The Council of Economic Advisers

October 2018

September 29, 2017

The Opportunity Costs of Socialism
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 1

Executive Summary

October 2018

Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in 

American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are 

gaining support in Congress and among much of the electorate.

It is unclear, of course, exactly what a typical voter has in mind when he or she thinks of 

“socialism.” But economists generally agree about how to define socialism, and they have 

devoted enormous time and resources to studying its costs and benefits. With an eye on this 

broad body of literature, this report discusses socialism’s historic visions and intents, its 

economic features, its impact on economic performance, and its relationship with recent 

policy proposals in the United States.

We find that historical proponents of socialist policies and those in the contemporary United 

States share some of their visions and intents. They both characterize the distribution of 

income in market economies as the unjust result of “exploitation,” which should be rectified 

by extensive state control. The proposed solutions include single-payer systems, high tax rates 

(“from each according to his ability”), and public policies that hand out much of the Nation’s 

goods and services “free” of charge (“to each according to his needs”). Where they differ is that 

contemporary democratic socialists denounce state brutality and would allow individuals to 

privately own the means of production in many industries.

In assessing the effects of socialist policies, it is important to recognize that they provide little 

material incentive for production and innovation and, by distributing goods and services for 

“free,” prevent prices from revealing economically important information about costs and 

consumer needs and wants. To this end, as the then–prime minister of the United Kingdom,

Margaret Thatcher (1976), once argued, “Socialist governments . . . always run out of other 

people’s money,” and thus the way to prosperity is for the state to give “the people more choice 

to spend their own money in their own way.”

Whether socialism delivers on its appealing promises is an empirical question. We begin our

investigation by looking closely at the most highly socialist cases, which are typically 

agricultural economies, such as Maoist China, Cuba, and the Union of Soviet Socialist Republics 

(USSR). Their nondemocratic governments seized control of farming, promising to make food 

more abundant. The result was substantially less food production and tens of millions of 

deaths by starvation. Even if highly socialist policies are peacefully implemented under the 

auspices of democracy, the fundamental incentive distortions and information problems 

created by large state organizations and the centralized control of resources are also present
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 2

in industrialized countries, as is currently the case in Venezuela. Lessons from poorly 

performing agricultural economies under socialist regimes carry over to government takeovers 

of other modern industries: They produce less rather than more.

These countries are examples of a more general pattern of socialism’s negative output effects. 

Such outcomes have also been observed in cross-country studies of the effect of greater 

economic freedom—quantified as an index of taxation and public spending, the extent of stateowned enterprises, economic regulation, and other factors—on real gross domestic product 

(GDP). This literature finds a strong association between greater economic freedom and better 

economic performance. It suggests that replacing U.S. policies with highly socialist policies,

such as Venezuela’s, would reduce real GDP at least 40 percent in the long run, or about $24,000 

per year for the average person.

Although they are sometimes cited as more relevant socialist success stories, the experiences 

of the Nordic countries also support the conclusion that socialism reduces living standards. In 

many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ significantly from what economists 

have in mind when they think of socialism. For instance, they do not provide healthcare for 

“free”; Nordic healthcare financing includes substantial cost sharing. Marginal labor income 

tax rates in the Nordic countries today are only somewhat higherthan in the United States, and 

Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less progressive than U.S. taxes. The Nordic countries

also tax capital income less and regulate product markets less than the United States does. 

However, the Nordic countries do regulate and tax labor markets somewhat more; thus,

American families earning the average wage would be taxed $2,000 to $5,000 more per year net 

of transfers if the United States had current Nordic policies. Living standards in the Nordic 

countries are at least 15 percent lower than in the United States.

It may well be that American socialists are envisioning moving our policies to align with those 

of the Nordic countries in the 1970s, when their policies were more in line with economists’ 

traditional definition of socialism. We estimate that if the United States were to adopt these

policies, its real GDP would decline by at least 19 percent in the long run, or about $11,000 per 

year for the average person.

The Nordic and European versions of socialized medicine have been viewed as so desirable by

modern U.S. socialists that they have proposed nationalizing payments for the healthcare 

sector (which makes up more than a sixth of the U.S. economy) through the recent “Medicare 

for All” proposal. This policy would distribute healthcare for “free” (i.e., without cost sharing)

through a monopoly government health insurer that would centrally set all prices paid to 

suppliers such as doctors and hospitals. We find that if this policy were financed out of current 

Federal spending without borrowing or tax increases, then more than half the entire existing 

Federal budget would need to be cut. Or if it were financed through higher taxes, GDP would 
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 3

fall by 9 percent, or about $7,000 per person in 2022, due to high tax rates that would reduce 

incentives to supply the factors of production. Evidence on the productivity and effectiveness 

of single-payer systems suggests that “Medicare for All” would reduce both short- and long-run 

longevity and health despite increasing somewhat the population with health insurance.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 4

Introduction

Coincident with the 200th anniversary of Karl Marx’s birth, socialism is making a comeback in 

American political discourse. Detailed policy proposals from self-declared socialists are 

gaining support in Congress and among much of the younger electorate. The purpose of this 

report is to evaluate the claims of modern U.S. socialists from the perspective of economists 

who have extensively studied the costs and benefits of socialism. We examine socialism’s 

historical and modern vision and intent, its economic incentives, its impact around the world 

on economic performance, and its relationship with recent policy proposals in the U.S.

To economists, socialism is not a zero-one designation. Whether a country or industry is 

socialist is a question of the degree to which (a) the means of production, distribution, and 

exchange are owned or regulated by the state; and (b) the state uses its control to distribute 

the economic output without regard for final consumers’ willingness to pay or exchange (i.e., 

giving resources away “for free”).

1 As explained below, this definition conforms with both 

statements and policy proposals from leading socialists, ranging from Karl Marx to Vladimir 

Lenin to Mao Zedong to current American socialists.2

In modern models of capitalist economies, there is, of course, an ample role for government.

In particular, there are public goods and goods with externalities that will be inefficiently 

supplied by the free market. Public goods are undersupplied in a completely free market 

because there is a free rider problem. For example, if national defense, a public good enjoyed 

by the whole country, were sold at local supermarkets, few would contribute because they 

would feel their individual purchase would not matter and they would prefer others to 

contribute while still being defended. Consequently, the market would not provide sufficient 

 

1 Criterion a is from the Oxford English Dictionary, which defines socialism as public policy based on “a political 

and economic theory of social organization which advocates that the means of production, distribution, and 

exchange should be owned or regulated by the community as a whole.” Criterion b further focuses the discussion 

to rule out state ownership or regulation for other purposes, such as fighting a war. See also Samuelson and 

Nordhaus (1989, 833), who describe “democratic socialist governments [that] expanded the welfare state, 

nationalized industries, and planned the economy.”

2 For classical socialists, “communism” is a purely theoretical concept that has never yet been put into practice, 

which is why the second “S” in USSR stands for “Socialist.” Communism is, in their view, a social arrangement 

where there is neither a state nor private property; the abolition of property is not sufficient for communism. As 

Lenin explained, “The goal of socialism is communism.” The supposed purpose of the “Great Leap Forward” was 

for China to transition from socialism to communism before the USSR did (Dikӧtter 2010). The classical definition 

therefore stands in contrast to vernacular usage of communism to refer to historical instances of socialism where 

the degree of control was the highest, such as the USSR, Cuba, North Korea, or Maoist China. This report therefore 

avoids the term “communism.”
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 5

defense. However, socialist regimes go well beyond government intervention into markets 

with public goods or externalities.

This is an empirical report about socialism that takes as its benchmark current U.S. public 

policies. This benchmark has the advantage of being measureable, but it necessarily differs 

from theoretical concepts of “capitalism” or “free markets” because the U.S. government may 

not limit its activity to theoretically defined public goods. Relative to the U.S. benchmark, we 

find that socialist public policies, though ostensibly well-intentioned, have clear opportunity 

costs that are directly related to the degree to which they tax and regulate.

We begin our investigation by looking closely at the most extreme, although not uncommon,

socialist cases, which are Maoist China, Cuba, the USSR, and other primarily agricultural 

countries (Pipes 2003). Referring to these same countries, Janos Kornai (1992, xxi) explained 

that the “development and the break-up and decline of the socialist system amount to the 

most important political and economic phenomena of the twentieth century. At the height of 

this system’s power and extent, a third of humanity lived under it.”

Socialists in these countries accused the agriculture sector of being unfair and unproductive 

(equivalently, food was too expensive in terms of the labor required to produce it) because 

farmers, who had been working on their land for generations, were too unsophisticated and 

because the market failed to achieve economies of scale. Government takeovers of agriculture, 

which forcibly converted private farms into state farms directed by government employees and 

party apparatchiks, were advertised as the way that socialist countries would produce more 

food with fewer workers so resources could be shifted into other industries.

Although agriculture is not a large share of the U.S. economy, present-day socialists echo the 

historical socialists by arguing that healthcare, education, and other sectors are unfair and 

unproductive, and they promise that large state organizations will deliver fairness and 

economies of scale. It is therefore worth acknowledging that socialist takeovers of agriculture 

have delivered the opposite of what was promised.3 Food production plummeted and tens of 

millions of people died from starvation in the USSR, China, North Korea, and other agricultural 

economies where the state took command.

Present-day socialists do not want the dictatorship or state brutality that often coincided with 

the most extreme cases of socialism. However, peaceful democratic implementation of 

socialist policies does not eliminate the fundamental incentive and information problems 

created by high tax rates, large state organizations, and the centralized control of resources. 

Venezuela is a modern industrialized country that elected Hugo Chávez as its leader to 

 

3 Many socialist scholars concur on this point (Nolan 1988, 6; Roemer 1995, 23–24; Nove 2010).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 6

implement socialist policies, and the result was less output in oil and other industries that were 

nationalized. In other words, the lessons from socialized agriculture carry over to government 

takeovers of oil, health insurance, and other modern industries: They produce less rather than 

more, even in today’s information age, where central planning is possibly easier.

Proponents of socialism acknowledge that the experiences of the USSR and other highly

socialist countries are not worth repeating, but they continue to advocate for increased

taxation and state control in order to help low-income people. Such policies would also have 

negative output effects, albeit of a lesser magnitude, as is seen in cross-country studies of the 

effect on real GDP of greater economic freedom. A broad body of academic literature quantifies 

the extent of economic freedom in several dimensions, including taxation and spending, the 

extent of state-owned enterprises, economic regulation, and other factors. This literature finds 

a strong association between greater economic freedom and better economic performance, 

suggesting that replacing U.S. policies with highly socialist policies such as Venezuela’s would 

reduce real GDP more than 40 percent in the long run, or about $24,000 per year for the average 

person.

Despite this evidence, current socialists sometimes cite the Nordic countries as socialist 

success stories. However, in many respects, the Nordic countries’ policies now differ 

significantly from policies economists view as characteristic of socialism. Nordic healthcare is 

not free but rather requires substantial cost sharing. As compared with the U.S. rates at 

present, marginal labor income tax rates in the Nordic countries today are only somewhat 

greater, and Nordic taxation overall is surprisingly less progressive than U.S. taxes. The Nordic 

countries also tax capital income less and regulate product markets less than the United States

does, but regulate labor markets more. Living standards in the Nordic countries are at least 15 

percent lower than in the United States.

The Nordic and European versions of socialized medicine have been viewed as so desirable by

modern U.S. socialists that they have proposed nationalizing payments for healthcare—which 

makes up more than a sixth of the U.S. economy—through the recent “Medicare for All”

proposal. This proposal would create a monopoly government health insurer to provide 

healthcare for “free” (i.e., without cost sharing) and to centrally set all prices paid to suppliers 

such as doctors and hospitals. We find that if this policy were financed out of current Federal 

spending without borrowing or tax increases, then more than half the entire existing Federal 

budget would need to be cut. If it were financed through higher taxes, GDP would fall by 9

percent, or about $7,000 per person in 2022. Evidence on the productivity and effectiveness of 

single-payer systems suggests that “Medicare for All” would reduce longevity and health, 

particularly among the elderly, even though it would only slightly increase the fraction of the 

population with health insurance.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 7

The burden is on socialists to explain how their latest policy agenda would overcome the 

undeniable problems observed when socialism was tried in the past. As the sociology professor 

Paul Starr put it, “Much of [modern American socialists’] platform ignores the economic 

realities that European socialists long ago accepted.”

4 Marx’s 200th birthday is a good time to 

gather and review the overwhelming evidence.5

The next section of this report begins by briefly reviewing the historical and modern socialist 

interpretations of market economies and some of the challenges with socialist policy 

proposals. The third section reviews the evidence from the highly socialist countries, by which 

we mean countries that were implementing the most state control of production and incomes.

Highly socialist countries experienced sharp declines in output, especially in the industries that 

were taken over by the state. Economies with less extreme socialism also generate less output, 

although the shortfall is not as drastic as with the highly-socialist countries, as shown in the 

fourth section for a wide cross section of countries. The fifth section’s more detailed 

examination of the Nordic countries reports a similar result. The sixth section applies the 

economic analysis to the headline American socialist proposal, “Medicare for All.”

The Economics of Socialism

Historically, philosophers and even some well-regarded economists have offered socialist 

theories of the causes of income and wealth inequality, and they have advocated for state 

solutions that are commonly echoed by modern socialists. They both argue that there is

“exploitation” in the market sector and there are virtually unlimited economies of scale in the 

public sector. The solutions include single-payer systems, high tax rates (“from each according 

to his ability”), and public policies that hand out much of the Nation’s goods and services free 

of charge (“to each according to his needs”) (Marx 1875).

The Socialist Economic Narrative: Exploitation Corrected by Central Planning

When Marx was writing over 150 years ago, obviously exploitive practices were still familiar.

The modern socialist view is that exploitation remains real but is somewhat hidden in the 

market for labor. Much inequality arises, it is said, because market activity is a zero-sum game,

with owners and workers paid according to the power they possess (or lack), rather than their 

marginal products. From the workers’ perspective, profits are an unnecessary cost in the 

production process. As Karl Marx put it, “Modern bourgeois private property is the final and 

 

4 Starr (2016) was referring specifically to Vermont senator Bernie Sanders, who is the leading socialist in Federal 

politics today.

5 See also Acemoglu and Robinson (2015), who review Marx’s key predictions about trends for wages and profits 

and find them to be falsified by the evidence.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 8

most complete expression of the system of producing and appropriating products, that is 

based on class antagonisms, on the exploitation of the many by the few” (Marx and Engels

1848, 24). The Chinese leader Mao Zedong, who cited Marxism as the model for his country,

described “the ruthless economic exploitation and political oppression of the peasants by the 

landlord class” (Cotterell 2011, chap. 6). Expressing similar concerns, current American 

senators Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren have stated that “large corporations . . . exploit 

human misery and insecurity, and turn them into huge profits” and “giant corporations . . .

exploit workers just to boost their own profits.”6

The French economist Thomas Piketty, whose 2014 book Capital in the 21st Century recalls

Marx’s Das Kapital, asserts that inequality today is “terrifying” and that public policy can and 

must reduce it; wealth holders must be heavily taxed.7

The socialist narrative names the oppressors of the vulnerable, such as the bourgeoisie (Marx), 

kulaks (Lenin), landlords (Mao), and giant corporations (Sanders and Warren).8 Piketty (2014) 

concludes that the Soviet approach and other attempts to “abolish private ownership” should 

at least be admired for being “more logically consistent.”

