Ryan Bourne and Adam N. Michel
The Democratic Socialists of America’s (DSA) new platform promises a world without bills. In their utopia, you’d see no rent check. No health insurance premium. No student loan repayment. No electricity bill. Life’s basics, including food, education, medicine, and transportation, would all become “common goods and utilities.”
That might sound appealing to Americans struggling with the cost of living after a bout of high inflation. But it’s just an accounting trick. A bill reflects the price of the service you were provided and how much of it you used. The DSA can socialize that payment, charging an out-of-pocket price of zero while taxpayers cover the tab. It cannot abolish the underlying cost of providing the service.
Nor can it abolish scarcity. A doctor’s time is limited. Apartments in Manhattan are scarce. Only so much electricity-generating capacity is available at 6 p.m. on a hot day in August. All goods and services require finite resources, whether they’re skilled teachers, construction workers, bus drivers, farmland, or whatever else. This is the central constraint nonmarket systems face when suspending market prices.
Market prices help manage that scarcity by conveying information about supply and demand. If a harvest fails, a crop becomes scarcer, and its price rises. That discourages some consumption—often by shifting to similar, lower-price substitutes—while encouraging additional production.
But DSA-style socialists see rising prices as a moral failure. The virtue of prices is not that they identify who is most deserving; it is that they allow millions of strangers to coordinate what they produce and consume without the impossibility of a central authority knowing everyone’s circumstances.
So that leaves the question: if not market prices, then what? What system of rationing replaces it? And who does get the bill?
No Prices Means Rationing by Something Else
Government-provided services are not produced for nothing. What changes when the government makes something “free” is the marginal price to the user. Setting it to zero means the supply is financed through taxes, fees, government appropriations, and political budgets.
Set out-of-pocket prices at zero, and the quantity demanded rises. Why not book the doctor’s appointment for your cold, occupy the larger apartment, or use more electricity when each appears costless?
If supply cannot expand enough to meet that demand, the service must be rationed in some other way. The cost becomes time spent searching or waiting, complicated eligibility rules, lower quality, restricted choice, geographic limitations, or political discretion.
A free road at rush hour provides a simple illustration. Nobody receives an invoice for entering it, yet drivers pay dearly in lost time. Congestion is the price. In health care, the equivalent might be a waitlist, triage based on the severity of your condition, or a limit on how much the government will pay for your treatment. The dollar price vanishes, but the shadow price moves into the waiting room.
In Britain’s National Health Service, patients do not receive a cash bill for a hip replacement or cataract operation. But at the end of May 2026, there were 7.3 million referral-to-treatment pathways awaiting care, representing roughly 6.2 million people. More than 104,000 pathways had waited over a year, and one-third had waited beyond the NHS’s 18-week standard.
Rationing also occurs through what medicines are available. The Alzheimer’s drugs lecanemab and donanemab were licensed in Britain, yet NICE’s final draft guidance concluded that their benefits were too small to justify the extra public cost. A medicine can exist, be legally approved, and still be unavailable because a committee must compare its value with everything else the same budget could buy.
Government-managed housing prices present the same problem. A rent-controlled apartment is amazing for the lucky incumbent. But for a newcomer looking for a new home, the relevant price may be years of searching, living farther from work, crowding into an unsuitable unit, or cultivating the right connections. Existing tenants also cling to below-market apartments long after the units cease to fit their needs, while families who value the larger space more struggle to find it.
Private Bills Become Public Taxes
Even if a nonmarket system successfully allocates scarce goods, it still must produce them. The government can declare that patients will receive health care without a bill, but doctors and nurses still have to be paid, the hospitals they work in must be built, and the medicines they prescribe and the medical equipment they use must be developed and manufactured. The same is true for all the other “common goods” in the DSA vision; each requires costly labor, land, and capital.
Public provision of goods and services, therefore, primarily shifts the cost from the individual consumer to the government, and at the scale envisioned by the DSA, those fiscal costs become enormous.
Comparable progressive proposals put the ten-year federal cost of Medicare for All at more than $33 trillion almost a decade ago. Large-scale energy and infrastructure programs have been estimated at $8 trillion to $12 trillion. Free college, loan cancellation, reparations, housing for all, job guarantees, and an expansion of Social Security would cost tens of trillions more.
Depending on the assumptions used, comparable versions of these proposals imply additional ten-year federal costs running from roughly $70 trillion to more than $200 trillion. That would come on top of a federal government already projected to spend roughly $94 trillion over the same period.
