Editor’s note: This has been excerpted with permission from the Pacific Research Institute. To read the entire article, click here.

The number of socialist mayors going back more than three decades is, thankfully, low as a portion of all U.S. mayors. A few stand out: Ron Dellums was Oakland’s mayor from 2007 to 2011; Konstantine Anthony had a short run in Burbank, Calif., that ended last year; and, of course, Bernie Sanders, now a U.S. senator, was mayor of Burlington, Vt., for eight years in the 1980s.

A number of other cities have socialist members on their governing councils. But, again, as a portion of all municipal-level policymakers, their numbers are small. Wikipedia says there are only 100 socialists currently on city councils and county commissions combined.

Despite the relative paucity of socialist municipal-level elected officials, large cities tend to adopt policies that can reasonably be called socialist. In some cases, it’s unavoidable. Privatizing city streets, for instance, would be a difficult task. So would the untangling of water and utility provision, which have been socialized for more than a century. Nevertheless, urban centers often run on government programs.

Most of today’s cities have been shaped by the events of the first two decades of the 20th century, when “​​socialist politicians in the United States were prominent and active at the municipal level, holding office as government insiders,” says David R. Berman, who wrote “​​Socialist Mayors in the United States.”

Berman, a professor emeritus of political science at Arizona State University, believes that, “socialist mayors in over 200 small cities across the United States brought meaningful improvements in the quality of life for people in their communities, playing an important role in this period’s municipal reform movement.”

Yet, the most “meaningful improvements in the quality of life for people in their communities” come not from central planners intent on forcing their will on people but markets. As economist Milton Friedman famously said, “there is no alternative way, so far discovered, of improving the lot of the ordinary people that can hold a candle to the productive activities that are unleashed by a free enterprise system.”

The socialism that Berman is so complimentary of is more anchor than life preserver. It curbs people’s ability to cooperate and work together, activities that are critical to a thriving society and the vitality of cities.

“​​Life in modern civilization, life in what [Friedrich] Hayek calls the ‘Great Society,’ requires us to coordinate peacefully not only with the type of people we would have in tribal life – people familiar to us who share our own perspective and largely share our own ends and our own knowledge about the world – but also strangers,” according to Libertarianism.org.

The Austrian economist, famous for writing “The Road to Serfdom,” also argued that, “​​Civilization as we know it is inseparable from urban life.” Brian Anderson, editor of City Journal, nods to Hayek’s thinking by writing that the city is the source “of the West’s dynamic, world-transforming science, culture and prosperity.” His article is aptly named, “Freedom and the city.”

Socialist and progressive frameworks make dynamism difficult. Closer to impossible, really. These government-centric ideologies offer only top-down “solutions” that are in practice coercion and compulsion carried out by those in power. Everyone else must submit. The objective of the socialist man is to own not just politics but to own people.

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