Historical and contemporary socialists argue that heavy taxation need not reduce national

output because a public enterprise uses its efficiency and bargaining power to achieve better 

outcomes. Mao touted the “superiority of large cooperatives.” He decreed that the Chinese 

government would be the single payer for grain, prohibiting farmers from selling their grain to 

any other person or business (Dikӧtter 2010).9In describing China, the British economists Joan 

Robinson and Solomon Adler (1958, 3) celebrated that “the agricultural producers’ 

cooperatives have finally put an end to the minute fragmentation of the land.” Lenin stressed 

 

6 Quotations from Senator Sanders (https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2017/aug/03/nissan-workers-unionbernie-sanders) and Senator Warren (https://www.safetyandhealthmagazine.com/articles/17144-sen-elizabethwarren-praises-power-of-regulation-during-symposium-speech), respectively. See also Bernhardt et al. (2008), 

and Section 103 of the House “Medicare for All” bill (H.R. 676), which requires health providers to surrender their 

for-profit status.

7 Thomas Piketty (2014, 572, 518) writes that “the right solution is a progressive annual tax on capital,” and “the 

primary purpose of the capital tax is not to finance the social state but to regulate capitalism.”

8

“Speculators” are also blamed for high prices and other social problems, as by Marx, Stalin, Senator Sanders, 

Senator Warren, and Fidel Castro, who said that they “have turned the planet into a giant casino” (Marx 

(1867/1887, chap. 8), https://www.marxists.org/reference/archive/stalin/works/1928/01/x01.htm, 

https://www.sanders.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/statement-by-sen-bernie-sanders-on-wall-streetsimpact-on-oil-prices, https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/elizabeth-warren-is-on-the-huntagain/2015/09/30/0e21163a-67be-11e5-8325-a42b5a459b1e_story.html, , 

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/americas/246491.stm).

9 Lenin (1918) also enforced a grain monopoly in the USSR.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 9

transforming “agriculture from small, backward, individual farming to large-scale, advanced, 

collective agriculture, to joint cultivation of the land.” Proponents of socialism in America 

today argue that the Federal government can run healthcare more efficiently than many 

competing private enterprises.10

State ownership of the means of production is an often-repeated Marxist proposal for ending 

worker exploitation by leveraging scale economies. This aspect of socialism is less visible in 

modern American socialism, because in most instances, socialists would allow individuals to 

be the legal owners of capital and their own labor.11 However, the economic significance of 

ownership is control over the use of an asset and of the income it generates, rather than the 

legal title by itself. In other words, the economic value of ownership is sharply diminished if the 

legal owner has little control and little of the income.12 The concept of full ownership in the

economic sense is rejected by socialists; they maintain that private owners left to themselves 

would not achieve full economies of scale and would continue exploiting workers. Public 

monopolies, “public options,” profit prohibitions, and the regulatory apparatus allow the 

socialist state to control asset use, and high tax rates allow the state to determine how much 

income everyone receives, without necessarily abolishing ownership in the narrow legal sense.

Historical socialists such as Lenin, Mao, and Castro ran their countries without democracy and 

civil liberties. Modern democratic socialists are different in these important ways. 

Nevertheless, even when socialist policies are peacefully implemented under the auspices of 

democracy, economics has a lot to say about their effects.

Whose Money Is Spent on Whom

Any productive economic system needs incentives: means of motivating effort, useful 

application of knowledge, and the creation and maintenance of productive assets. The higher

an economy’s tax rates, the more its industries are monopolized by a public enterprise, and the 

more its goods and services are distributed free of charge, then the more disincentives will 

reduce the value created in the economy.

 

10 The CEA notes that it is directed by the 1946 Employment Act to “formulate and recommend national economic 

policy to promote employment, production, and purchasing power under free competitive enterprise” (Sec. 4a).

11 Even the USSR and other highly socialist countries had elements of private property (Dolot 2011, 134; see also 

Pryor 1992, chap. 4). The CEA also notes that American socialists may not only intend to prohibit private health 

insurance but also, for example, intend to nationalize energy companies (Day 2018).

12 See also Samuelson and Nordhaus (1989, 837) who define a socialist economy as one “in which the major 

economic decisions are made administratively, without profits as a central motive force for production,” and 

Roemer (1994), who defines socialism independent of legal property rights.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 10

As the Nobel Prize–winning economist Milton Friedman demonstrated with his illustration of 

“four ways to spend money” (see figure 1), a challenge for socialism is thatthe persons deciding 

on resource allocations—that is, how much to spend on a product and how that product should 

be manufactured and delivered to the final consumer—are different from those providing the 

resources and different from the final consumer who is ultimately using them (Friedman and 

Friedman 1980). In the market system, people spend their own money, and are therefore more 

careful how much to spend and on what the money is spent. To the extent that they also use 

what they purchased—the upper left corner in figure 1—they are also more discerning, so that 

the items purchased are of good value. They will gather and consider information that helps

compare the value of different options.

The upper right hand corner of figure 1 gives the case of spending one’s own money on 

someone else, which introduces inefficiencies because the recipient may place a lower value 

on the spending. For example, the recipients of Christmas gifts sometimes value the gifts less 

than they cost the giver, as exemplified by Christmas sweaters that are never taken out of the 

closet to be worn. The inefficiency of the lower left corner is exemplified by the larger 

spending that takes place when spending on oneself using other people’s money, as with 

fully reimbursed corporate travel or entertainment. The lower right category is the one 

applicable to government employees who spend tax revenue on government program 

beneficiaries; not only is there a tendency to overspend using other people’s money, but that 

spending may have little value from the perspective of program beneficiaries.13

Many presentations of socialist policy options, even those by expert economists, ignore the 

distinction between spending your money on yourself and spending someone else’s money on 

someone else. The “Medicare for All” bills currently in Congress, for example, supposedly just 

 

13 The gap between program spending and value to beneficiaries has been measured by Gallen (2015), Finkelstein 

and McKnight (2008), and Olsen (2008), among others.

Figure 1. Four Ways to Spend Money

Yourself Someone else

Yours

Economize and 

seek highest 

value

Economize, but 

don't seek highest 

value

Someone 

else's

Don't economize 

but seek highest 

value

Don't economize 

and don't seek 

highest value

Whose 

money 

is spent

On whom money is spent
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 11

swap household expenditures on health insurance that occur under a private system for 

household expenditures on taxes earmarked for the public program. 14 But this swap 

fundamentally changes the types of healthcare that are ultimately received by consumers, the 

size of the healthcare budget, and the size of the overall economy. In a private system, a 

consumer has some control over his or her spending on health insurance—by, for example, 

selecting a plan with different benefits, or switching to a more efficient provider. Insurers in a 

private system must be responsive to consumer demands if they want to attract and retain 

customers and thus stay in business.

15 Individuals also have little reason to economize on 

anything that they can obtain without payment (Arrow 1963; Pauly 1968).

In a socialist system, the state decides the amount to be spent, how it is spent, and when and 

where the services are received by the consumer. A consumer who is unhappy with the state’s 

choices has little recourse, especially if private businesses are prohibited from competing with 

the state (as they are under “Medicare for All”). It may be argued that “giant” private 

corporations also limit consumer choice, but this comparison ignores how corporations are 

subject to competition. For example, a consumer can purchase goods from Walmart rather 

than Amazon, not to mention a whole host of other retailers. Amazon is legally permitted to 

entice Walmart customers, and vice versa, with low prices, better products, free shipping, and 

so on. Whereas retail customers are not forced to open their wallets, giant state enterprises are 

guaranteed revenue through taxation and are often legally protected from competition. 16

Those who maintain that Amazon and Walmart are too large might note that the single-payer 

revenues proposed in “Medicare for All” will be about eight times the revenue for either of these

corporations.17

Another problem with the socialist system is that “other people’s money” starts to disappear 

when the “other people” realize that they have little incentive to earn and innovate because 

what they receive has little to do with how much they make.

18 An important reason that people 

 

14 Cooper (2018) refers to it as the “taxes-for-premiums swap.” Krugman (2017), writes that “most people would 

gain more from the elimination of insurance premiums than they would lose from the tax hike” without 

mentioning any of the economic problems with spending someone else’s money on someone else.

15 See also Shleifer (1998).

16 Interestingly, socialist policies could simultaneously reduce the size of private enterprises with antitrust and 

other policies and enlarge government enterprises with legal protections from competition.

17 The sixth section of this report estimates that “Medicare for All” would be financed with about $2.4 trillion in 

2022. In 2017, Walmart’s U.S. revenues were about $0.3 trillion, while Amazon’s U.S. revenues were less than $0.2 

trillion. The sixth section also explains why “Medicare for All” would sharply reduce consumer spending, which 

suggests that 2017 revenues would be an optimistic projection for what retail corporations would earn with 

“Medicare for All” in place.

18 See also Winston (2010) for an analysis of the private sector’s innovation advantage.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 12

work and put forth effort is to obtain goods and services that they want. Under socialism, the 

things they want may be unavailable because the market no longer exists, or are made 

available without the need for working.

Noneconomists sometimes claim that high taxes do not prevent anyone from working, as long 

as the tax rate is less than 100 percent, because everyone strives to have more income rather 

than less. This “income maximization” hypothesis is contradicted by the most basic labor 

market observations, not to mention decades of research. 19 Earning additional income 

requires sacrifices (a loss of free time, relocating to an area with better-paying jobs, training, 

taking an inconvenient schedule, etc.), and people evaluate whether the net income earned is 

enough to justify the sacrifices. Socialism’s high tax rates fundamentally tilt that trade-off in 

favor of less income.

Why “Free” Is Costly

Because market prices reveal economically important information about costs and consumer 

wants, regulations and spending programs that distribute goods or services at below-market 

prices, such as for “free,” have a number of unintended consequences (Hayek 1945). Fewer 

goods and services will be produced, and what is produced may be misallocated to consumers 

with comparatively little need. We explain below why the very idea that a single-payer 

government program will use its market power to obtain lower prices is an acknowledgment

that the program will be purchasing less quantity or quality.

On the demand side of a market, people vary in their willingness to pay for the product or 

service, and their willingness varies over time. The market system allocates the available goods 

to consumers who are willing to pay more than the market price, while those not willing to pay 

the price go without. Willingness to pay is related to income, but it is also related to “need,” at 

least as consumers perceive need. Consumers are, for example, willing to pay more for food 

when they are hungry and to buy health insurance when they are older. In this way, the market 

has a tendency to allocate goods and services when and to whom they are needed.

If the government decrees that a product shall be free, then something other than a willingness 

to pay the market price will determine who receives the available supply. It may be a 

willingness to wait in line, or political connections, or membership in a privileged demographic 

group, or a government eligibility formula (Shleifer and Vishny 1992; Barzel 1997; Glaeser and 

Luttmer 2003). By comparison with the market, giving a product away for free may sometimes 

have the effect of taking the good away from consumers when they need it most and 

transferring it to consumers when they need it least. As we show later in this report, single-

 

19 E.g., Prescott (2004), Rogerson (2006), and Chetty et al. (2011).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 13

payer healthcare programs tend to reallocate healthcare from old to young. Centrally planned 

agricultural systems have, in effect, taken food products away from starving people in rural 

areas and transferred the products to urban consumers or sold them on the international 

market.

Prices that are below their competitivelevels also affect supply. Although a single government 

payer has market power that it can use to reduce the incomes of suppliers, the price reduction

is accomplished by reducing the quantity or quality of what it purchases in order to squeeze its 

suppliers.

20 This may be one reason why single-payer healthcare systems have longer 

appointment wait times than in the U.S. system (see the sixth section of this report), and why 

“free” Nordic colleges yield lower financial returns than higher education in the United States,

even though the Nordic returns include no tuition expense (see the fifth section below).

The Dismal Track Record of Highly Socialist Countries

Socialism is a continuum. No country has zero state ownership, zero regulation, and zero taxes. 

Even the most highly socialist countries have retained elements of private property, with 

consumers sometimes spending their own money on themselves (Pryor 1992). This report 

therefore begins with the historically common highly socialist regimes, by which we mean 

countries that implemented the most state control of production and incomes for at least a 

decade. 21 Of more than a dozen countries meeting these criteria, this section emphasizes 

Maoist China, Cuba, and the USSR, which are the subject of much scholarship, and Venezuela, 

which has been unusual as an industrialized economy with elements of democracy that 

nonetheless pursued highly socialist policies.22

Many of the highly socialist economies were agricultural, with state and collective farming 

systems implemented by socialist governments to achieve purported economies of scale and, 

pursuant to socialist ideology, to punish private landowners. Agricultural output dropped 

sharply when socialism was implemented, causing food shortages. Tens of millions of people 

 

20 This effect is the monopsony mirror image of monopoly pricing. Sellers with market power typically exercise it 

by constraining the quantity or quality of what they produce and thereby squeeze the buyers in the market 

(Williamson 1968; Farrell and Shapiro 1990; Whinston 2006). Buyers with market power typically exercise it by 

constraining the quantity or quality of what they purchase.

21 The highly socialist countries are sometimes called “communist,” although, as previously noted, communism 

has a different meaning in the theory of socialism. We presume that, in contrast to the Nordic countries, central 

government spending far exceeds private spending in highly socialist countries—although, with pervasive state 

ownership and centralized control, it is difficult to construct accurate measures of the components of spending 

that would be comparable between highly socialist countries and the rest of the world.

22 Also recall, from the second section above, the parallels between modern socialist rhetoric and the statements 

attributed to Mao, Castro, and Lenin.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 14

starved. It took quite some time for sympathetic scholars outside socialist countries to 

acknowledge that large state farms were less productive than small private ones.

The economic failures of highly socialist policies have been described at length by both 

survivors and scholars who have reviewed the evidence in state archives. Not only did highly 

socialist countries discourage the supply of effort and capital with poor incentives, but they 

also allocated theseresources perversely because central planning made production decisions 

react to output and input prices in the opposite direction from those of a market economy.

Although agriculture is not a large part of the U.S. economy, present-day socialists echo the 

historical socialists by arguing that healthcare, education, and other sectors are unfair and 

unproductive, and they promise that large state organizations will deliver fairness and 

economies of scale. It is therefore worth acknowledging that socialist takeovers of agriculture 

have delivered the opposite of what was promised. 

Present-day socialists do not want the dictatorship or state brutality that often coincided with 

the most extreme cases of socialism. However, peaceful democratic implementation of 

socialist policies does not eliminate the fundamental incentive and information problems 

created by high tax rates, large state organizations, and the centralized control of resources. 

As we report at the end of this section, Venezuela is a modern industrialized country that 

elected Hugo Chávez as its leader to implement socialist policies, and the result was less 

output in oil and other industries that were nationalized.

23

When evaluating the misalignment between the promises of highly socialist regimes to 

eliminate the misery and exploitation of the poor and the actual effects of their policies, it is 

instructive to look at a major guide economists use to determine value: the revealed preference 

of the population—in other words, voting with their feet. Implementation of highly socialist 

policies, such as in Venezuela, have been associated with high emigration. Perhaps more 

telling is that historically socialist regimes—such as the USSR, China, North Korea and Cuba—

have forcibly prevented people from leaving.

 

23 See also the fifth section, on socialism in the Nordic countries, and the sixth section, on single-payer healthcare. 

Further evidence about the effects of socialism on nonagricultural industries are reported by Conquest (2005), 

Gregory (2004), Horowitz and Suchlicki (2003), and Kornai (1992). Johnson and Brooks (1983, 9) describe how the 

“Soviet rural road system can only be described as a disgrace, the result of decades of socialist neglect.”
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 15

State and Collective Farming

State and collective farming (hereafter, “state farming”) is a historically common practice in 

highly socialist countries.24 The state acquires private farmland, and often much livestock, by 

force. The land is organized in large parcels, typically about one per village as compared with

the multitude of parcels in a typical village before collectivization. Villagers were required to 

work on the land, with the output belonging to the state. Decisions were made by government 

employees and party apparatchiks, who may have had little or no experience or specialized 

knowledge in comparison with the original landowners (Pryor 1992). These decisions included 

devising and implementing complex systems of production targets and quality requirements 

(Nolan 1988).

