- October 3, 2026
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(Editor’s note: This originally appeared in the Sarasota Observer, sister paper of the Business Observer, in part of a series of editorials devoted to issues and candidates on the Nov. 3 election ballots. This week’s installment focuses on a national level — the “Medicare for All” mantra; the rise of the socialists and their condemnation of capitalism; and the cost of living and blame placed on Donald Trump and the Republican Congress.)
To be sure, elections have consequences. And in the spirit of founder James Madison: “A people who mean to be their own governors must arm themselves with the power which knowledge gives …”
Our aim is to spur you to think before you vote. Do your research.
— MW
To an extent, the whole idea of “Medicare for All” is comical — because it’s so farcical.
Anyone who has paid any attention to the news in the past year, and, of course, who has vivid memories of how our federal government handled COVID, surely has the smarts to dismiss all of the Socialists and Democratic Party candidates yapping about “Medicare for All.”
Oh yeah, that’s just what we need — a 100% government-controlled medical insurance system. It would make everyone’s life so much better than it is. We would all be so much happier and healthier, because, as we all know, when the federal government gets involved, everything just goes hunky-dory.
You know, like this:
Wall Street Journal, Sept. 23: The Trump administration announces it is removing 760,000 fraudulent enrollees from Obamacare.
Health and Human Services reported that nearly half of new Obamacare enrollees between 2021 to 2024 were improper, phantom or fraudulent. More than a million enrollees signed up for health benefits without providing a Social Security number.
Then there is the home-health fraud in California, Minnesota, Maine, Ohio and on and on. “California’s annual Medicaid spending on in-home care has ballooned to roughly $25 billion from roughly $9.2 billion seven years ago,” reported the Journal, a 171% increase.
The Medicare and Medicaid fraud in Minnesota is estimated at a measly $9 billion.
Just to give you an idea of how much $9 billion is: If you stacked 9 billion $1 bills, it would be 611 miles high, the same as driving up I-75 from Sarasota to Dalton, Georgia.
But that’s nothing. The Epoch Times published a headline Sept. 8: “Improper Obamacare, Medicaid enrollments cost taxpayers $65 billion.”
And then there is this one — one of the toppers of all toppers of the federal government’s management of healthcare. No surprise, it came from Florida.
Remember PPP during COVID? Two months ago, the U.S. attorney’s office in Miami reported how a group of Haitians and Colombians in South Florida fraudulently obtained hundreds of thousands of dollars from the federal Payroll Protection Plan and used it to finance the assassination of the president of Haiti in 2021.
All of this together illustrates that it is undeniable that health insurance and healthcare are as costly and as ineffective as they are precisely because of the federal government.
Medicare for All?
Oh, just one more minor issue. Shifting all private health insurance to Medicare is estimated to cost the federal government an additional $2.5 trillion to $3.6 trillion per year.
So let’s get this straight: We have a national debt of $40 trillion; a current annual budget deficit of $2 trillion; interest on our debt is our highest expense; and the geniuses campaigning for Medicare for All want to add another $3 trillion in new federal spending.
Any candidate who supports Medicare for All clearly and convincingly is totally unqualified for office.
The crazy leftist Socialists who now rule the national Democratic Party spew the need for socialism because, they say, capitalism is a failure. Capitalism, so say Bernie Sanders, AOC & Co., only benefits “the billionaire oligarchs.”
Stop right there. Let’s be clear here: THE U.S. DOES NOT HAVE A CAPITALIST ECONOMY.
Far from it. What we have is an ugly, mangy, diseased mutt, so mutated that its capitalistic genes and characteristics are hardly recognizable.
Yes, there are pockets of our economy where true capitalism exists. But the truth is the U.S. economy is far more of a Statist and Interventionist economy, moving more and more to becoming the German socialist model of the 1930s.
In that era, business owners and entrepreneurs nominally maintained private ownership of the means of production. They bought and sold goods and services; they operated under contracts; and made hiring and firing decisions of workers. But as Ludwig von Mises, the famed Austrian economist, wrote in his acclaimed book, “Interventionism,” “They were entrepreneurs in name only.” Hitler’s government told them “what and how to produce, at what prices, and from whom to buy, at what prices, and to whom to sell.
