from Sound and Sovereign.
In 1884, a group of British intellectuals decided socialism didn't need a revolution it just needed time they took their name from a Roman general who beat Hannibal by refusing to fight head on. Wear the enemy down and do it slowly their strategy was simple don't storm the palace just move into it. Write the policy. Train the experts. Advise the politicians. Change the system one law at a time until one day you look up and everything's done. And in Britain it worked.
In 1918, Sydney Webb, one of the leading Fabians wrote Labor Clauses Number Four. It committed the party to common ownership of the means of productions, distribution, and exchange. Thirty years later, Britain had nationalized the Bank of England, coal, the railways, electricity, and gas. No gun fire. Just legislation. Now look at Europe today. Governments across the EU spend about half their entire economies. In France, 57% of GDP.
And here's where it gets uncomfortable. American never voted for socialism, but look at the trend. The federal government alone now spends 23% of the entire economy, above the 50-year average. With local and state, it's about 36%. The Federal Register hit 107,000 pages in 2024 [Biden years], the most ever.
And lobbying, a record 4.4 billion dollars in one year. Now ask yourself, why would companies spend a billions on politicians? Because it pays. See, when the government decides who gets the contract, the subsidy, the bailout or the regulatory carve-out, the smartest investment is not a better product, it's a better relationship with the people who write the rules. And people look at that and say, "See, capitalism is failing us. We need more government." Nope. That's not a free market . . . if you just took the time to learn instead of listening to the people trying to get your vote. In a free market, you win by serving customers better than your competitor. Political favoritism has nothing to sell because politicians have nothing to hand out because they don't produce. You know where the road to the top ran through the politicians? The Soviet Union. They even had a name for it: the nomenklatura. It was the party's list of who got the key jobs, the bigger apartments, the better stores not by merit but by access. So when you look at where the problems in this country really are, it is not a lack of government intervention. It's exactly the opposite. We look more like a corrupt politically managed economy than a free market. You don't need conspiracy theory. That was the point of their whole strategy. You win the ideas, you win the institutions, you never need to win a revolution.
And the Fabian symbol? A tortoise. It didn't need to be fast, it just needed us not to notice. So maybe it wasn't the Fabians that took over America, maybe it was their method and they did it right under our noses.