The socialist narrative emphasizes exploitation, which in an agricultural economy refers to the 

power dynamic that determines the division of agricultural income between landlords and 

farm workers. State farms purport to end the exploitation by eliminating the landlords, known 

as kulaks in the USSR.25 Another advantage of state farms, from the socialist perspective, was 

economies of scale (Pryor 1992). In principle, the knowledge and techniques of the best farmer 

could be applied to all the land rather than the comparatively small plot that the best farmer 

owned.26 Capital may be easier to obtain for a larger organization. Writing about the USSR in 

1929, Joseph Stalin stressed transforming “agriculture from small, backward, individual 

farming to large-scale, advanced, collective agriculture, to joint cultivation of the land.”Writing 

about China in 1958, the British economist Joan Robinson asserted that “the minute 

fragmentation of the land” that prevailed before collective farming was a major source of 

inefficiency. The family itself was sometimes criticized as operating on too small a scale; in 

 

24 State or collective farms were formed, e.g., in the USSR; elsewhere in the Soviet Bloc; and in Vietnam, North 

Korea, China, Cuba, South Yemen, Congo, Ethiopia, Cambodia, and Laos (Pryor 1992, chap. 4). In principle, 

participation in collective farms was voluntary, and operations were collectively managed by villagers, whereas 

state farms were owned and managed by government with the farm workers as government employees. In 

practice, even the collective farms may come “under the control of the Communist Party and the government,” 

as they did in the USSR (Dolot 2011, chap. 2). See also Johnson and Brooks (1983, 4–5), Conquest (1986, 171), and 

Pryor (1992, 12–14).

25 With landlords resisting the seizure of their property, the state often imprisoned or murdered landlords 

(Conquest 1986; Rummel 2011).

26 The CEA is not aware of socialist explanations of why the best farmer owned comparatively little land or did not 

contribute his or her talents to a larger but purely voluntary collective. A neoclassical explanation might involve 

credit constraints and the like, or simply that it would not be efficient for the best farmer to control more land 

than he or she chose to purchase in the marketplace (i.e., the market reflects genuine limitations on scale 

economies; see also Conquest (1986).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 16

China, household utensils were confiscated and villagers were assigned to communal kitchens 

for eating and food preparation (Jisheng 2012).

27

Eyewitnesses tell a different story concerning the operation of state farms, and central 

planning more generally. In Cuba and the USSR, for example, the managers of state farms were

chosen from the ranks of the Communist Party, rather than because of management skill or 

agricultural knowledge (Dolot 2011).28 “The state monopoly stifled incentives for increasing 

production,” describes a Chinese eyewitness (Jisheng 2012, 174–77). Production units 

sometimes had an incentive to produce less and to hoard inputs, in order to obtain more 

favorable allocations the next year (Gregory 1990).

The Opposite of What Was Promised

State farms reduced agricultural productivity rather than increasing it. The unwarranted faith 

in state farms had a doubly negative effect on agricultural output: Not only was less produced 

per worker, but workers were removed from agriculture, on the mistaken understanding that 

farming was becoming more productive (Conquest 1986). Both the lack of food and reliance on 

central planning rather than market mechanisms resulted in tens of millions of deaths by 

starvation.

Statistics from highly socialist regimes are informative, but necessarily imprecise. Gregory 

(1990), Kornai (1992), and others explain how officials in these regimes deceive their superiors 

and the public. Refugees from the regimes may be free to talk after their escape, but they may

not constitute a random sample of the populations they left and may have imperfect 

memories. Readers are advised that the estimates in this section are necessarily inexact.

In Cuba, the disincentives inherent in the socialist system sharply reduced agricultural 

production. As O’Connor (1968, 206–7), explains, “Because wage rates bore little or no 

relationship to labor productivity and [state farm] income, there were few incentives for 

workers to engage wholeheartedly in a collective effort.” Table 1 shows the change in 

agricultural production in Cuba spanning the agrarian reform period of 1959–63, when about 

70 percent of farmland was nationalized (Zimbalist and Eckstein 1987). Production of livestock 

fell between 14 percent (fish) and 84 percent (pork). Among the major crops, production fell 

 

27 See also Lenin (1951).

28 See also O’Connor’s (1968, 205) description of Cuban state farms with “[inefficiencies] arising from 

overcentralized decisionmaking, together with a shortage of qualified personnel which was aggravated by a 

tendency to place politically reliable people in top administrative posts even when they lacked technical skills.”
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 17

between 5 percent (rice) and 75 percent (malanga). The biggest crop, sugar, fell 35 percent.

There was not a major Cuban famine, however, because of Soviet assistance and emigration.29

The CEA also notes that, while Cuba had similar gross national income to Puerto Rico before

the Cuban Revolution in the late 1950s, by 2000 Cuban gross national income had fallen almost

two-thirds relative to Puerto Rico.30

In the USSR, the collectivization of agriculture occurred with the First Five-Year Plan, 1928–32.

Horses were important for doing the farm work, but their numbers fell by 47 percent, in part 

because nobody had much incentive to care for them when they became collective property 

(Conquest 1986). In the Central Asian parts of the USSR, the number of cattle fell more than 75 

percent, and the number of sheep more than 90 percent (Conquest 1986). Looking at official 

Soviet data for about 1970, Johnson and Brooks (1983) concluded that the entire suite of 

socialist policies—“excessive centralization of the planning, control, and management of 

agriculture, inappropriate price policies, and defective incentive systems for farm managers 

and workers and for enterprises that supply inputs to agriculture”—was reducing Soviet 

agricultural productivity about 50 percent.31

A famine ensued in 1932 and 1933, and about 6 million people died from starvation (Courtois 

et al. 1999).

32 The death rates were high in Ukraine, a normally fertile region from which the 

 

29 See Walters (1966) on Soviet economic aid to Cuba.

30 Collins, Bosworth, and Soto-Class (2006) and the Barro-Lee data set, using GDP for Cuba in 1950. The result is 

more extreme if the comparison is based on GDP because people and businesses outside Puerto Rico have 

substantial claims on the production occurring there.

31 This is likely an underestimate because, as Johnson and Brooks acknowledge, their research project was made 

possible through cooperation with the Soviet government.

32 Conquest (1986, 301) cites 7 million. 

Table 1. Agricultural Production in Cuba Before and After the Nationalization of Farms

Livestock

Change from 1957–58 

to 1963–64 Crop

Change from 1957–58 

to 1963–64

Beef -45% Sugar -35%

Pork -84% Corn -39%

Poultry -36% Rice -5%

Fish -14% Malanga -75%

Eggs -40% Yucca -56%

Milk -39% Potatoes -50%

Source: Salazar-Carrillo and Nodarse-Leon (2015).

Table 1. Agricultural Production in Cuba Before and After the Nationalization of Farms

Livestock

Change from 1957–58 

to 1963–64 Crop

Change from 1957–58 

to 1963–64

Beef -45% Sugar -35%

Pork -84% Corn -39%

Poultry -36% Rice -5%

Fish -14% Malanga -75%

Eggs -40% Yucca -56%

Milk -39% Potatoes -50%

Source: Salazar-Carrillo and Nodarse-Leon (2015).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 18

Soviet planners had been exporting food.33 Figure 2 shows the time series for Ukrainian deaths 

by sex, along with births. This time series also appears to show that millions more people were 

not born because of the famine.

Mao’s government implemented the so-called Great Leap Forward for China from 1958 to 1962, 

including a policy of mass collectivization of agriculture that provided “no wages or cash 

rewards for effort” on farms.

34 The per capita output of grain fell 21 percent from 1957 to 1962; 

for aquatic products,the drop was 31 percent; and for cotton, edible oil, and meat, it was about 

55 percent (Lin 1992; Nolan 1988).35 During the Great Chinese Famine from 1959 to 1961, an 

estimated 45 million people died (Dikӧtter 2010). Figure 3 shows the time series for deaths and 

births, which form a pattern similar to Ukraine’s, except that the absolute number of deaths 

was an order of magnitude greater.

 

33 In fact, the USSR as a whole was exporting grain at that time (Dalrymple 1964, 271; Courtois et al. 1999, 167). 

Note that there were also starvation deaths elsewhere in the USSR (Conquest 1986). In contrast to the famines 

associated with highly socialist regimes, Ó Gráda (2000) and Goodspeed (2016, 2017) find that one important 

margin of adjustment during the Irish Famine of 1845–51 was substantially increased net imports of relatively 

cheap corn and other grains, and similarly dramatically increased exports of higher-value agricultural output such 

as eggs, dairy products, and cattle.

34 Meng, Qian, and Yared (2015, 1572), summarizing Walker (1965).

35 See Cheremukhin et al. (2015) for aggregate productivity time series.

0

200

400

600

800

1,000

1,200

1,400

1924 1926 1928 1930 1932 1934 1936 1938

Figure 2. Annual Sex-Specific Trends in Numbers of Births and 

Deaths in Ukraine, 1924–39

Number (thousands)

Source: Meslé and Vallin (2012).

Births Male deaths

Female

deaths

1939
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 19

Failed agricultural policies are not the only way that civilians died at the hands of their highly

socialist state. Rummel (1994), Courtois and others (1999), Pipes (2003), and Holmes (2009) 

document noncombat deaths in the Soviet Bloc, Yugoslavia, Cuba, China, Cambodia, Vietnam, 

Laos, North Korea, and Ethiopia. These deaths exclude deaths in military combat, but include 

deaths in purges, massacres, concentration camps, forced migration, and both escape 

attempts and famines. The death rate in famines was particularly high in North Korea, where 

about 600,000 people died from starvation in the late 1990s out of a population of about 22

million (Goodkind, West, and Johnson 2011).

36 Cambodia’s Communist period was especially 

violent.

The total noncombat civilian deaths in the highly socialist countries were a combination of the 

effects of government takeovers of important industries and brutal political systems. Modern 

American socialists are against state brutality. But it is a mistake to ignore the highly socialist 

tragedies altogether, because it was high taxes, large state organizations, and centralized 

control that delivered the opposite of what was promised and forced consumers to endure 

intolerably small supplies of food and other consumer goods. In other words, the low output 

of state farms and centralized planning was a result of economic failures that cannot be

rectified with more peaceful implementation. Venezuela, discussed below, is a case in point.

 

36 The CEA did not find comparable data on deaths for highly socialist regimes in Afghanistan, Angola, Benin, 

Congo, Mozambique, Somalia, and South Yemen. Such data may be lacking because their implementations may 

have been comparably peaceful from a civilian perspective.

0

10

20

30

40

50

1949 1953 1957 1961 1965 1969 1973 1977

Figure 3. Birth and Death Rates in China per 1,000, 1949–78

Birth or death rate per 1,000

Source: China National Bureau of Statistics.

Birth rate

Death rate

1978
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 20

Though the nationalization of agriculture depressed output, the privatization of the same land 

brought it surging back. Johan Norberg explains how, when Chinese villagers began to 

(secretly) privatize their land, the “farmers did not start the workday when the village whistle 

blew any longer—they went out much earlier and worked much harder. . . . Grain output in 1979 

was six times higher than the year before.”37

Although socialist policies are ostensibly implemented to reduce poverty and inequality, it was 

the end of highly socialist policies in China that brought these results on a worldwide scale.

China’s major reforms began in 1978, which is about the time that the poverty rate in China, 

and therefore world poverty rates and world inequality, began a remarkable decline (Sala-iMartin 2006).38 Policy changes in India also coincided with reduced poverty in that country, 

although it is debated whether the early Indian policies were socialist (Basu 2008). The end of 

socialism in the USSR increased inequality in that region, but this was not enough to offset, by 

worldwide measures, the progress elsewhere in the world (Pinkovskiy and Sala-i-Martin 2009).

Lessons Reluctantly Learned

Before the First Five-Year Plan, the USSR’s economists had observed the productivity losses 

that came with attempts to collectivize farming. Conquest (1986, 108) describes how they “still 

defended small scale agriculture in 1929—but soon had to repudiate that position.” The 

political leadership then prohibited the types of economic analysis that might show the 

opportunity costs of state farms (Conquest 1986).

Although the eyewitnesses saw in real time the economic problems with large state 

organizations, some distinguished economists outside the socialist countries dismissed any 

evidence that might suggest socialism to be a failure in the USSR or China. For instance, Paul 

Samuelson, the first American to win the Nobel Prizein economics, expressed surprise that the 

Soviet collective farms were not more productive than private land allotments (Samuelson 

1976). As recently as 1989, he and William Nordhaus were still writing that “the Soviet economy 

is proof that, contrary to what many skeptics had earlier believed, a socialist command 

economy can function and even thrive” (Samuelson and Nordhaus 1989, 837). John Gurley 

(1969), one of the 11 managing editors of the American Economic Review, wrote that “the basic 

overriding economic fact about China is that for twenty years it has fed, clothed, and housed 

 

37 Norberg (2016, chap. 1), citing Zhou (1996).

38 See also the official rural poverty measure (State Council of the People’s Republic of China 2016), which fell from 

98 percent in 1978 to 6 percent in 2015.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 21

everyone, has kept them healthy and has educated most. Millions have not starved.” 39 As 

recently as 1984, John Kenneth Galbraith asserted that “the Russian system succeeds because, 

in contrast with the Western industrial economies, it makes full use of its manpower.”40

The infamous journalist Walter Duranty privately estimated that 7 million people died from the 

Soviet famine, but instead he published Soviet propaganda in the New York Times during those 

years.

41 Meanwhile, the highly socialist governments themselves eventually acknowledged the 

value of private enterprises. As a means of increasing national output, Cuba, China, the USSR, 

and other highly socialist countries eventually permitted private enterprises both in and 

outside the agriculture sector to coexist with state-owned enterprises.42

Venezuela: An Industrialized Country with Highly Socialist Policies

Venezuela is not an agricultural economy, but it nationalized important parts of its economy, 

implemented effectively high marginal tax rates, and centrally controlled prices of consumer 

and other goods. As with the other highly socialist countries, its state-owned enterprises have 

proven to be unproductive. Millions of people have already fled the country.

The economies of the highly socialist countries described above are agricultural and labor 

intensive. An oil-rich country such as Venezuela that managed its oil assets well and paid cash 

royalties to its citizens independent of how much they earn could in principle be providing 

income for its citizens with zero marginal tax rates.43 The economy could also be unregulated 

and without state-owned enterprises (with oil assets rented to private businesses to operate), 

and therefore not be socialist in any aspect of the definition introduced in the first section 

above. However, this is not the path taken by Venezuela over the past 20 years, when it 

 

39 Gurley republished these ideas later (e.g., Gurley 1976, 13). Today, it must be acknowledged that the Great 

Chinese Famine was in the middle of Gurley’s “twenty years” period, when everyone in China was supposedly fed.

40 According to Schumpeter (1943, chap. XIII), these attitudes are to be expected. He says that intellectuals benefit 

from criticizing the social system in which they live, and that it is the abundance of the market system that allows 

intellectuals to be a large share of the population.