“All prices, wages and interest rates were being fixed by the authority,” von Mises wrote. “The authority, not the consumers, directed production. This was socialism with the outward appearance of capitalism.”
When you think about all of the government regulations to which we must adhere in every aspect of our lives today, we are entrenched in a Deep State of government intervention and intrusion, not far from the German model.
Daniel Lacalle, a Spanish economist who subscribes to the true meaning “classical liberalism,” recently wrote that the cause of our nation’s economic strife is not capitalism. He described our mutt-like economy perfectly:
“Statism is the gradual replacement of civil society, markets, savings and individual choice by political control, public spending, regulation, taxation and monetary intervention … It is a system in which the political class extracts wealth and freedom from families and businesses to sustain itself, reward dependent clients and exert control over society.
“Big government, high taxes, constant money printing and cronyism are not free market capitalism,” writes Lacalle. “Big government, interventionism, money printing and high taxes have obliterated the economy and demolished the opportunities for middle-class families and small businesses to thrive. More government, taxes, printing and interventionism will only cripple it further.”
Von Mises is more explicit: Interventionism is when governments order and forbid. Sound familiar? “It forces the entrepreneur and the owner of the means of production to use their means in a way different from what they would do under the pressure of the market.”
In another of his books, “Liberalism,” von Mises devoted 10 pages of examples showing the ill-fated consequences of government interventions into manufacturing, employment, wages and pricing fixing. His conclusion:
“From whichever side we consider interventionism, this system leads to a result that … must appear as a senseless, self-defeating, absurd policy.”
And his final conclusion: “Either capitalism or socialism. There exists no middle way.” Interventionism, he said, inevitably leads to socialism.
It’s no use trying to educate the radical, leftist Democrats that socialism has always failed. They don’t care that the socialist dictators slaughtered and starved hundreds of millions over the ages. They are invincibly ignorant.
At the same time, it’s alarming that recent polls show that 53% of Gen Zers (14-29) support socialism over capitalism; 48% of millennials (18-34) support socialism; and 34% of Gen Xers (46-61).
What’s more, roughly 45% of U.S. voters say they are politically independent, which means they may shift their votes from one side to the other.
Either way, all of these voting groups decide our elections. So it would behoove the future of our country to convince Americans of the virtues of capitalism.
A daunting job, to be sure, and one that cannot be done in a month. What’s more, as a nation, we are terrible at making the case.
Nonetheless, we should try — at least one family member at a time.
Start with this book: “A Student’s Guide to Socialism — How It Will Trash Your Lives,” by Paul Rubin, emeritus professor of economics at Emory University. It’s a quick, easy-to-understand read for young and old. It shows the virtues of capitalism and the destructive forces of socialism in everyday life.
Rubin shows, for instance, how socialism would stifle the earnings and standard of living for young people entering the workforce.
Converting to a socialistic economy would take time, he writes. And that would bring uncertainty. “One thing we know for certain is economic uncertainty reduces investment and hiring.
“Thus,” he states with italics: “you will not get a good job. Firms will not in general be hiring for good jobs; they will hire a minimum number of workers for low-paying and easily replaceable jobs …
“Another thing we know for certain is that the quality of your first job follows you through your career,” he writes. “If you start off at a low pay rate, you will never catch up.”
Here is another contrast: Innovation disappears with socialism. All that we have materially in this world — cell phones, satellites, dishwashers, MRIs, mass production of food and social media — comes not from government or socialist rulers dictating the means of production. All of it comes from entrepreneurial capitalism — men and women using their creativity and free wills to satisfy the needs of the world; men and women exchanging goods and services voluntarily and peacefully for each other’s benefits.
And most important: Capitalism is freedom. Socialism is slavery.
In his careful analysis of the three economic systems — Socialism, Interventionism and Capitalism, von Mises’ conclusion was unequivocal: After “every examination of the different conceivable possibilities of organizing society … no other system of social organization is feasible.” Capitalism is the one.
A version of this article originally appeared on sister site YourObserver.com.
