Opinion · Political Economy

It Was Never About the Free Stuff

Free college, free healthcare, free housing — the benefits are the sales pitch. The product is authority. And history shows the state almost never hands it back.

By Michael T. Ruhlman, Contributing Editor  |  July 2026

Critics of democratic socialism usually aim at the promises: free tuition, free healthcare, free childcare, guaranteed income. Fire at the arithmetic, they reason, and the movement collapses. But this misreads what the movement’s leadership is actually buying. The benefits are the marketing. The product — the thing acquired, held, and never voluntarily returned — is power.

Let me be fair before I am blunt. Millions of Americans support these programs sincerely. They want a stronger safety net, a fairer shake, a hedge against medical bankruptcy. Those convictions deserve to be answered on their merits, not caricatured. The argument here is not about the voter’s heart. It is about the leadership’s incentive — and about the institutional logic that operates no matter whose heart is in the right place.

The Machinery Grows Itself

Every new entitlement requires an agency to run it, a budget to fund it, a rulebook to govern it, and an enforcement arm to police it. Each layer transfers decisions that once belonged to households, churches, charities, and businesses into the hands of officials. And the officials’ incentives all point one direction: no agency is rewarded for declaring its mission accomplished. Budgets grow by demonstrating need, never by ending it. Milton Friedman put it in nine words: nothing is so permanent as a temporary government program.

The economist Robert Higgs documented the pattern in Crisis and Leviathan and gave it a name — the ratchet effect. Government expands in a crisis, real or declared, and when the crisis passes, it never returns to its prior size. The income tax arrived in 1913 with a top rate of seven percent, sold as a modest levy on the very rich. Wartime agencies outlive their wars. Emergency powers outlive their emergencies. The ratchet clicks forward; it does not click back.

Why Power, Not Wealth, Is the Prize

Wealth buys things. Power decides who gets things — which industries receive subsidies, which regulations land on which competitors, which groups receive preference and which receive scrutiny. A billionaire can buy a company. The official who controls the permitting, the pricing, and the licensing controls every company. That is why F.A. Hayek devoted a chapter of The Road to Serfdom to the question of why the worst get on top: positions that command the distribution of resources do not attract the meek. They attract precisely the people who want to command.

He will take the tenth of your sheep: and ye shall be his servants. And ye shall cry out in that day because of your king which ye shall have chosen you. — 1 Samuel 8:17–18 (KJV)

Samuel’s warning to Israel is the oldest political economy lesson on record. The people demanded a centralized power to take care of them. The prophet itemized, in advance, exactly what that power would take — their sons, their fields, their harvests, their labor — and they chose it anyway. Nothing about human nature has been amended since.

The Live Experiment

This is not an abstraction in 2026. New York City’s new administration campaigned on city-run grocery stores, frozen rents, fare-free buses, and universal city childcare. Judge each proposal however you like on its merits — but notice what every single plank has in common. Each one moves a decision out of a household or a business and into an office. Who stocks the shelves, what the rent may be, how transit is funded, who watches the children: in every case, the answer migrates from the citizen to the state. The benefits may or may not materialize. The authority materializes on day one.

Contrast the market’s arrangement of power. In a free economy, economic authority is scattered across millions of consumers, workers, entrepreneurs, and investors making independent choices daily. Businesses live or die on whether customers voluntarily say yes. It is a brutally democratic system — a continuous election in which everyone votes with every dollar, and no incumbent is safe.

The Real Question on the Ballot

So the debate was never really whether tuition should be subsidized or insulin capped. Those are the storefront. The question behind the storefront is where decision-making authority in American life should reside: dispersed among citizens acting freely, or consolidated in the institutions of the state and the people who run them.

The greatest incentive for political leadership is not the ability to provide benefits. It is the ability to determine who receives them, under what conditions, and at what price. Control over resources becomes control over people. And as Samuel warned and history confirms, governments rarely surrender powers once they acquire them — which is why the real attraction of democratic socialism, for those who would administer it, was never the free stuff at all.