41 He won a 1932 Pulitzer Prize for some of his publications about the USSR (Conquest 1986, 320). Though he 

personally visited the famine regions in 1933, his New York Times publications that year denied that there was a 

famine, and mocked a journalist who reported otherwise (Conquest 1986, 319; Applebaum 2017). Conquest 

explains how Duranty was further honored in New York City for telling “people what they wished to hear.” The 

New York Times “publicly acknowledg[ed] his failures” in the 1980s (https://www.nytco.com/new-york-timesstatement-about-1932-pulitzer-prize-awarded-to-walter-duranty/).

42 See Johnson and Brooks (1983, 5–6), Zimbalist and Eckstein (1987, 13), Pipes (2003, 871), and Dikӧtter (2010, 

xxii).

43 For example, the oil-rich state of Alaska has no sales or state income tax. Oil-rich Norway, conversely, has 

marginal tax rates that are similar to other Nordic countries (recall the fourth section above).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 22

nationalized most oil assets and many other businesses, implemented effectively high 

marginal tax rates, and centrally controlled prices of consumer and other goods.

In 1999, “Hugo Chávez convinced the people of Venezuela they were being robbed by the 

greedy oil companies, dramatically raised taxes and royalties on new and existing projects. . . . 

The state-owned oil entity no longer possessed the know-how to develop its resources and 

production began declining” (Oil Sands Magazine 2016). Oil revenues were spent on generous 

social programs rather than investing in the country’s oil production capacity or cutting taxes 

(Economist 2017; Monaldi 2018).44 As shown in figure 4, Venezuela’s oil production has been 

declining while production in Canada, which has petroleum resources similar to Venezuela’s, 

has been increasing.45

Venezuela nationalized several other businesses, ranging from cell phones to medicines.

According to Transparency International (2017, 52), “From 2001 to 2017, the Venezuelan state 

went from owning 74 public enterprises to 526, four times more than Brazil (130) and ten times 

more than Argentina,” and by 2016 state enterprise employment reached 6 percent of the 

entire workforce.

 

44 Under Hugo Chávez, the Venezuelan government “constructed a free healthcare program for people living in

poor and marginalized areas,” largely by importing about 31,000 medical personnel from Cuba (Brading 2013, 

chap. 4; Westhoff et al. 2010; see also Wilson 2015).

45The success of Canada’s oil industry over the same time frame is one reason why the CEA believes that the 

economic disaster in Venezuela cannot be blamed on world oil markets.

0

1,000

2,000

3,000

4,000

5,000

6,000

1998 2000 2002 2004 2006 2008 2010 2012 2014 2016 2018

Figure 4. Total Petroleum and Other Liquids Production, 

1998–2018

Canada production

Thousands of barrels per day

Source: U.S. Energy Information Administration.

Jun-18

Venezuela production
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 23

Earning and spending are heavily taxed in Venezuela. The top rate on personal income is 34 

percent, plus 11 percent for payroll. The value-added tax rate is 16 percent. Inflation is a tax 

implicitly paid while a worker or consumer holds currency; even during normal times, inflation 

was 2 percent per month. Import restrictions are relevant because, in a well-functioning 

economy based on natural resources, many consumer goods would be imported. Currency 

transactions, and international financial transactions generally, are tightly controlled, which 

means that an importer would in effect pay a tax when obtaining the foreign currency required 

to purchase foreign goods. As of 2012, the import tariff rate was 12.1 percent on nonagricultural 

goods. Imports are also at risk of theft by border patrol. If we take the foreign exchange and 

import theft rates to each be 10 percent, this puts the overall tax rate on earning for the purpose 

of obtaining consumption goods at over 60 percent.46

The Venezuelan economy does not benefit from price signals the way that less-regulated 

economies do. High inflation, which is expected to reach 1 million percent per year in 2018, 

makes it difficult to discern relative prices (Fischer, Hall, and Taylor 1981). Even without 

inflation, many prices are not determined by the market. In Venezuela, the 2011 Law of Fair 

Costs and Prices gives the Superintendent of Fair Costs and Prices (known as SUNDECOP) 

“broad authority to regulate the prices of almost all goods and services sold to the public,” 

deciding “whether prices are ‘fair’ and to identify businesses that make ‘excessive profits 

through speculation’” (USTR 2013). “Basic goods like flour and aspirin had fixed prices and 

were so cheap that companies had no incentive to make them” (Kurmanaev 2018).

Emigration has proven to be an important way that Venezuelan policies have reduced the 

supply of goods and services. Talented workers have emigrated from the oil industry and from 

medical practice (Dube 2017). Overall, about 2 million people have emigrated from the country 

in recent years (Alhadeff 2018).

Socialism and Living Standards in a Broad Cross Section of 

Countries

Of course, not all countries have pushed socialist policies to the extremes discussed in the 

previous section. To the extent that socialist policies would involve lesser increases in tax rates, 

the extensive literature on the effects of taxation could be used to assess some of the 

consequences of more moderate socialism, which is an approach pursued in the sixth section 

of this report.47 But the tax literature does not address state-owned enterprises and centralized 

price setting, and how these socialist practices interact with high tax rates.

 

46 This applies a 48 percent import share to consumption.

47 An extensive review is provided by the CEA (2018a, chap. 1).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 24

An extensive economic growth literature is helpful in this regard because it documents a 

relationship between real GDP and the degree of socialism, measured in a large sample of 

countries as the opposite of economic freedom. The studies suggest that moving U.S. policies 

to highly socialist policies would reduce real GDP at least 40 percent in the long run.

Alternatively, adopting a 1975 Nordic level of socialism, which is about halfway toward our 

highly socialist benchmark of 2014 Venezuela, would reduce real GDP by at least 19 percent in 

the long run.48 These effects are similar to those obtained with alternative methods in the fifth 

and sixth sections of this report.

The growth studies mainly rely on the Fraser Institute, which in 1996, in conjunction with 10

other institutes, published the book Economic Freedom of the World 1975–1995. Fraser has 

subsequently provided annual measures of the Economic Freedom of the World (EFW) Index,

which measures the degree to which the policies and institutions of countries are supportive 

of economic freedom. Forty-two indicators are used to construct a summary index for each 

country and year that ranges between 1 for the least free and 10 for the most free. The

indicators are aggregated to five main categories, which are then given equal weight in the 

overall index. The first category is the size of the government in terms of spending, taxation, 

and the size of government-controlled enterprises. The second is the legal system and property 

rights in terms of the protection of persons having such rights. The third category is referred to 

as “sound money,” and measures policies related to inflation. The fourth is free international 

trade, which means that citizens are free to trade with other countries. The fifth is limited 

regulation, which addresses the freedom to exchange and trade domestically. Note that each 

category is an indicator of economic freedom, rather than political freedom or civil liberties.

Of particular interest in this report are the recent EFW values for the U.S. (8.0), the Nordic 

countries (averaging 7.5), and Venezuela (2.9).49 Venezuela in 2016 was one of the least free in 

the entire country panel.50 Also of interest is the Nordic average in 1975 (5.5), which was about 

when socialism peaked in those countries. In other words, the Nordic countries were once 

about halfway between where the U.S. and Venezuela have been recently, but now have 

economic freedoms that are much closer to those of the U.S.

 

48 In 2017, 19 and 40 percent of U.S. per capita GDP were, respectively, about $11,000 and $24,000.

49 The year 2016 is the most recent one with comprehensive coverage. Alesina and Angeletos (2005) explain why 

fundamentally similar countries can nonetheless take quite different approaches to socialism and, conversely, 

that small political changes could result in a dramatic increase in a country’s socialism.

50 We also note that the highly socialist countries tend to be excluded from the data, in part because it is difficult 

to construct accurate measures of the components of spending that would be comparable between highly

socialist countries and the rest of the world. Among the countries with EFW indices, the Marxist governments of 

1990 Nicaragua and 1980 Congo have EFW values below 3.5, although so too do a few repressive anti-Marxist 

governments. 
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 25

The EFW Index is related to our discussion of more socialist policies that involve increased 

public financing, public production, and regulations that replace each citizen’s ability to spend 

his or her own money on himself or herself with the government’s spending other people’s 

money on others. As reviewed by Hall and Lawson (2014), the EFW Index has been cited and 

utilized in hundreds of academic articles. Their review discusses 402 articles, of which 198 used 

the EFW Index as an independent variable in an empirical study. They report that over twothirds of these studies found economic freedom to correspond to improved types of economic 

performance, such as faster growth, better living standards, and more happiness, as well as 

other measures.

In particular, a large subliterature focuses on the correlation between the EFW Index and 

economic investment and growth, as reviewed by De Haan, Lundström, and Sturm (2006). One 

major study—by Gwartney, Holcombe, and Lawson (2006)—found that a 1-unit increase in the

EFW Index from 1980 to 2000 was associated with a 2.6-percentage-point increase in private 

investment as a share of GDP and thereby a 1.2-percentage-point increase in annualized 

economic growth over 20 years.

51 This suggests that going from U.S. EFW to Venezuela’s would 

reduce GDP by about two-thirds after 20 years.52 Going to 1975, Nordic values of EFW would 

reduce GDP more than 40 percent.

Another study, by Easton and Walker (1997), found effects that are smaller although still 

economically significant. They estimate the elasticity of the steady state level of GDP per 

worker with respect to EFW of 0.61, so that going to Venezuela’s EFW would reduce real GDP 

per worker by about 40 percent in the long run.53 With the 1975 Nordic value of EFW, long-run 

GDP per worker would be reduced at least 19 percent. To the extent that socialism reduces the 

fraction of the population that works, the reductions in GDP per capita are even greater.

This evidence is suggestive as to the opportunity costs of socialism, but of course cross-country 

correlations are not necessarily causal. Moreover, the EFW Index is not exactly the inverse of 

 

51 The other independent variables in the model are tropical location, coastal population, and human capital 

growth.

52 The CEA notes that, at very low levels of economic freedom and therefore tax rates near 100 percent, it is difficult 

to predict GDP. The effects of, say, a 95 percent tax rate should be quite different from the effects of a 90 percent 

tax rate, because in the latter case workers keep twice as much as they do in the former. As previously noted, the 

data for the least-free countries are often lacking or are of especially poor quality.

53 The other independent variables in the model are a transformation of the population growth rate, the physical 

investment rate, and schooling. Also recall the third section’s estimates of the output effects of highly socialist 

policies: reductions of at least two-thirds (all of Cuba, as of the 21st century), about half (Soviet agriculture, circa 

1970), and about three-fourths (Venezuelan oil production). Also of interest is the comparison of North and South 

Korea, where highly socialist North Korea appears to have about a 90 percent shortfall in GDP per capita (Rice et 

al. 2018). The CEA therefore refers to the output effect of highly socialist policies as “at least 40 percent” (negative).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 26

socialism, and the various ingredients for the index can be difficult to measure. This evidence 

therefore needs to be considered together with the case studies in the third and fifth sections 

as well as the tax-impact analysis in the sixth section. 

The Nordic Countries: Policies and Incomes Compared with the 

U.S.

The Nordic countries refer to Denmark, Finland, Iceland, Norway, and Sweden. This section 

looks at the Nordic countries in more detail because they are often singled out as countries 

with socialist policies and admirable economic outcomes. Though these countries have singlepayer, universal-coverage health insurance, they do not impose a single payer on the entire 

nation, despite being more homogeneous countries than the United States (Anell, Glenngård,

and Merkur 2012; Vuorenkoski, Mladovsky, and Mossialos 2008; Olejaz et al. 2012; Ringard et al. 

2013; Sigurgeirsdóttir, Waagfjörð, and Maresso 2014).54 Combining state, local, and central 

governments, public spending is about half of GDP in the Nordic countries, as compared with

38 percent of GDP for the United States (OECD 2018b). However, the Nordic countries do not 

have many other policies advocated by modern American socialists, such as high corporate

taxes, heavy regulation of business, public monopoly of primary and secondary schooling, 

paying full benefits to people who have not worked, or healthcare that is free at the time of

service.

55

We find that today, the Nordic countries’ marginal tax rates on labor income are not in fact far 

above those in the U.S., once implicit employment and income taxes are considered. Nordiccountry living standards are still at least 15 percent lower than in the U.S. The private and social 

returns to a college education are higher in the U.S., even while college education is at least as 

common here. These results are consistent with the basic economic idea that redistribution 

and single-payer systems have significant costs in terms of reducing national incomes.

The Nordic countries themselves recognized the economic harm of high tax rates in terms of 

creating and retaining businesses and motivating work effort, which is why their marginal tax 

rates on personal and corporate income have fallen 20 or 30 points, or more, from their peaks 

in the 1970s and 1980s (Stenkula, Johansson, and Du Rietz 2014).

 

54 The exception is Iceland, which is a nation of less than 350,000 people and therefore smallerthan even the leastpopulated U.S. state (Alaska).

55 All the Nordic countries’ health systems have user fees or out-of-pocket payments, whose share of overall health 

spending is similar to what it is currently in the United States (without “Medicare for All”). See Rice et al. (2018);

Globerman (2016); Anell, Glenngård, and Merkur (2012); Olejaz et al. (2012); Ringard et al. (2013); Sigurgeirsdóttir, 

Waagfjörð, and Maresso (2014); and Vuorenkoski, Mladovsky, and Mossialos (2008). The CEA notes that singlepayer, universal coverage and free healthcare (zero cost sharing) are not synonymous.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 27

Do the Nordic Countries Have Socialist Tax Policies?

The Nordic countries are reputed to have taxes that are higher but “fairer” than those in the 

U.S. In fact, this reputation is only partly earned. The Nordic-country average tax rate on capital 

income is lower than in the U.S., even since the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act has lowered the top U.S. 

statutory corporate tax rate by 13 percentage points. Nordic taxes on labor are only somewhat 

higher than in the United States, especially once implicit taxes are acknowledged.

A key difference between Nordic and U.S. taxation is that the latter is considerably more 

progressive. With lower thresholds for their income tax brackets, the Nordic economies apply 

their highest marginal tax rate to taxpayers earning only marginally above-average income, 

meaning that low- and middle-income tax filers face substantially higher average rates in the 

Nordic countries than in the United States. Moreover, the Nordic countries rely more heavily 

on value-added, or consumption, taxes, which are not progressive. The higher tax revenue 

share of GDP in the Nordic economies is thus predominantly accounted for by a broader base,

rather than by “taxing the rich.” As shown below, Senator Bernie Sanders is currently proposing 

tax rates that are above the Nordic-country average in six of seven tax categories, with the 

exception being sales / value-added taxes.56

As shown in table 2, the corporate income tax rate in the Nordic countries ranges from 20 to 23 

percent, which was about half the U.S. Federal and State statutory rate until 2018. The top 

personal rate on dividend income is 29 percent in the U.S., compared with 22 percent in 

Iceland, 29 percent in Finland, 30 percent in Sweden, 31 percent in Norway, and 42 percent in 

Denmark. Sweden and Norway have no estate tax, while the top estate tax rates range from 10 

to 19 percent in the other three Nordic countries, as compared with 43 percent in the U.S.57

 

56 Senator Sanders proposes to repeal the Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, which reduce the combined Federal-State 

statutory corporate rate by 13 percentage points (Bollier 2018). The other rate proposals are reported by 

http://sanders.senate.gov and Cole and Greenberg (2016).

