic migration.

Of course Capitalism isn’t perfect. Not even capitalism is perfect. No human administered system of government or economics ever has been or will be. Again, human nature, greed, cupidity, fear, megalomaniacal leaders, those seeking power who are those who can least be trusted with it, graft, dishonesty.

We aren’t all bad. But we aren’t perfect, either.

Capitalism, as a system, works better that communism or socialism because capitalism better accounts for human nature. What motivates us, what we aspire to, even what we fear.

Capitalism spreads the wealth of society out through corporations and the business class in addition to the government. Socialism and communism concentrate all the power in the government.

Someone who doesn’t understand why that could be a problem doesn’t understand politics, how government functions (and dysfunctions), and has forgotten history.

Not ancient history, either. Forget the Black Book of Communism, detailing how communists and socialists engineered the deaths of 100 million people over the past 100 years.

It took government agencies almost a week to get water to the Superdome after Hurricane Katrina.

Bill Mahr is right: When citizens give their governments all the power, bad things tend to happen.

Where purponents of communism and socialism point to so-called “success stories”, they still aren’t seeing the whole picture.

The Scandinavian countries democratic socialists like to point to didn’t become wealthy thanks to socialism or communism. They are wealthy capitalists countries who used the wealth created by capitalism to expand the social services network for their citizens.

Which is an excellent idea U.S. states like California should maybe try.

Because Scandinavian countries have populations much, much smaller than that of the U.S. If socialists and communists in the U.S. think their policies are so great, let’s see it them.

If wealthy, private-school educated “revolutionaries” like Zohran Mamdani think socialist policies will solve the world’s ills, New York City is about to find out the truth.

Concentrating wealth and power in the hands of government bureaucrats will end as it always ends: The poor will get poorer, rich bureaucrats will get richer.

(Contributing writer, Brooke Bell)