US Chamber of Commerce Tour Ignores 250 Years of Socialism

On September 18, the US Chamber of Commerce announced it is launching a six-week, 20-state “Free Enterprise Express Bus” tour to back Republican candidates and “fight for free enterprise.” This big business lobby ignores the fact that, just like “capitalism,” American “democratic socialism” (supported by the voters for generations) is everywhere in our mixed-economy country.

Here is an incomplete list of public goods, services, benefits, and institutions that Democratic candidates can invoke in asking their GOP opponents: “Which one of the following will you tell voters you want to get rid of?”

1. Public Lands - Parks and National Forests
2. Public Schools and Universities
3. Public Transit
4. U.S. Postal Service
5. Public Drinking Water Departments
6. Public Electric Utilities
7. Public Fire Departments
8. Public Libraries
9. Public Roads and Highways
10. VA hospitals
11. Mandatory Minimum Wages
12. SNAP Food Stamps
13. Unemployment Compensation Payments
14. Social Security
15. Medicare
16. Medicaid
17. Head Start
18. Peace Corps and AmeriCorps
19. Meals on Wheels
20. Tennessee Valley Authority (TVA)

The list can go on. During the Vietnam War, the Pentagon begged the big drug companies to work on anti-malaria medicines. Malaria was the second leading cause of hospitalization for US soldiers in that undeclared war. Big Pharma refused, saying there was too little profit in one-time anti-malarial shots, compared with medicines soldiers were taking every day. So, the Pentagon chose socialism, setting up its own drug development entity in its two military hospitals. Pentagon scientists and doctors developed three of the four anti-malaria drugs in use and offered them to any country for use, without imposing patent monopolies.

Probably one of the nation’s earliest and foremost mixed-economy-minded civic founders was Ben Franklin. A successful businessman, he also knew the meaning of the phrase later coined by Amory Lovins: “Markets make a good servant, a bad master, and a worse religion.” Societies have many necessities that markets—meaning private companies—don’t supply when immediate profits are insufficient. Franklin helped create institutions to meet some of those needs: Philadelphia’s subscription Library Company, the volunteer Union Fire Company, and the Academy and College of Philadelphia, a precursor to the University of Pennsylvania. He also played an important role in colonial postal administration. These were not all government-operated public agencies, but they were civic institutions intended to serve broad public purposes.

Public works were crucial in enabling private business enterprises to flourish. Consider the Erie Canal, which opened in 1825 and linked the Hudson River at Albany to Lake Erie at Buffalo. It created a navigable commercial route between the Atlantic economy and the Great Lakes interior, reducing transportation costs and accelerating settlement and trade. The growth of the nation-building national post office is an example of a spectacular universal “democratic socialistic” public institution.

When these and other socialistic enterprises generated consumer or worker demand, private corporate usurpers moved to undermine them, seize a piece of this governmental success and their publicly created value, rip them off as vendors, or persistently disparage these services to get the public to lose confidence in them. This corporate propaganda never stops.

For years, health insurance companies have carved out or hollowed out parts of Medicare and Medicaid. For the former, it is called “Medicare Advantage” (we call it Medicare Disadvantage), a cleverly deceptive trap, heavily advertised for elderly beneficiaries, costing traditional Medicare many billions of dollars a year, going for profits to the likes of giant United Health Care Corp. and Aetna. Both the Biden and Trump Justice Departments have gone after these in-built long exposed corporate frauds.

For example, the Justice Department has pursued Medicare Advantage fraud and False Claims Act cases involving inflated risk scores, unsupported diagnosis codes, and other practices that increase taxpayer payments. Recent settlements include $556 million from Kaiser Permanente affiliates, $172.3 million from Cigna, and up to $98 million from Independent Health. Medicare and Medicaid are highly vulnerable to waste, overpayments, and fraud. Federal estimates placed combined improper payments in the two programs at more than $100 billion in fiscal year 2023 (See Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services (CMS) Fiscal Year 2023 Improper Payments Fact Sheet).

For years, private freight companies have been undermining and restricting the Postal Service’s business—using Congress, for example, to ban the US Postal Service from transporting beer and wine, among other limitations while private carriers may transport alcohol.

The hyper-corporatists do not like to talk about the democratic socialist institutions listed above in taking today’s Democratic Socialists of America to task. So, they seize on some DSA apparatchiks’ media-grabbing declarations such as calls for closing down prisons or defunding the police. Like right-wing extremists, they have learned that to start getting media attention, they have to say off-the-wall or extreme things in absolutist language.

In contrast, elected democratic socialists or candidates generally focus on expanding the frayed “social safety net” for many millions of Americans, restoring taxes on the undertaxed giant companies that pay little or no US income tax or the superrich with their clever tax lawyers, and cracking down on corporate crooks ripping off hard-earned consumer dollars and savings.

To illustrate how modest these elected self-described democratic socialists are, consider New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani. He has never supported, even while a state assemblyman in Albany, repeal of an enormous daily electronic rebate of a tiny sales tax on stock sales. Under legislation signed by Gov. Hugh Carey in 1977 and fully phased in by 1981, Carey agreed to a deal with the stock market brokerage industry, that has rebated hundreds of billions of dollars back to Wall Street. Still, Mamdani, who needs money for his free childcare, free buses and other programs, is unwilling to demand a stop to the rebate. We’re also still waiting for Mayor Mamdani to call for greater enforcement against corporate crime, fraud, and abuses in the city. (See my columns: Mamdani’s Magnificent Primary Win—What Follows, June 27, 2025 and Open Letter to Zohran Mamdani – Political Moderate, December 5, 2025).

To the people of America: You have a people’s economy—much of it still intact—to preserve, strengthen, and bring up to date. Greet the Chamber’s Free Enterprise Bus when it comes to your state (check the Chamber’s website) with signs like: “Stop the Corporate Crime Wave,” or “Get the Rich Off Welfare.”

See my book, Let’s Start the Revolution, Tools for Displacing the Corporate State and Building a Country that Works for the People.