57 All the countries have a zero rate for comparatively small estates. U.S. rates include the population-weighted 

average of State estate and inheritance tax rates.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 28

Senator Sanders has made specific proposals for the taxation of capital in the U.S. He voted 

against cutting the corporate income tax, which had a statutory rate of about 39 percent for 

Federal and State taxes combined, and he now rallies his followers to repeal the cut (Bollier 

2018). This rate is well above where the U.S. and the Nordic countries are now. The senator has 

proposed a 68 percent rate on dividends and capital gains, which is more than double, or about 

39 points above, where the U.S. is now.58 He has also proposed adding 24 points to the top 

estate tax rate, even though the U.S. rate is already well above Nordic rates.

The Nordic countries are similar to the U.S. in terms of their payroll tax rates (combined for 

employer and employee) and the top personal income tax rate.59 Even excluding implicit taxes, 

the overall top marginal tax rate on personal income in the United States in 2017, 46.3 percent

(as calculated by the OECD), was only 3 percentage points below the Nordic average of about

50 percent.60 Interestingly, Senator Sanders proposes increasing both payroll and personal 

income tax rates above the Nordic average, especially as regards the top personal rate.

 

58 The 68 percent rate includes 3.9 percentage points for State and local taxes (https://taxfoundation.org/howhigh-are-capital-gains-taxes-your-state/), the top Sanders bracket inclusive of 2.2 percentage points for his 

additional personal income surtax (54.2), and Sanders’s 10 percent ACA tax on investment income. See also 

https://www.taxpolicycenter.org/sites/default/files/alfresco/publication-pdfs/2000639-an-analysis-of-senatorbernie-sanderss-tax-proposals.pdf. The 68 percent does not include any phase-out of the rebate of Senator 

Sanders’s proposed carbon tax.

59 Some of the Nordic countries have privatized much of their old-age social security programs (Turner 2005).

60 The Tax Cuts and Jobs Act temporarily reduces the Federal rate, and therefore the combined State-Federal rate, 

by less than 3 points.

Table 2. Tax Policies in the U.S. and Nordic Countries

Tax policy Denmark Finland Iceland Norway Sweden U.S.

Nordic average 

minus U.S.

Senator Sanders' 

proposal minus U.S.

Taxes on capital

Statutory corporate income tax rate 22 20 20 23 22 26 -4 13

Top personal rate on dividend income 42 29 22 31 30 29 1 39

Top personal rate on capital gains 42 33 20 27 30 29 1 39

Top estate or inheritance tax rate 15 19 10 0 0 43 -35 24

Taxes on labor or consumption

Payroll tax rate (on a base of employer cost) 0 26 6 19 29 14 2 7

Top individual income tax rate 56 49 44 39 60 46 3 12

Sales or value-added tax 25 24 24 25 25 6 19 N/A

Progressivity of household taxes (mid-2000s) 1.02 1.20 0.90 0.95 1.00 1.35 -0.34 N/A

Sources: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; PwC (2018a); Tax Foundation (2016); Tax Policy Center (2016); CEA calculations.

Levels Difference from U.S. actual

Note: All rates are percentages. The OECD progressivity measure is the top decile's tax share divided by its income share and would be one for a proportional income tax. Corporate, dividend, and sales tax 

rates are for 2018. All other rates are for 2015–2017. 
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 29

None of the entries in table 2 incorporate implicit taxes, which refer to the loss or gain of 

transfer income that occurs when a household works or earns more. In the Nordic countries, 

implicit tax rates can be negative because working or earning more entitles a person to 

additional transfer income that helps offset some of the extra payroll, income, or sales tax that 

he or she will pay. In other words, a Nordic citizen with a history of working or earning more 

will receive a greater benefit when he or she has earned more in the past. For example, work is 

required in order to be eligible for full paid family leave, unemployment, or retirement 

benefits.61 As a result, the disincentive to work in a Nordic country may be somewhat less than 

what is shown in table 2.

Working or earning does not entitle the Nordic citizen to additional health benefits, but at the 

same time, working and earning does not cause him or her to lose benefits, as it would in the 

U.S. In other words, U.S. programs tend to have positive implicit taxes on work because the 

people who work and earn more are paid fewer benefits.62 Table 2 shows a gap between Nordic 

and U.S. marginal tax rates on labor income, but the true gap would likely besmaller if implicit 

taxes were fully considered.

Margaret Thatcher (1976) observed that “socialism started by saying it was going to tax the 

rich, very rapidly it was taxing the middle income groups. Now, it's taxing people quite highly 

with incomes way below.” Obtaining large amounts of tax revenue ultimately involves

resorting to high tax rates on the poor and middle class because these groups in the aggregate 

generate much of the Nation’s income—what economists call “widening the tax base” (Becker 

and Mulligan 2003). One way that the Nordic countries broadly levy high rates is with a value-

 

61 See Anderson et al. (2007), Rogerson (2007), and Kleven (2014), who describes “the strong subsidization of 

goods that are complementary to working.” See also Gruber and Wise (1999) on retirement benefits. U.S. 

unemployment and retirement benefits can be tied to work history, too (Feldstein and Samwick 1992), but by 

comparison with the Nordic countries, these negative implicit taxes are smaller because the full benefit amounts 

are smaller. U.S. welfare programs have sometimes required work from able-bodied adults (Mulligan 2012), 

although Senator Sanders and Senator Warren have opposed such requirements 

(https://www.facebook.com/senatorsanders/posts/work-requirements-dont-improve-employment-they-justleave-more-people-hungry-des/10157113484572908/) or have recommended more exemptions from them 

(https://www.warren.senate.gov/newsroom/press-releases/with-snap-under-attack-warren-blumenthalcolleagues-introduce-legislation-to-ensure-recipients-seeking-employment-dont-unfairly-lose-benefits). The

CEA also notes that Senator Sanders proposes to increase implicit marginal income tax rates by phasing out the 

rebate of a proposed carbon tax (Mermin, Burman, and Sammartino 2016). The collection of such a tax also 

shares some economic features with sales taxes. 

62 Health premium tax credits and Medicaid eligibility are two important examples in the health area (Mulligan 

2015). Food stamps and public housing are two more U.S. assistance programs that have positive implicit tax rates 

on employment and income.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 30

added tax (VAT), which is essentially a national sales tax. Regardless of whether they are rich, 

poor, or in between, Nordic households are required to pay an additional VAT of 24 or 25 

percent on their purchases, on top of all the other taxes that they pay.

63 By comparison, sales 

taxes vary by U.S. State, but none is that high, and the national average rate is about 6 percent.

Even without the VAT, the high Nordic rates apply to everyone, not just the rich. The OECD 

prepares a measure of progressivity that is the share of nationwide household taxes paid by

the top 10 percent of citizens (ranked by their income), expressed as a ratio of the share of 

national aggregate income. 64 The ratio would be 1 if the household taxes were a fixed 

proportion of income. A regressive (progressive) tax would have a ratio less (greater) than 1, 

respectively. As shown in table 2’s last row, four of the Nordic countries have essentially 

proportional household taxes.65 The average progressivity of all five countries is 1.01, which is 

0.34 less progressive than in the U.S.

Another indication of the progressivity of U.S. income taxation relative to the Nordic countries

is the threshold, expressed as a multiple of the average wage66, at which the top marginal 

income tax rate comes into effect. As shown in figure 5, in the United States, the top marginal 

rate only applies to income above eight times the average wage. In contrast, on average, in the 

Nordic countries the top marginal income tax rate applies to income that is only 1.5 times the 

average wage. Indeed, in Denmark, earnings that are just 1.3 times the average are already 

subject to the top tax rate. To put this in perspective, if the U.S. tax code were as flat as that of 

Denmark, a filer earning just $70,000 a year would already face the top marginal personal 

income tax rate of 46.3 percent, whereas the U.S. code allows a filer to earn as much as 6 times 

that, or $423,904, before paying that rate.

 

63 The sales price of retail items is usually quoted inclusive of the VAT. Note that a sales tax rate cannot be added 

to income tax rates to get a meaningful overall rate because the sales tax is levied on a smaller base. For example, 

a 25 percent sales tax is like a 20 percent income tax.

64 The OECD refers to income and payroll (employee part only) taxes as “household taxes” (OECD 2018c).

65 Household taxes, which include personal income taxes, can be essentially proportional even while personal 

income tax rates rise with income because payroll tax rates fall with income and/or high-income taxpayers have 

disproportionate deductions from income for tax purposes.

66The term “average” refers to the mean.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 31

Lower personal income tax progressivity in the Nordic countries, combined with lower taxation 

on capital and on average only modestly higher marginal personal incometax rates on the right 

tail of the income distribution, means that a core feature of the Nordic tax model is higher tax 

rates on average and near-average income workers and their families. That is, contrary to the 

misperceptions of American proponents of Nordic-style democratic socialism, the Nordic 

model of taxation relies heavily not on imposing punitive rates on high-income households but 

rather on imposing high rates on households in the middle of the income distribution. This is 

illustrated in table 3, which reports that even after accounting for transfers, a one-income 

couple earning the average wage, with two children, faces an all-in average personal income 

tax rate of 22 percent in the Nordic countries (counting government transfers as a negative tax), 

as compared with a rate of 14.2 percent in the United States. This comparison for the various 

family types suggests that American families earning the average wage would be taxed $2,000 

to $5,000 more per year net of transfers if the United States had current Nordic policies.

1.3

1.9

1.2

1.6 1.5

8.0

0

2

4

6

8

10

Denmark Finland Iceland Norway Sweden United States

Figure 5. The Progressivity of Personal Income Tax Structures in the 

Nordic Countries and the United States

Top tax rate threshold as multiple of the average wage

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Note: For example, if the U.S. threshold as a multiple of the average wage was lowered to Denmark's, the top marginal 

tax rate would apply to filers earning just $68,802.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 32

Do the Nordic Countries Have Socialist Regulatory Policies?

In its Economic Freedom of the World Index, on average the Fraser Institute rates the Nordic 

economies, and particularly Denmark and Sweden, above the OECD mean with respect to 

regulatory freedom, while the Heritage Foundation ranks all the Nordic economies higher than 

the United States for business freedom (Gwartney, Lawson, and Hall 2017; Miller, Kim, and 

Roberts 2018). OECD data show that the Nordic countries have less regulation in their product 

markets and more regulation in their labor markets in comparison with the United States. The 

Nordic countries are fairly similar to the average OECD member country on the regulation 

measures.

The top rows of table 4 show how the OECD ranks all five Nordic countries as having less 

product-market regulation than the United States, largely due to Nordic deregulation actions 

over the past 20 years. In comparison with the Nordic countries, the study finds the United 

States to be especially high on price controls and command-and-control regulation of business 

operations.

67

 

67 See also McCloskey (2016, 24) and the regulation components of the Fraser Economic Freedom of the World 

Index. The OECD product market survey was limited to the State of New York, and therefore may not be 

representative of the rest of the country. The data show the U.S. suffering from relatively high regulatory 

protection of incumbents due to exemptions from antitrust laws for publicly controlled firms (OECD 2018c). In 

addition, the OECD notes that U.S. product market regulation is more restrictive than other OECD economies due 

to the prevalence of State-level ownership of certain enterprises, particularly in the energy and transportation 

sectors. To the extent that the Nordic countries have lower product market regulation, this may somewhat offset 

their higher marginal tax rates on labor income (Fang and Rogerson 2011).

Single individual with 2 children 1-Income earner couple with 2 children

(less transfers) (less transfers)

Denmark 16.5 25.3

Finland 21.8 24.7

Iceland 24.8 18.6

Norway 19.4 22.5

Sweden 18.8 18.8

United States 17.1 14.2

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development.

Table 3. All-In Average Personal Income Tax Rate at Average Wage Less Transfers, 

2017

Country
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 33

The Nordic countries do not have minimum wage laws, although the vast majority of jobs have 

wages limited by collective bargaining agreements. The Nordic countries have more 

employment protection legislation, although they obtain labor market flexibility with intensive 

use of temporary employees.68

Income Comparisons with the U.S.

The average real GDP per capita in the U.S. is about 20 percent above the averages in Denmark, 

Finland, Iceland, and Sweden. The comparison with Norway is similar, too, if we adjust for 

Norway’s large oil income. Indeed, Alaska and North Dakota—U.S. States that, like Norway, 

have high oil output per person—enjoy per capita GDP that is 15 and 4 percent higher, 

respectively, than Norway’s.

At the same time, people of Nordic descent currently living in the U.S. have incomes about 25

percent above the average American (regardless of descent), and therefore have incomes 

about 50 percent above the average of the people resident of their home country. In other 

words, if the U.S. were to take on all the characteristics of a Nordic country, it could expect its

incomes to be sharply lower.

To begin understanding the financial consequences of living in a Nordic country rather than 

the U.S., consider the cost of owning and operating a pickup truck, which is one of the most 

popular personal vehicles in the U.S. We take the case of one of the smaller trucks, the Ford 

Ranger, because the larger pickups are difficult to obtain, park, and so on in a Nordic country.69

The truck starts at $24,300 in the U.S., as compared with about $40,500 in Finland (including 

 

68 U.S. temporary employment is about 2 percent of overall employment (Saint Louis Federal Reserve series 

TEMPHELPS and PAYEMS), whereas it ranges from 9 to 17 percent in the Nordic countries (Svalund 2013).

69 Even smaller pickup trucks are comparatively rare in the Nordic countries, in large part because of the additional 

expenses of documented here.

Table 4. Regulation Policies in the U.S. and Nordic Countries, 2013

Regulation policy Denmark Finland Iceland Norway Sweden

Nordic 

average U.S. OECD average

Product markets 1.2 1.3 1.5 1.5 1.5 1.4 1.6 1.7

 Public ownership 2.8 3 2.6 3.3 3.4 3 3 2.7

 Price controls 0.6 0.9 1.4 0.7 0.4 0.8 2.6 1.4

 Command and control regulation 1.4 1.7 1.3 1.2 1.6 1.5 2.2 1.9

Employment protection 2.1 2.4 2 2.2 2.5 2.3 0.5 2.0

Addendum: temp employment as % of total 10 13 9 7 13 10 2

Sources: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; European Commission.

Levels

Note: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development measures of regulatory strictness. Organization for Economic 

Cooperation and Development product-market measures for the U.S. refer to New York state only. Each table entry is a regulation 

index, with a higher value referring to more regulation.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 34

VAT). Fuel taxes, which are higherin the Nordic countries than the U.S., and the fact that paying 

these expenses requires work and thereby further tax expenses, also adds the cost of 

ownership in the Nordic countries. As a result, owning and operating a pickup truck costs the 

average worker in a Nordic country substantially more than it costs the average American 

worker. In the U.S., 4.4 hours of work per week is enough to earn, after labor income taxes, 

enough to pay toward the purchase price and to pay the fuel costs. The average worker in a 

Nordic country has to work between 6.0 hours per week in Denmark and 11.9 hours per week

in Finland, as shown in figure 6. The greater ownership costs in the Nordic countries reflect a 

combination of higher retail prices (including VAT), higher fuel costs, lesser wage rates, and 

somewhat greater marginal tax rates on labor income.

Figure 7 extends the pickup-truck results to all goods and services in the economy by using the 

real income and production statistics. The blue bars show real GDP per capita in the home 

country relative to the average for the entire U.S.70 Four of the bars are negative, meaning that 

those countries have less GDP per capita. Despite being an oil-rich country, Norway’s average 

GDP per capita is only somewhat above the U.S. average, and is 13 percent below the average 

GDP per capita in the oil-rich State of Alaska (not shown in the figure).

Furthermore, it has been noted that the true U.S./Nordic output gap is likely even greater 

because the U.S. has more nonmarket household production, such as at-home child care or 

 

70 Note that GDP includes both private and public sectors and therefore resources received by households from 

the public sector. The U.S./Nordic gap for disposable income would be even more dramatic.

