The political landscape in the United States continues to become ever more divisive—and ever more incoherent. The Trump administration is engaging in a major program of deregulation and lower taxation at home, while pursuing tariffs and a trade war abroad. Simultaneously, a growing fraction of the Democratic party is moving left from liberalism to progressivism to democratic socialism. Politicians like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren proudly call themselves democratic socialists and advance a vision for the country in which well designed regulations mitigate what they regard as the corrosive the effects and embedded inequality of the capitalist system. They rightly dissociate themselves from the brutality and totalitarianism of the socialist regimes, from the Soviet Union to China to Cuba to Venezuela; their hope is to achieve a state-dominated economy in a benign democratic form.

But how exactly does a socialist economy operate within a democratic system? As if on cue, this question is addressed by President Trump’s Council of Economic Advisors in a timely new report, “The Opportunity Costs of Socialism.” Its conclusion is that socialism cannot succeed even in democratic societies. The Report makes its case in part by showing how once prosperous nations like Cuba and Venezuela have become economic basket cases as formerly democratic institutions gave way to totalitarian rule.

The Council’s Report quickly provoked indignant responses for its “bizarre” juxtapositions of mass atrocities with market distortions. But even if the two issues are rigidly separate, Democratic socialists still have to explain why a system that has failed whenever it has been tried can succeed under their tutelage. To borrow a grandiose phrase from Marx, the internal “contradictions” of socialism doom it to failure. To see why, start with some definitions of socialism. As the Council notes, the Oxford English Dictionary defines socialism as “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.” A somewhat shorter definition speaks of socialism as “collective ownership of the means of production,” in contrast of course with a regime of (bourgeois) private property. This latter regime, according to Marxist theory, “is the final and 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.” More modern democratic socialists tend to soften the claim for state ownership by speaking, as does the democratic socialist journalist Meagan Day, of “pooling society’s resources to meet people’s basic needs.”