Socialism is back — and will always “be back.”

We had a nice little run in which politics seemed to be about something other than free markets versus socialism. Pandemics. Trans ideology. Censorship. Jihadism. The Woke Right. Jew-hatred. For a while, it almost seemed as though freedom had won the economic argument. Socialism had collapsed across much of the world, while appreciation grew for the staggering productive power of decentralized economies.

But we will never truly win.

Free markets are astoundingly complex — exactly the kind of decentralized, emergent system the human mind is terrible at understanding. Every ordinary intuition tells us that if we want a society in which people get the things they need, someone must design it. Someone must organize production, allocate resources, set priorities and make sure the whole thing works.

Government.

And on its face, that sounds perfectly reasonable. The truth — that the design emerges without a designer, that order arises without central direction, and that no one even needs to understand the whole system for it to work — sounds almost ridiculous. Surely there must be someone in charge.

So people fall into a kind of conspiracy theory. Not the usual right-wing variety, populated by evil plotters with absurd powers, but its benevolent mirror image: wise clerics who can organize the world for the common good.

Human groups do not merely fail to understand free markets. They often do not want to understand them. They want somewhere to channel their good intentions. They want visible moral authorship. They want to be able to say that their compassion, their movement and their policies produced the good.

But in a free market, no one gets to claim responsibility for the miracles. No committee created the abundance. No movement delivered it. No clerisy forged prosperity across the land. It emerged from millions of people pursuing their own plans, trading, adapting and correcting one another without central command.

That is economically miraculous — and politically intolerable to anyone who wants to rule.

So no, the defenders of freedom — free speech, free markets and the rest — have not won. We never will. Every generation must fight the argument again, because every generation is born with the same instincts: distrust the spontaneous, trust the planner, and hand power to the people promising to do good.

Mamdani has slingshotted us straight back into the old socialism-versus-free-markets battle. It is a slap in the face. Good. Let it wake us up.

The argument is not over. It will never be over.

So get locked and loaded. Sharpen the case. Learn the history. Explain the miracle. Expose the clerisy.

There is another generation waiting to be taught what freedom is — and what happens when people surrender it.