4.4

6.0

7.1

8.5

11.9

0

5

10

15

US Denmark Norway Sweden Finland

Figure 6. Weekly Cost of Owning and Operating a Pickup Truck, by 

Country

Hours of work needed to earn the after-tax income to cover the cost

Sources: Ford Motor Company; Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development; Wall Street Journal.

Note: Estimates are based off the starting price for a Ford Ranger XL. U.S. estimate uses starting price for the 2019 

model. Operating costs are taked to be fuel for 1,000 miles per month. These are costs for personal ownership. Local

currency units are converted to weekly work hours using OECD estimates of the average full-time-equivalent wage 

and the marginal tax wedge for the principal earner in a single-earner married-couple family with two children and 

earning the average wage.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 35

home schooling, than Nordic countries do. Nordic countries tend to do more of their child care 

in the marketplace because child care is a government job. As Sherwin Rosen (1997, 82)

described Sweden, “a large fraction of women work in the public sector to take care of the 

children of other women who work in the public sector to care for the parents of the women 

who are looking after their children. If Swedish women take care of each other’s parents in 

exchange for taking care of each other’s children, how much additional real output comes of 

it?”

Figure 7’s red bars show the per capita income of people with Nordic ancestry living in the U.S., 

and therefore not subject to Nordic tax rates and regulations.71 They have incomes of about 30 

percent more than the average American and, based also on the red bars, about 50 percent

more income than the average in their home country. This suggests that the incomes of Nordic 

people are not lower because, apart from public policy, low incomes are somehow part of 

Nordic culture.

However, the difference between the incomes of Nordic people in the U.S. and Nordic people 

living in the Nordic countries is too large to be entirely due to policy differences between the 

two sets of countries. One contributing factor may be that ancestry is self-reported and that, 

holding actual ancestry constant, the propensity to identify with Nordic ancestry may be 

 

71 Most of them were born in the U.S. See also Sanandaji (2015, 2016).

-15

-23

-19

22

-15

35

18

25 26

29

-30

-20

-10

0

10

20

30

40

Living in the home country Living in the U.S.

Figure 7. Income per Capita of People of Nordic Ancestry, by Place 

of Residence, 2014

Relative to U.S. per capita income

Sources: U.S. Census Bureau; CEA calculations. 

Note: International comparisons are for real GDP on a purchasing-power-parity basis.

Danish Finnish Icelandic Norwegian Swedish
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 36

correlated with income. Another factor may be that there was positive self-selection bias 

among Nordic emigrants to the United States. That is, those who emigrated from the Nordic 

countries to the United States would be earning more than the home country average if they 

and their families had not emigrated.72

Another indicator of differences in material well-being in the Nordic economies and the United 

States is average individual consumption per head. Table 5 reports average individual 

consumption per head at current prices and exchange rates, adjusted for purchasing power 

parity, with the United States indexed to 100. In 2016, the most recent year for which data are

available, average individual consumption per head was 31 percent lower in Denmark than in 

the United States, and 32 percent lower in Sweden than in the United States. The only Nordic 

economy in which average consumption is within 20 percent of the U.S. level is Norway, where 

average consumption per head is 82 percent of the U.S. level.

Though the Nordic economies exhibit lower output and consumption per capita, they also 

exhibit lower levels of relative income inequality as conventionally measured. Table 6 reports 

Gini coefficients, a standard way of measuring inequality, for disposable income after taxes 

and transfers in the Nordic economies and United States in 2015. On average, the U.S. Gini 

coefficient is 0.1 percentage point higher than the Nordic economies’, indicating higher relative 

 

72 However, recent research suggests the sign of selection bias for Nordic emigrants is ambiguous. Specifically, 

Abramitzky, Boustan, and Eriksson (2012) study Norwegian emigration to the United States during the “Age of 

Mass Migration,” from 1850 to 1913, exploiting within-household variation in emigration status to compare 

outcomes for Norwegian brothers who emigrated versus those who did not. They find negative selection bias 

among migrants from urban areas, and mixed results for those from rural areas. These results are also consistent 

with those of Borjas (1987, 1991).

Denmark 69

Finland 70

Iceland 69

Norway 82

Sweden 68

United States 100

Note: Actual Individual Consumption (AIC) consists of the consumption goods and services acquired by individual households. According 

to the Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, AIC is the sum of three components: 1) "The value of households’ 

expenditures on consumption goods or services including expenditures on nonmarket goods or services sold at prices that are not 

economically significant"; 2) "The value of the expenditures incurred by government units on individual consumption goods or services 

provided to households as social transfers in kind"; and 3) "The value of the expenditures incurred by NPISHs on individual consumption 

goods or services provided to households as social transfers in kind."

Table 5. Actual Individual Consumption Per Head at Current Price and Purchasing Power 

Parity, United States = 100

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, National Accounts.

Countries 2016
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 37

income inequality. The Palma ratio—the ratio of disposable income at the 90th percentile to 

disposable income at the 50th percentile—is also higher in the United States than in the Nordic 

countries, as reported in table 6.

By some measures, even poor American households have better living standards than the 

average person living in a Nordic country. Using 1999 data, Fredrik Bergström and Robert 

Gidehag (2004) found that all the States of the United States had a smaller percentage of 

households with incomes below $25,000 than Sweden did. As a country, the percentage was 

less than 30 for the United States, as compared with more than 40 for Sweden. Robert Rector 

and Kirk Johnson (2004) reviewed evidence from a sample of 15 European countries and found 

that homes were smaller for the average in all three of the sample’s Nordic countries (Denmark, 

Finland, and Sweden) than they were for poor households in the United States.

The income and production results from this section, and the health results from the third 

section above, suggests that there are significant opportunity costs of pursuing Nordic public 

policies. One might guess that the opportunity costs of pursuing even more socialist public 

policies—current American socialists are proposing as much—are even greater. The fifth 

section therefore turns to the evidence from highly socialist countries.

Nordic Colleges Are Free, but Are They Worth It?

An OECD study of education systems reports that college tuitions are zero in Denmark, Finland, 

and Norway (OECD 2018a).

73 Given that modern American socialists advocate free college paid 

for by the Federal government, it is worth looking at the Nordic experience in this area to see 

 

73 No data were reported for Iceland or Sweden.

Denmark 0.26 1.7

Finland 0.26 1.7

Iceland* 0.25 1.7

Norway 0.26 1.7

Sweden 0.27 1.7

United States 0.39 2.3

Table 6. Relative Income Inequality, 2015

Country

Gini coefficient

(disposable income, post taxes and transfers)

Palma ratio

(P90/P50 disposable income decile ratio)

Note: Data for Iceland are for 2014.

Source: Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development, National Accounts.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 38

whether, consistent with the economics of socialism, offering college for free affects its 

quality.74

The same OECD study estimates that, while many American students pay tuition, Americans 

are somewhat more likely to attain tertiary education on average. In comparison with the 

tertiary schooling returns in the Nordic countries, American college graduates get their tuition 

back with interest, and also a lot more. To put it another way, the rates of return to a college 

education in Nordic countries are low, and propensities to invest are not high, despite the fact 

that such an investment requires no tuition payments out of pocket.

Figure 8’s bars, measured on in U.S. dollars adjusted for purchasing power parity, shows the 

OECD’s estimates of net present financial value of a college education in the four countries, for 

men, discounted with an 8 percent interest rate.75 The OECD’s estimates of the financial payoff 

to a U.S. college education are far greater, despite the fact that tuition payments count as 

negatives in the calculations.

 

74 See the College for All Act of 2017, introduced in the U.S. Senate as S. 806, with eight senators sponsoring or 

cosponsoring it.

75 The country pattern is similar with the lesser discount rates also shown by the OECD, and similar for women 

(although female returns are not shown with the 8 percent rate). Among the various discount rates used by the 

OECD (2018a), the CEA uses the one closest to the net marginal product of physical capital. 

-$2,400

$21,800

$27,500

$108,700

-20,000

0

20,000

40,000

60,000

80,000

100,000

120,000

Norway Denmark Finland U.S.

Figure 8. Net Lifetime Private Financial Returns for a Male Attaining 

Tertiary Education

Equivalent U.S. dollars converted using PPP for GDP

Source: Organization for Cooperation and Development; Education at a Glance.

Note: For 2017, discounted at an 8 percent annual real discount rate. PPP is purchasing power parity.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 39

The calculations are comparing two lifetime cash-flow profiles: (a) beginning work after high 

school and getting the earnings (after taxes) associated with that level of education and (b) 

earning nothing during the college years, and paying tuition (if any), but then earning (after 

taxes) associated with a college education. Note that high-school profile (a) has positive cash 

flows during the college ages, whereas college profile (b) has negative or zero cash flows 

according to the amount of tuition. A positive value means that the investing the positive 

college age cash flows from the high-school profile (a) at 8 percent yields less than the 

borrowing to pay tuition if any and then enjoying the extra earnings associated with college. A 

negative value, as for Norway, means that a student who could invest his high school earnings 

at 8 percent per year (real) would be financially ahead by working during his or her college ages 

rather than going to college. The U.S. value of $108,700 means that the present value 

(discounted at 8 percent) of the college profile (b) exceeds the present value of the high school 

profile a by $108,700.76

Taxes and tuition subsidies are among the reasons that the financial value of a college 

education varies across countries. Their effects on the results can be removed by looking at 

earnings before taxes and by including public tuition subsidies as a cost. Even from this social 

(private plus public) perspective, the U.S. financial return is more than double the Nordic 

returns.77 This is consistent with the economic hypothesis advanced in the second section 

above that making a good free reduces its quality.78

Socialized Medicine: The Case of Medicare for All

Over the next few decades, the health sector is projected to grow to a fourth or even a third of 

the U.S. economy (CMS 2018a), and a free, single-payer healthcare system continues to be the 

cornerstone of current socialist policy proposals in the United States. The Senate and House 

“Medicare for All” (M4A) plans, sponsored or cosponsored by 141 members of Congress, are 

designed to use the scale economies of a public monopoly to sharply cut costs (S. 1804; H.R. 

 

76 The net present value is even greater if smaller discount rates are used (OECD 2018a, 109).

77 The data provided by OECD (2018a) only permit adding private and social returns when both are discounted at 

2 percent per year.

78 See also Kirkeboen, Leuven, and Mogstad (2016) on the returns to postsecondary education in Norway and 

Murphy, Scott-Clayton, and Wyness (2017) on the effects of free college in England on education expenditure per 

student. Note that the returns pattern in figure 9 cannot be explained by a higher propensity to attain college in 

Nordic countries because the tertiary education attainment rates among persons age 25–54 range from 31 to 35 

percent in the three Nordic countries, whereas the U.S. rate is 36 percent (OECD 2018a, table A1.1; these 

percentages do not include short-cycle tertiary degrees, although conclusions would be similar if they were 

included.).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 40

676).

79 These plans make it unlawful for a private business to sell health insurance, or for a 

private employer to offer health insurance to its employees.80 Although, at the time of passing 

the ACA, it was promised that consumers could keep their doctor or their plan, M4A takes the 

opposite approach: all private health insurance plans will be prohibited after a four-year 

transition period.81

Echoing historic claims about state-run enterprises, it is claimed that the government 

monopoly will be more productive by avoiding “waste” on administrative costs, advertising 

costs, and profits and will use its bargaining power to obtain better deals from healthcare 

providers. Modern journalists and analysts routinely claim that single-payer programs are 

more efficient—and thus are similar in spirit to Lenin and Mao, who justified government 

takeovers on the basis of the virtues of single-payer programs.82

Socialized medicine is an important example of the issues raised by Milton Friedman’s four 

spending categories portrayed in figure 1 above. It has individuals (government employees) 

spending others people’s money (taxpayers) on other people than themselves (program 

participants). The first issue concerns the inefficient financing of a program when using other 

 

79 See also Sanders (2017).

80 More precisely, M4A makes it unlawful for private companies or employers to sell or offer health insurance that 

covers “medically necessary or appropriate” hospital services, or ambulatory patient services, or primary and 

preventive services, or prescription drugs, or medical devices, or biological products, or mental health services, 

or substance abuse treatment, or laboratory/diagnostic services, or reproductive care, or maternity care, or 

newborn care, or pediatrics, or oral health services, or audiology services, or vision services, or short-term 

rehabilitative and habilitative services and devices (Sections 107 and 201 of the Medicare for All Act of 2017 and 

Section 104 of the House bill). The House bill (Section 102) adds dietary and nutritional therapies, long-term care, 

palliative care, chiropractic services, and podiatric care to the list of services that cannot be lawfully covered by 

private or employer plans. It has been noted that M4A does not turn health providers into government employees 

(although Section 103 of the House bill requires all participating providers to surrender their for-profit status). 

Nevertheless, because the bill makes private health insurance unlawful, health providers have no choice but to 

receive their income and instructions from the Federal government or from the relatively few people who want to 

purchase their services without insurance. Recall that the definition of socialism does not much distinguish 

between means of production that are owned from means of production that are regulated by the state.

81 This also echoes back to the socialization of agriculture. For example, the Chinese Communist Party’s 

collectivization agenda was initially discouraged by the “deep attachment” of the peasants to their land (Walker 

1965, 4).

82 See Kliff (2014), Frank (2017), and Konrad (2017). See also Weisbart (2012). The China scholar Peter Nolan (1988, 

4) warns that “none [of socialism’s errors] has been so important as the misplaced belief in the virtues of largescale . . . units of production.”
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 41

people’s money, and the second issue concerns the low productivity of a program in 

translating tax revenues into outputs valued by participants such as improved health.83

In this section, we assess the evidence for the financing and program productivity issues raised 

by “Medicare for All.” We define this program as having a monopoly public insurance plan and, 

unlike any Nordic country, zero out-of-pocket spending at the time of healthcare service.84 The 

price paid to the government monopoly in health insurance, the analog to revenue received by 

private plans, would be determined through tax policy. For those analyses that are 

quantitative, we focus on the year 2022, giving M4A a reasonable amount of time to be adopted 

and implemented.

The quality or productivity of the monopoly plan would be determined through centrally 

planned rules and regulations. As opposed to a market with competition, if a patient did not 

like the tax charged or the quality of the care provided by the government monopoly, he or she 

would have no recourse. In addition, price competition in healthcare itself, as opposed to 

health insurance, would be completely eliminated because all the prices paid to providers and 

suppliers of healthcare would be set centrally by the single payer. The plan also differs from 

the currently popular Medicare program by eliminating cost sharing; by preventing private 

health plans from competing, as in the Medicare Advantage program; by preventing private 

markets from supplementing the public program; and, according to the House bill, by 

prohibiting healthcare providers from earning profits. Moreover, even if M4A made no changes 

to Medicare operations, it still would have the problem of taking a program that functions well 

for about a sixth of the population and making it work on a vastly larger scale.

A smaller economy is one of the adverse effects, due to M4A’s disincentives to work and earn.

If financed solely through higher taxes, we find that the program would reduce long-run GDP 

by 9 percent and household incomes after taxes and health expenditures by 19 percent.

Evidence on the productivity and effectiveness of single-payer systems suggests that M4A 

would reduce longevity and health, particularly among the elderly, while only minimally

increasing the fraction of the population with health insurance.

 

83 Other policy areas, such as public primary and secondary schools, have elements of figure 1. M4A is different in 

that it prohibits private competition. Moreover, public schools compete against each other in suburban areas, 

whereas M4A has no such mechanism. Perhaps the closest schooling analogy would be urban public school 

systems before the advent of charter schools, magnet schools, and voucher systems. The earlier urban systems 

proved to be less productive than private schools (Neal 1997, 1998). Perhaps the ultimate indicator of the 

additional value created by having private schools is that a great many families pay tuition at those schools even 

while their public school is “free.”