Those resources will ultimately come from the same households that no longer have bills. The only question is how visibly they pay.
The government can finance spending through taxes, borrowing, or money creation. Borrowing postpones taxes, but it cannot permanently replace them. Money creation imposes costs through inflation, an opaque and unsustainable form of tax.
This leaves direct taxes as the only sustainable way to fund a comprehensive fiscal agenda. The DSA presents “aggressive wealth taxes on the richest individuals and corporations” as the obvious source of that revenue. But even at confiscatory tax rates, there is not enough wealth held or income earned by billionaires and their businesses to finance a spending agenda of more than $7 trillion a year.
For example, the total wealth of the 400 wealthiest Americans is about $6.6 trillion—not even enough to fund one year of the contemplated spending. And that is a one-time revenue source. Once the wealth is confiscated and spent, it cannot finance the next year’s benefits.
The same arithmetic explains why countries with large welfare states do not finance them solely with taxes on billionaires and corporations. They rely heavily on broad taxes on wages, income, and consumption. Universal benefits require a universal tax base that includes people at every income level.
Making Scarcity Worse
Socialized provision can do more than move costs around. The combination of suppressed prices, diminished profits, and high taxes makes the underlying goods harder to produce and reduces the likelihood of new innovations.
In a market, a high price and the prospect of profit create a supply response. They tell builders where homes are wanted, entrepreneurs which medicines patients want, and retailers where shelves are empty. Capital and labor move toward those opportunities when government regulations allow them to.
A queue or waitlist sends a much weaker signal. It does not automatically generate revenue, attract new entrants, or reward anyone for eliminating it. Under public provision, capacity expands only if officials recognize the shortage, secure a budget, design a program, hire staff, and survive the next election. A higher price and the profit that comes with it do all that with a shorter wait.
Existing rent control laws show how today’s relief shrinks tomorrow’s supply. When San Francisco extended controls in 1994, affected landlords reduced the rental housing supply by 15 percent, largely by converting units to owner-occupied use or redeveloping them. Protected tenants benefited, but would-be tenants faced fewer homes and higher rents. Rent control did not merely redistribute existing apartments; it reduced future availability.
Hold utility prices too low, and investment in pipes, generating capacity, or grid resilience gets underfunded. Set payments for medical services too low to attract enough staff, and access deteriorates even though the nominal price remains low.
Social provision also can’t simply eliminate profits and pocket the difference.
Take food. US food retailers earned an average net profit margin of just 2.1 percent in 2025. Confiscate every cent of profit and assume government-run stores are equally efficient, and a $100 grocery basket becomes $97.90. Costco’s fiscal 2025 net income was about $8.1 billion on $269.9 billion of merchandise sales. That’s roughly three cents per sales dollar. The other 97 cents paid for food, wages, warehouses, refrigeration, transport, spoilage, energy, property, technology, interest, and tax.
And where profits are high, they attract new entrants, whose competition pushes prices—and profits—down. When a drug’s branded exclusivity ends, the FDA reports that just one new competitor creating a generic version can cut prices by about 30 percent, while five competitors are associated with reductions approaching 85 percent. The prospect of profit drives entry, and then competition passes much of the gain to consumers.
Profit also helps drive new supply and innovation. The possibility of new earnings persuades people to risk capital on a new store, drug, power plant, or transportation route before anyone knows whether the investment will succeed. Loss performs the opposite function.
Business owners invest in research and development of new technology to improve efficiency. In the case of supermarkets, owners have invested in just-in-time supply chains and complex forecasting to reduce wasted stock. These investments lower prices for shoppers and increase profits for business owners. Those profits are what Thomas Sowell explained as “the price paid for efficiency.”
A firm that repeatedly wastes resources eventually runs out of investors willing to finance it. A publicly run service has no profit or loss to signal its value and can thus live on forever through taxpayer funding.
None of this means every observed profit is virtuous. Profits can reflect monopoly privilege, licensing barriers, import protection, patent abuse, zoning restrictions, or regulatory capture. The remedy is to strip away unjustified privilege and enable entry. Nor must every useful institution be organized for profit. Charities, mutuals, cooperatives, and even some public bodies can work well when embedded in a broader market system.
But it’s a mistake to imagine that eliminating prices and profit across a swath of industries leaves incentives unchanged. This is the central contradiction in the DSA affordability agenda. It promises greater access to housing, medicine, education, and transportation while adopting policies that discourage the production of these goods.
The DSA can obscure the bill. It cannot abolish the cost; it can only shift it to another mechanism while undermining choice, quality, and innovation.
