"Replace the frigidity of rugged individualism with the warmth of collectivism!" says my new socialist mayor, Zohran Mamdani.

Sounds so nice.

No more greedy capitalists hoarding wealth. People share. It's the socialist dream.

What will replace capitalism and individualism? One model is the commune—that socialist system where people share, rather than greedily chasing money.

In my new video, TikTokers claim capitalism is "ending." They sing about the beauty of communes. One asks, desperately, "Where is my commune?!"

Good question. They're hard to find because they keep failing.

One of the most famous was founded in 1825 in New Harmony, Indiana. Private property was banned and residents shared everything.

The result?

After just two years, most residents left.

Today, New Harmony is a tourist attraction, meant to "inspire progressive thought," says the assistant director of the expensively renovated site. "It just has some magic here."

But New Harmony's magic only exists today because a nepo baby poured her rich father's money into it. Robert Blaffer started Humble Oil, which became ExxonMobil. After his death, his daughter spent millions of her father's dollars turning the failed commune into an expensive museum.

The "magic" tourists experience in New Harmony comes from capitalism, the only system that creates lasting wealth.

The "warmth of collectivism" fails again and again.

It's failing now in Cuba, North Korea, Nicaragua, and Venezuela.

It was tried and abandoned in the Soviet Union, Mongolia, Afghanistan, Ethiopia, Angola, Mozambique, Benin, the Congo, Somalia, Grenada, and Cambodia.

Even China and Vietnam's leaders, to allow their countries to prosper, felt they had to give up pure socialism and allow private property and capitalism.

But my new mayor still wants to give "the warm of collectivism" a shot.

If he were my age, he would have been a hippie. Hippie communes were popular then.

One in Tennessee called The Farm forbade members to have their own money or property. Everyone shared everything.

"Mothers would nurse each other's babies—other parents would take care of you," said a former member.

"If you want to become a member of the community," warned The Farm's lawyer, "you got to put everything you have in the pot. We're doing this for a lifetime!"

But they couldn't do it for a lifetime. They couldn't even keep it for a dozen years.

There just wasn't enough money, says the commune's bookkeeper: "Everybody was saying…there's not enough food, not enough vegetables, not enough diapers, shoes. All things the children needed."

Only when the commune allowed members to own things, and keep profit from their labor, was The Farm able to survive.

Residents now say, "We're not socialists anymore. We have our own money."

New York's Oneida Community was founded as a free-love, socialist commune, where "every man in the community was essentially married to every woman and all the property was shared."

But Oneida survives today only because they dropped socialism and became capitalists, selling expensive Oneida silverware.

Likewise, an Iowa commune, Amana Colonies, survives because they abandoned socialism to sell appliances.

Some Americans (falsely) think Israeli communes, Kibbutzim, succeeded. But they mostly failed, despite getting heavy taxpayer subsidies. Why?

Yaron Brook of the Ayn Rand Institute explains, "People envied one another…and treated one another really, really bad. It's obvious why. Some people worked hard. Others didn't. Yet they had exactly the same."

The surviving few Kibbutzim are capitalist. Members own property and earn their own money.

The "warmth of collectivism" doesn't last.

But socialists never admit that their communes fail.

"Because to them it's a moral ideal," says Brook. "Moral striving for the good, even though it's a complete disaster and a complete failure everywhere and anywhere it is tried."

No matter what my new mayor and other "progressives" say, the only thing that works—the only thing that really makes life better for people—is private ownership and capitalism.

COPYRIGHT 2026 BY JFS PRODUCTIONS INC.

The post Mamdani's Promise of the 'Warmth of Collectivism' Is a Lie. Just Ask All the Failed Communes. appeared first on Reason.com.

The current Washington tiff between Donald Trump and Jerome Powell is being reframed as Powell heroically defending the Fed’s “independence.” In truth, the Fed has always done the administration’s dirty work and pursued inflation when it might temporarily boost the economy.

In 2014, the United States Postal Service (USPS) began replacing its fleet of delivery vehicles. In the almost 12 years since, only about 6 percent of its 51,500 custom-built delivery vehicles have been delivered. The Postal Service says the rollout will last at least two more years.

The signature USPS delivery truck is the Grumman Life Long Vehicle (LLV), which first entered service in 1986. Designed to last over 20 years, some have now been in service for twice as long, and don't include many modern amenities, like air conditioning and airbags. Maintaining the LLVs beyond their best-by date involved reverse-engineering the 130,000-strong fleet for discontinued parts, according to The Washington Post. In 2014, the USPS began its $9.6 billion fleet upgrade by announcing the Next Generation Delivery Vehicle (NGDV) program.

Oshkosh Defense, which produces rather mean-looking tactical vehicles for the American military (and has never before produced a delivery van), was awarded a multibillion-dollar contract in February 2021 to produce the NGDV for the Postal Service over 10 years. The Post details the production nightmare that ensued. After repeated delays, setbacks, and quadrupling the minimum number of electric NGDVs, thanks to a generous $3 billion subsidy from the Inflation Reduction Act, Oshkosh had only delivered 612 of 35,000 e-NGDVs by November 2025, and only 2,600 of the 16,500 internal combustion engine NGDVs.

The Postal Service agreed to pay Oshkosh $77,692 per e-NGDV and $54,584 per NGDV in March 2023. To put these numbers in context, FedEx's fleet of Mercedes-Benz Sprinter vans is considerably cheaper, costing $50,830 for the baseline 2026 Sprinter and $61,180 for the 2026 eSprinter. (The Sprinter debuted in 1995 and the eSprinter rolled out in 2019, two years before the USPS awarded its Next Generation Delivery Vehicle contract to Oshkosh.)

Paying almost $80,000 per vehicle should have rung alarm bells, but what makes this situation worse is that the USPS knows cheaper alternatives exist. 21,000 of the Postal Service's new fleet are commercial off-the-shelf vans like the Ford E-Transit (whose 2026 model starts at $54,855). In 2023, there were nearly 40,000 Mercedes-Benz Metris vans (which start at $41,495) in its fleet. It's unclear why the agency decided to get bogged down with Oshkosh at all. Whatever the reasons may be, price is not one of them.

What comes as no surprise is that a generously subsidized quasi-governmental agency is wasting money and time on a boondoggle.

The post The Postal Service's 'Next Generation' Electric Delivery Vehicles Cost $22,000 More Than Other Electric Vans appeared first on Reason.com.

The Fed’s cost overruns in its building renovation project supposedly are not borne by taxpayers because, as the myth goes, the Fed is “self-financing.” However, the Fed’s “earnings” come from interest payments from the government, payments made by...taxpayers.

Rothbard aimed at something substantially more radical than Mises. Murray wanted a complete free market in money, with no government involvement whatever.

On this episode of Power and Market, Ryan, Connor, and Tho discuss the reported probe into Fed Chair Jerome Powell. Is this actual accountability for malfeasance, or a petty battle of DC egos? At the end of the day, does the difference matter? And should Powell be encouraged that central banks around the world are standing in solidarity with him? The panel dives into these questions and more.