84 For out-of-pocket payments for Nordic countries, see Rice et al. (2018) and Globerman (2016).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 42

Financing “Medicare for All”

The first issue with implementing such a program is its financing. In 2022, the Centers for 

Medicare and Medicaid Services (CMS), which administers most government-financed 

healthcare, projects that the private sector will spend $1.47 trillion on private health insurance 

and $0.46 trillion in out-of-pocket health expenses, in an economy with a total GDP of $24.35 

trillion.85

Because healthcare is free at the time of service to users under M4A, and otherwise would not 

be “free” for those not on government programs, M4A increases healthcare utilization at 

Federal expense. We use Blahous’s extra-utilization estimate (2018) of $0.44 trillion in 2022 for 

a total addition to Federal spending of $2.37 trillion. Without M4A, $2.37 trillion would be 9.7 

percent of GDP, or 11.7 percent of consumption, or an average of about $18,000 per 

household.

86

Using these estimates, we first consider what the size of spending cuts would need to be if no 

new additional taxes were imposed. We find that in order to pay for M4A with the same 

spending cuts across all existing Federal programs, these cuts would need to be 53 percent 

across the board in 2022. In other words, without additional taxes, all other programs of the 

Federal government would need to be cut by more than half. This would imply cuts to Social 

Security of about $0.7 trillion, to (the existing part of) Medicare of about $0.4 trillion, and to the 

Department of Defense’s budget of about $0.4 trillion. 

If these cuts were made outside Medicare, 79 percent of Social Security would need to be cut, 

of about $1.0 trillion per year; and for the Department of Defense, of about $0.6 trillion per year.

Excluding Social Security from the cuts would require cuts to Medicare of 74 percent, or about 

$0.6 trillion per year, and to the Department of Defense, about $0.6 trillion per year.

 

85 National Health Expenditure Accounts projections, tables 1 and 3. These expenses include spending by 

government employees and premiums for their health plans. Here we assume that governments compete for

workers with the private sector, where workers are compensated according to their marginal product. Holding 

constant, for the moment, the amount and allocation of labor, untying health insurance from employment means 

that both private and government workers receive the same compensation, but more of it in cash. In effect, the 

Federal government ends up spending more on Federal employees because their compensation is the same; but 

additionally, these employees are among those drawing on Medicare.

86 Assuming that 17 percent of GDP is investment, that puts private purchases at 11.7 percent of consumption 

(public and private consumption combined). The CEA has not yet considered the even large amount of Federal 

health spending that would occur if the most comprehensive list of covered services were adopted in reconciling 

the Senate and House M4A bills.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 43

It has been argued that the population would be no worse off financing M4A solely with taxes 

because these new taxes would simply replace the cost of premiums paid to private sector 

insurers. This argument ignores that taxation distorts economic activity and that therefore the 

cost of tax revenues are larger than the revenues themselves, the so-called excess burden or 

deadweight loss of taxes in excess of the revenues. To illustrate, if the government imposed a 

per-passenger tax of $1 million on air travel, it would collect virtually no revenue because no 

one would fly, but it would impose a large burden on the population in excess of the revenue 

collected by replacing air travel with cars and other types of ground transportation. The 

existing empirical literature finds that this burden is about 50 cents on the dollar, so that the 

cost of collecting the taxes to fund M4A in a year is about 1.5 times the additional revenue 

needed to fund the larger program (Feldstein 1999; Saez, Slemrod, and Giertz 2012; Weber 

2014).

87

Between the two extreme funding scenarios, funding M4A entirely by cuts in spending or 

entirely by tax increases, lies a middle ground of using both spending cuts and tax increases in 

combination. This was indeed the observed path for the most recent Federal healthcare 

expansion in the U.S., through the ACA. The Congressional Budget Office (CBO) estimated that

this program was about evenly funded by tax increases and by spending cuts to Medicare and 

Medicaid (CBO 2009).

88 Indeed, for a program as large as proposed, it is unclear whether 

sufficient tax revenue can feasibly be collected in the presence of tax avoidance behavior,

particularly by the higher-income populations that provide the largest share of total Federal

tax revenues. If the amount of maximum revenue collected, the height of the so-called Laffer 

curve, is below what is required in new funding, then spending cuts are required, regardless of 

whether lawmakers would prefer to finance the entire program with taxes.

Implications for the Value of the Program and Health Outcomes

The second issue with socialized medicine concerns the quality or productivity of the program 

in translating the tax revenue collected into value to beneficiaries. This value is partly but not 

fully measured in terms of the population’s improved health, because the population may not 

value the health or healthcare provided as much as is spent on it—a general concern forin-kind 

programs such as healthcare. To illustrate, according to CMS, in 2016 about $7,565 was spent 

per Medicaid beneficiary (Kless, Wolfe, and Curtis 2017). If Medicaid beneficiaries were given 

 

87 The excess burden rate is larger, and potentially infinite, when considering particularly large increases in 

revenue, as with M4A.

88 It is sometimes said that the ACA increased the Medicare insolvency date, which is another way of saying that 

part of the ACA’s funding came from a combination of Medicare tax increases and Medicare spending cuts. It is 

also asserted that the ACA cut Medicare provider payment rates without cutting benefits but that ignores, among 

other things, the fact that Medicare Advantage plans offer nonrequired benefits and would cut them if payments 

were insufficient.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 44

this spending to allocate as they see best, it is unlikely they would spend it all on health 

insurance. The problem ultimately comes back to inefficiencies of spending other people’s 

money on other people; here, CMS is spending tax dollars on beneficiaries.

We consider the impact on healthcare for and the overall health of the current Medicare 

population above age 65, which under both spending cuts and tax increases are likely to be 

adversely affected. In expanding the size of the eligible population of the program, those who 

arecurrently eligible are unlikely to benefit. The evidence for a trade-off between universal and 

senior healthcare is supported by both the European single-payer experience that limits care 

for the elderly compared with the U.S., as well as the recent domestic U.S. reforms in terms of 

the ACA that cut Medicare spending by $802 billion to help fund expansions for younger age 

groups (CBO 2015).

M4A would replace an existing system of financing. The existing system has private insurance 

as well as insurance for the lower-income households, with essentially zero deductibles, in the 

Medicaid program. It also has Medicare for the elderly, and the ACA for the nonelderly who are 

ineligible for Medicaid. It also has uncompensated emergency care, given that hospitals are 

banned from turning away emergency care. Therefore, changing the financing of health leaves

little room to improve health among U.S. citizens. Yes, the current system has some nonMedicaid eligible citizens who are uninsured, but by all estimates they are healthy people, 

which is why they choose not to purchase an ACA plan (CBO 2017).

Under the existing system, the primary financial limits on healthcare utilization are 

copayments and deductibles, which are put in place to keep premiums affordable by limiting 

overconsumption of free healthcare at the time of service. M4A would eliminate copayments 

and deductibles for everyone. Holding fixed the aggregate supply of healthcare, M4A thereby 

reduces health and longevity by reallocating healthcare from high-value uses to low-value

ones. In addition, M4A reduces the aggregate supply of healthcare by reducing payments to 

providers, by discouraging innovation, and by using a centralized bureaucracy to allocate 

resources.

We illustrate the evidence forthe relationship between single-payer programs, healthcare, and 

health outcomes, including short-run effects, assuming that it has no impact on medical 

innovation, as well as long-run effects that incorporate changes in incentives for innovation 

and the resulting impact on future health. 

Cross-country evidence on the effects of universal healthcare on elderly healthcare and health 

outcomes. Proponents of M4A often refer to European-style programs of socialized medicine as 

their role model, but the European programs appear to deliver less healthcare to the elderly 
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 45

and result in worse health outcomes for them. 89 There is well-documented evidence that 

insufficient reimbursements to suppliers leads to a rationing of care, for example, through 

waiting times. For instance, there is age discrimination in coverage for certain procedures 

(Cullis, Jones, and Propper 2000). Such age discrimination in coverage occurs because there is 

no competition between plans under a monopoly. If there were, presumably plans would 

emerge that offered the care not covered by the government monopoly.

More systematic evidence has been documented about the elderly’s worse health outcomes in 

Europe compared with the United States. In 1960—before Medicare—the U.S. ranked below 

most EU countries for longevity among those age 50–74, yet above them among those age 75

and higher. Ho and Preston (2010) have documented that theU.S. outperforms many European 

countries in the longevity of individuals age 75 and higher. They argue that the U.S. healthcare 

system is performing especially well for older patients through better diagnosis and treatment 

of diseases of older people.

Recent evidence has suggested that healthcare is an important determinant for these longevity 

differences in cancer care in particular. Cancer is the leading cause of death in many developed 

countries, especially among older individuals, and an important component of overall U.S. 

healthcare. Philipson and others (2012) found that U.S. cancer patients live longer than cancer 

patients in 10 countries that belong to the European Union, after the same diagnosis, due to 

the additional spending on higher-quality cancer care in the U.S. Figure 9 shows the results for 

life expectancy after diagnosis.90

Figure 9’s disease-specific evidence is more informative of the benefits of health care than 

often-discussed cross-country comparisons of nationally aggregated outcomes, such as 

overall population longevity and aggregate health care spending. There are many 

determinants of overall population health other than healthcare—such as diet, exercise, genes, 

and violence—that differ across countries. These factors may be more prone to lead to lower 

U.S. longevity even while U.S. healthcare is of higher quality. The fact that U.S. exports 

specialized care to many foreigners that can afford to come to the U.S. to receive it is perhaps 

the strongest indication of its superior quality. The general pattern of medical tourism is that 

the United States exports high-quality care while importing low-cost care (Woodman 2015).

 

89 Note that a number of European countries—such as Belgium, Germany, and Switzerland—have universal 

healthcare without having a single-payer system.

90 Between the two continents, difference not attributable to a different propensity to screen for cancer in the U.S.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 46

A U.S. single-payer system would have adverse long-run effects on global health through reduced 

innovation. There is much theoretical and empirical economic analysis concluding that 

lowering prices for innovative industries often has short-run benefits that are dominated by 

long-run costs. Lowering prices by having a single payer for innovative healthcare technologies 

is analogous to reducing patent lives, for both reduce the return to medical research-anddevelopment (R&D) investments. Both have short-term benefits lowering prices for existing

technologies, but at the cost of reducing the flow of new technologies that ultimately lower the 

real price of health.

Existing evidence suggests that innovation has been valuable in healthcare, in the sense that 

the health generated by innovation exceeded its additional costs (Cutler 2004). Put more 

simply, if a health plan offered the lower premiums and quality of care of the 1970s, it would 

likely not pass the market test. Because world innovation relies so heavily on the U.S. market 

to support it, adopting an M4A program would likely adversely affect innovation because the 

world market for new innovations would shrink. A large body of literature looks at the effects 

of market size on innovation. For example, using the passage of the Medicare Prescription 

Drug, Improvement, and Modernization Act of 2003 as a source of variation, Blume-Kohout and 

Sood (2013) find an elasticity with respect to market size of between 2.4 to 4.7 for Phase 1 

clinical trials. These estimates are well within the range of the work of Acemoglu and Linn 

(2004), who find an elasticity of 3.5 for approved new molecular entities. Moreover, these 

8.5

9.2

9.7

10.2

11.1

7.1

7.6

7.9

8.4

9.3

7

8

9

10

11

12

1983–5 1986–8 1989–91 1992–4 1995–9

Figure 9. Trends in Average Survival from a Cancer Diagnosis in the 

United States and 10 European Countries

Life expectancy post-diagnosis (years)

Source: Philipson et al. (2012).

Note: Results are standardized by age, gender, and cancer site. Includes EU countries for which survival data were 

consistently available over the analysis period: Finland, France, Germany, Iceland, Norway, Slovakia, Slovenia, 

Scotland, Sweden, and Wales.

United States

European Union
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 47

results are consistent with evidence on the impact of public policy on market size.91 Although

these long-run effects on a reduced pace of innovation are more difficult to quantify, they may 

well be more important than the short-run effects of spending less on elder care.

U.S. patients and taxpayers alike have financed the returns on R&D investments to innovators. 

Unlike other developed countries with single-payer systems, which nearly all impose some sort 

of price controls, the U.S. market is less financed by the public sector and more open to market 

forces. In a free market, prices of products reflect their value as opposed to prices in 

government-controlled markets, which reflect political trade-offs. Among the OECD member 

nations, more than 70 percent of patented pharmaceutical profits come from sales to U.S. 

patients, even though the United States only represents 34 percent of the OECD’s GDP at 

purchasing power parity (CEA 2018b).

Take the case of pharmaceutical innovation to improve patient health. Empirical research in 

this industry and others has shown that R&D investments are positively related to market size. 

For the case of medical innovation,evidence suggests that a 1 percent reduction in market size 

reduces innovation—defined as the number of new drugs launched—by as much as 4 percent 

(Acemoglu and Linn 2004).

Given that future profitability drives investment in this way, Lakdawalla and others (2009) 

examined the impact on medical innovation of the U.S. adopting European-style price 

controls. The study examined patients over the age of 55 and considered the reduction in R&D 

and new drugs approved that these price controls would cause. The paper examined increases 

in mortality for the heart disease, hypertension, diabetes, cancer, lung disease, stroke, and 

mental illness. The major finding is displayed in figure 10. Given that innovations are financed 

by world returns mostly earned in the U.S., the mortality effects on health were substantial 

both in the U.S. and in Europe.

If M4A would entail the same experience with below-market prices as other countries with 

socialized medicine, it would reduce the world market size and thereby medical innovation, 

and ultimately mean that future patients would forgo the health gains that would have come 

from these forgone innovations. 

 

91 For example, Finkelstein (2004) finds a 2.5-fold increase in the number of new vaccine clinical trials for affected 

diseases following the adoption of three public health policies aimed at raising vaccination rates, and Yin (2008) 

finds that the introduction of the Orphan Drug Act raised the flow of new clinical trials for rare diseases by 182

percent in the three years following the passage of the policy.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 48

Economies of scale in insurance. Many observers argue that a major benefit to adopting singlepayer healthcare is that the costs of producing health insurance by a state monopoly would be 

lower than under competition. The evidence on this comes from a body of literature on socalled administrative costs of health insurance that do not directly go toward paying for care 

for beneficiaries. In order to hold regulation constant, Sood and others (2008) analyzed 

administrative costs within a singleU.S. State, California. They considered administrative costs 

and profit levels as the residual of the premium revenue spent on health care to beneficiaries. 

They found that in 2006, profit levels of private plans were significantly below the average for

all Standard & Poor’s 500 companies (5 vs. 7.5 percent), which, given the existence of 

government plans, makes profits only 2 or 3 percent of overall health spending. Sood and 

others further found that private plans spend about 12 percent on administrative costs, 

whereas Medicare costs were 5 percent plus the administrative costs of intermediaries that 

collect premiums and process Medicare claims. 

As discussed by Philipson (2013), the focus on administrative costs omits other important 

costs, and forgone opportunities, of the state monopoly approach. Under a government 

monopoly health insurer, the plan is financed with taxes rather than voluntarily paid 

premiums. As previously discussed, the economic cost of taxes is not merely the revenue that 

arrives in the Treasury but also the distortions of household and business decisions induced by 

taxes. This applies to administrative costs as well so that $1.00 in administrative costs in the 

private sector is equivalent to about $1.50 in administrative costs in the public sector. 

-0.1

-0.5 -0.5

-0.6

-0.7

-0.1

-0.2

-0.4

-0.4

-0.7

-0.8

-0.7

-0.6

-0.5

-0.4

-0.3

-0.2

-0.1

0.0

2010 2030 2040 2050 2060

U.S. population EU population

Figure 10. Effect of U.S. Drug Price Controls on Global Longevity, 

Among Those Age 55–59 Years in the United States and Europe, 

2010–60

Changes in life expectancy (years)

Source: Lakdawalla et al. (2009).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 49

In addition, this argument ignores the vital role that private “administrative” expenses—such 

as marketing, profits, and utilization controls—play in driving competition and innovation in 

the marketplace. Administrative costs also help prevent fraud, which is estimated to be about 

10 percent of Medicare and Medicaid spending.

92 That is, by having low administrative costs, 

CMS does not minimize fraud, which raises the total cost of the programs.

93 In addition, private 

plans reduce overall costs by aggressively reviewing healthcare utilization under the plan. As a 

result of competition among plans, lower overall costs are passed on to consumers as lower 

premiums,even though a greater percentage of those costs may be administrative. In contrast, 

a public program does not engage in premium competition. Fraud and a lack of utilization

controls are natural consequences of the fact that the public program is “spending other 

people’s money” (as explained in the second section of this report). Beneficiaries, workers, and

shareholders of private plans would not tolerate the higher premiums or lower wages or 

dividends that would be the result of lax utilization controls or high levels of fraud. 

The apparent efficiency of CMS compared with private insurers may also simply be a product 

of inadequate accounting. Medicare’s per-enrollee administrative costs are close to those of 

private insurers. Sood and others (2008) find that Medicare spends $471 per enrollee on 

administrative costs, close to the $493 in for-profit plans, and actually above the $427 spent 

across all California health plans. Medicare’s administrative costs as a share of medical 

spending are smaller only because medical spending is higher for the 65-plus population in the 

program compared with the population below 65 that is privately insured. Last, part of the 

difference in administrative spending between private insurers and CMS is due to State 

premium taxes paid by private insurers, from which CMS is exempt. 

Healthcare providers, as distinct from health plans, spend significant time and resources on 

administrative costs (Woolhandler, Campbell, and Himmelstein 2003; Himmelstein 2014).

Some of these costs serve the economic functions noted above, such as controlling fraud and 

overutilization; but others are specifically related to billing. It is asserted (e.g., by Weisbart 

2012) that a single-payer system would eliminate many billing-related expenses, but these

savings may not materialize, given that the Federal payer will be issuing new regulations as it 

attempts to deal with the myriad of different circumstances that can arise among the 325 

million people who would be on the single government plan.

 

92 The GA0 (2017, 2018) reports that in 2016, CMS found that the improper payment rate was 11 percent (about $41 

billion) for Medicare and 10.5 percent (about $36 billion) for Medicaid. Not surprisingly, underpayments account 

for only a small share (1 percent) of improper payments, the rest being overpayments. The Medicaid Fraud Control 

Unit reports (Murrin 2018) that over the last five years, fraud has accounted for nearly 75 percent of all its 

convictions. 

93 The CEA notes that whether fraud is a social cost depends on how the fraud “industry” is organized.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 50

If the government can lower costs by eliminating profits and marketing without hurting quality 

or innovation, the question then arises as to why policymakers and voters would not want to 

socialize many other sectors and have the government run most of the economy. Not even 

current socialists in the U.S. are proposing socialism on such a scale. The question therefore 

arises, what is unique about health care that makes a government monopolist more efficient 

in this sector? In many other industries, economists have generally found that production costs 

under a monopoly are larger than with competition. Monopolies that are owned in whole or in 

part by the government incur higher costs than private corporations that operate 

competitively. The seminal research by Boardman and Vining (1989) found robust evidence 

that state-owned and mixed enterprises are less efficient than private corporations. More 

recent work has examined the inefficiencies and higher costs incurred by public monopolies in 

the education and corrections sectors (Hoxby 2014; Gaes 2008). Once these factors are taken 

into account, Medicare’s efficiency advantage becomes illusory, even if abnormal profits and 

marketing were to be eliminated from the private sector.

The lower quality of socialized medicine, in terms of reduced availability. Beyond the evidence 

on health outcomes discussed above, a major quality attribute of healthcare is how long one 

must wait to be cared for. The highest-quality care may be ineffective if there are delays in 

diagnosis or treatment. For example, delays to diagnose or treat cancer may cause it to spread 

to a point where treatment will not work, so even if a country had great cancer care, it could 

have bad outcomes in terms of cancer mortality if diagnoses or treatment was delayed. This 

major dimension of quality of care may fall with government expansions of care as they 

generate excess demand, and thereby may induce queues with waiting times to access that 

care. Although expansions may expand access to care, if there is a queue for this care, it may 

not be as valuable. 

Because it is “free” at the time of service, the single-payer, universal-coverage system gives 

consumers more reason to consume healthcare (Arrow 1963; Pauly 1968). Also, in the casethat 

it cuts provider reimbursement rates, a single-payer system gives the healthcare industry less 

reason to supply it.94 Something has to determine who gets the scarce provider resources, and 

quality degradation is the typical way that markets make such a determination when prices 

are unable to (Mulligan and Tsui 2016). The quality degradation may take the form of shorter 

appointment times, longer patient travel times, or longer waiting times to receive care.

Waiting times to visit healthcare specialists for seniors are low in the U.S. compared with other 

countries, especially those with a single-payer system. Figure 11 shows the results of a survey 

conducted by the Commonwealth Fund, with single-payer countries shown in red. In 2017, 59 

percent of seniors in Canada waited at least four weeks to see a specialist during the past two

 

94 M4A reduces payments to providers (subtitle B of Title VI of the Senate Medicare for All Act of 2017).
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 51

years. Sweden and Norway had rates of 45 and 54 percent, respectively. Among the 11 

countries analyzed by the survey, the United States had the lowest share, at 21 percent.

Indeed, one does not need to go abroad to see differences in the intended versus actual 

outcomes of socialized medicine. The Veterans Administration (VA) is publicly funded and 

usually offered only publicly provided care to military veterans, until it was recently reformed 

by the Choice Act to give them greater access to private providers.

95 The VA health system had

been plagued by some of the same problems as socialized regimes abroad, such as delays in 

treatment, which forced veterans to wait for necessary medical care.

Effects on Overall Economic Activity

Here we use an extension of the neoclassical growth model to estimate (a) the tax rate increase 

required to finance M4A entirely with taxes on labor income, and (b) the long-run equilibrium 

GDP associated with the higher tax rate.

96 The model is extended to have three goods and 

calibrated to fit the GDP, private health spending, and all other spending in the baseline 

situation of no M4A. The baseline economy has a 48 percent average marginal tax rate on labor 

income, which reflects the combination of various payroll, income, and sales taxes that are 

currently in place in the U.S., including implicit taxes on employment and income. Private 

 

95 For more information on the Choice Act, see https://www.va.gov/opa/choiceact/documents/choice-actsummary.pdf.

96 The long-run GDP effects would be of greater magnitude if partially financed with capital-income taxes.

21

22

24

37

41

42

45

45

51

54

55

59

0 10 20 30 40 50 60

United States

Switzerland

Netherlands

Germany

CMWF Average

France

Sweden

New Zealand

United Kingdom

Norway

Australia

Canada

Figure 11. Seniors Who Waited at Least Four Weeks to See a 

Specialist during the Past Two Years, 2017

Percent

Source: Canadian Institute for Health Information (2018). 

Note: Single-payer systems are shown in red, as compiled by Ghanta (2013) from World Health Organization sources. 

CMWF Average refers to the average of the 11 countries in the Commonwealth Fund survey. Results exclude 

respondents who never attempted to get an appointment.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 52

health spending is assumed to be exempt from labor income taxation, which is an 

approximation of the current situation in which employer-sponsored insurance premiums are 

exempt.

This model is then used to simulate the effect of raising the tax rate across the board enough 

so that government revenue is sufficient to pay for all of healthcare (as noted at the beginning 

of this section, about $18,000 additional taxation per household in 2022) without cutting any 

other government programs. Although a significant amount of tax revenue and a significant 

reduction in disposable income are obtained by broadening the tax base (private health 

spending may be legally deductible under M4A, but its amount is assumed to be zero), the rate 

must still increase by 14 percentage points across the board in order for the Federal 

government to have enough revenue to pay for the Nation’s health expenditures.

97

As a measure of the average incentive to work, the average after-tax share kept by households 

at the margin is reduced by 27 percent due to the higher tax rate. National income and GDP are 

thereby reduced by 9 percent in the long run, as illustrated in table 7, where national income 

falls from 100 to 91.0.

98 In 2022, for example, 9 percent of GDP is expected to be about $7,000 

per person, or $17,000 per household. Although private health expenditures are eliminated, 

the amount of income that the private sector has after taxes and health expenditures still falls 

by 19 percent (about $17,000 per household in 2022) because the tax rate is higher and M4A 

removes a major tax exclusion. In other words, M4A is not just a swap of taxes for private health 

spending. Moving health spending onto the Federal budget reduces the private sector so much 

that households are spending 19 percent less on nonhealth items than they would be without 

M4A. From a national perspective, healthcare is a lot more expensive with M4A than it is without 

it, because households not only need to pay for healthcare through taxes but also the economy 

is smaller.

 

97 The CEA is working on a more detailed macroeconomic model that recognizes that (a) the health-insurance tax 

exclusion is in effect a negative tax on employment because it is tied to employment, (b) the ACA is a positive tax 

on employment (Mulligan 2015), and (c) that government health spending is of a different quality than private 

spending. Both a and b are eliminated by M4A. In order to be conservative about the economic harm of M4A, the 

model used in this report assumes that M4A financing includes substantial broadening of the tax base. Without 

base broadening, it is unclear whether the economy would be capable of generating the tax revenue needed by

M4A.

98 As a comparison with the 9 percent, consider the fourth section’s cross-country finding that changing the U.S. 

policies to those of the Nordic countries when they were at peak socialism would reduce long-run GDP by at least 

19 percent. In other words, the 9 percent effect of M4A is about half the effect of peak Nordic socialism.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 53

The Mercatus Center at George Mason University calculated the cost of M4A from a Federal

accounting perspective as $32 trillion over 10 years (Blahous 2018). This is their version of the 

CEA’s 11.3 addition (34 percent increase, or about $18,000 per household in 2022) to tax 

payments shown in table 7’s second row. Proponents of M4A point out that there is a benefit 

helping to offset the $32 trillion, which is true but incomplete. In the CEA’s framework, the 

offsetting benefit is the reduction in private health spending of 9.5, shown in table 7’s third row

measured on a scale with baseline national income equal to 100. But the economics of 

socialism points to additional effects, one of which is also shown in table 7’s first row: there is 

less national income and therefore substantially less to spend on nonhealth goods and 

services.99 The national income opportunity cost is similar in magnitude to, but not included in, 

Mercatus’ Federal accounting cost estimate or the CEA’s tax increase estimate. The Mercatus 

study did not consider any reduction in national income, which we estimate to be about $20

trillion over 10 years as a result of M4A.

100

 

99 The other cost is the loss of quality of the health spending when it is shifted from private to public, as discussed 

in the previous subsection.

100 The loss of national income is not fully a cost because of the offsetting savings on using less labor and capital 

in the economy. At the same time, the factor savings are not a full offset because factor incomes are subject to 

large tax rates, thereby generating a large gap between the social and private values of factor supplies.

Without M4A With M4A Impact

National income 100 91 -9%

Taxes 33.0 44.3 34%

Private health spending 9.5 0.0 -100%

Taxes and health spending 42.5 44.3 4%

National income – Taxes – Private health 57.5 46.7 -19%

Disposable national income 67.0 46.7 -30%

Note: M4A is financed entirely with taxes. National income without M4A is normalized to 100.

Table 7. The National Accounts With and Without “Medicare for All”

Sources: Bureau of Economic Analysis; CEA calculations.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 54

Conclusions

This report has examined socialism’s historic and current visions and intents, its economic 

features, its impact on economic performance, and its relationship with recent policy 

proposals in the United States. A large body of evidence shows how the high tax rates, state 

monopolies, and centralized control of socialism disincentivize effort and innovation and 

substantially reduce the quantity and quality of a nation’s output. This evidence includes

before/after estimates of the consequences of nationalizing agriculture, and later privatizing 

it; commentary and interpretation from survivors of highly socialist policies; before/after 

estimates of the effects of a socialist takeover of the oil industry; cross-country relationships 

between economic freedom, GDP per worker, and other macroeconomic variables; 

comparisons of the rates of return between “free” and tuition-paid colleges; comparisons of 

conditional mortality between the U.S. and single-payer countries; and application of a broad 

body of economic literature on the effects of raising tax rates.

An open question for socialists is whether they recommend reducing living standards for poor 

and middle-income families if it serves the purpose of making the top 1 percent—or the 

bourgeoisie, or the kulaks, or the landlords, or the giant corporations—worse off too.

Centralized state controls and high tax rates historically delivered such results. The Nordic 

countries abandoned this approach, backing down from high tax rates and finding ways to 

enhance consumer choice and market competition. Even Cuba, China, the USSR, and other 

highly socialist countries eventually permitted private enterprises both in and outside the

agriculture sector to coexist with the state-owned enterprises. With the exceptions of Cuba, 

North Korea, and Venezuela, all the highly socialist countries eventually transitioned to 

primarily private economies.

Despite this evidence, current socialists arguethat U.S. tax rates are not nearly high enough on 

capital income and on top personal incomes, even though these rates are already near or 

above what they are in the Nordic countries. With health insurance, to name one of the major 

industries in the U.S. economy, socialists promise great results if only the state is granted a 

monopoly and its goods and services are distributed free of charge. Such a state enterprise

would be far larger and more centralized than any the Nordic countries have ever seen. This is 

where the experiences of Cuba, China, the USSR, and other highly socialist countries are 

relevant and worth remembering.

The China scholar Peter Nolan (1988, 4) once advocated socialism—until he observed the 

results. He explains that “errors of all kinds have been made in the socialist countries’ rural 

policies, but . . . none has been so important as the misplaced belief in thevirtues of large-scale 

. . . units of production.” He adds that “stimulating the productive forces, and, consequently, 
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 55

the possibilities for human self-fulfillment, in a poor peasant economy (indeed, in any 

economy) requires harnessing . . . market competition.”

The CEA does not expect that socialist policies would cause food shortages in the United 

States, because socialists are no longer proposing to nationalize food production. Rather, the 

historical experience with agriculture is relevant because it involved economic disincentives, 

central planning, and a state monopoly over a sector that was large when socialism was 

introduced—similar to healthcare today. The historical evidence suggests that the socialist 

program for the U.S. would make shortages, or otherwise degrade quality, of whatever product 

or service is put under a public monopoly. The pace of innovation would slow, and living 

standards generally would be lower. These are the opportunity costs of socialism from a 

modern American perspective.
CEA • The Opportunity Costs of Socialism 56

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ABOUT THE COUNCIL OF ECONOMIC ADVISERS 

The Council of Economic Advisers, an agency within the Executive Office of 

the President, is charged with offering the President objective economic 

advice on the formulation of both domestic and international economic 

policy. The Council bases its recommendations and analysis on economic 

research and empirical evidence, using the best data available to support 

the President in setting our nation's economic policy. 

www.whitehouse.gov/cea 

October 2018