I did not learn economics from a textbook. I learned it standing in a bread line at 6 years old, in the dark, in the cold, at 5 in the morning.
That is my first memory of the system some Americans now call social justice: not free education, not free healthcare, but frozen feet. I was born in 1972 in Soviet Georgia, and I have already flown the airline Claire Valdez wants to build. It was called Aeroflot, and it taught me everything her campaign leaves out.
Valdez is the Democratic Socialists of America member who just took the Democratic primary for New York’s 7th Congressional District with 58% of the vote — 25 points clear of her nearest rival — with New York Mayor Zohran Mamdani’s money and muscle behind her. Asked on a podcast for her “hot take,” she delivered: “We need to nationalize the airline industry — but let’s start by abolishing PreCheck.” Her complaint is familiar and not entirely wrong: cramped seats, junk fees, overbooking, “very few rights.” Her remedy is one federal airline, run as a public utility, with standardized fares.
MAMDANI’S SOCIALISTS WROTE A NEW PLATFORM. I’VE READ IT BEFORE — IN RUSSIAN
Standardized fares. I remember those.
The economics of the bread line
In the Soviet Union, there was exactly one airline, and it was the state. A ticket costs the same everywhere because a ministry sets the number, the way Valdez’s would. What the poster never mentioned was the rest of the arrangement. A seat was not a product you bought. It was a permission you were granted. Flights went where the plan sent them, not where passengers wanted to go. When a flight was overbooked — and they were — the list was not settled by who paid. It was settled by who mattered. The party official flew. The engineer waited. The pensioner waited longer.
That is the part the word “standardized” hides. When money no longer decides who gets the scarce seat, something else must, and that something is always proximity to power. We even had a word for it: blat — connections. If you knew the shop clerk, the warehouse manager, the butcher, the party secretary, you had everything. If you did not, you stood in line. A market rations by money, which is unfair in an ordinary, predictable way. A state-run system rations by political rank, an unfairness that follows you all the way home. I watched grown adults spend their lives learning which uncle to call. I would rather explain a baggage fee to my grandchildren than teach them that.
And understand what the shortage actually was, because this is the hardest thing for Americans to picture. The problem was not that goods were expensive. The problem was that they did not exist. People had wages. The shelves were bare. There were lines for bread, milk, butter, meat, soap, and shoes. A car meant joining a list and waiting five, seven, or 10 years. A telephone could take a decade. In the West, the constraint is price. Under socialism, the constraint was existence itself, a different category of economics entirely, and the one Valdez has never had to learn.
My parents both worked. We were not starving. We simply lived in an economy where having money did not mean you could buy milk, which is why, before sunrise, it fell to a 6-year-old to go stand in the cold and hold a place in line. That is a lesson no textbook teaches as well as a freezing dawn.
A childhood friend of mine learned a harsher version of the same lesson. Sunflower oil was rationed — one measure, a hundred milliliters, per person — so entire families stood in line together to claim their combined share. Hers sent all five members into the winter cold, including her, 6 years old and running a fever, because a share not physically present was a share lost. Eight hours later, they reached the counter with one large container, big enough for all five rations — and received one. The rule was one container per person. Four rations forfeited, a sick child frozen all day, so that the state could enforce the shape of a jar.
Here is the strangest proof of all. Soviet Georgia was one of the rare republics where private plots, small markets, and semilegal trade were relatively widespread. Farmers grew their own fruit and sold it themselves, and the state called them speculators and prosecuted them for it. Buy something, sell it for more, and you could go to prison. Profit was a crime. Yet, across the whole USSR, those tiny private plots, barely 3% of the sown land, produced roughly a quarter of all agricultural output. Three percent of the land, feeding the country, precisely because it was the only part not owned by the state. The regime knew the statistic and tried to bury it, because that single number was a quiet obituary for its entire economic theory.
Equality by subtraction
Which brings me to PreCheck — the tell in Valdez’s own sentence. Notice that she does not begin with the airlines. She begins with the fast lane. PreCheck is the modest thing a traveler can buy to make the ordeal shorter: about $80, five years, keep your shoes on. It is not a subsidy and not a birthright. Anyone can purchase it. And it is the first thing she would abolish.
Ask why, and you learn how this mind works. The logic is not “let us lift everyone into the fast lane.” It is “no one may stand in a lane I cannot abolish.” The fast line offends not because it is unavailable but because it is better, and someone is in it. This is equality by subtraction — not raising the floor but lowering the ceiling until the room is level. The system I grew up in was built entirely on that instinct, and it delivered exactly what it promised: everyone equal, and equally stuck.
And notice the order of operations. First, you abolish the small advantage a citizen can buy. Then you nationalize the industry that offered it. Valdez has been candid about where the line runs next: utilities, hospitals, pharmaceutical companies, and private health insurance. Take her at her word. She has earned that courtesy by being clearer than most. Marx did not write “seize the airlines.” He wrote “seize the means of production” — a sequence, not a single act: industry by industry, each step reasonable on its own, until nothing is left that a citizen owns and the state does not. The flight simply goes first because it has the best complaints attached. Everyone has been stuck in a middle seat. Not everyone has been stuck in a dialysis chair, but it is on the same list.
This is why “it’s just PreCheck” misses the point as thoroughly as “it’s just a rent freeze.” The individual measures are designed to be popular. The seats really are too small. The fees really are insulting. The rent really is too high. A program that begins with true grievances is far more dangerous than one that begins with lies, because the grievance is real and the remedy is the Trojan horse. You are meant to be nodding about legroom, while the thing that actually changes is who owns the plane. The fare is not the price.
Aeroflot with American paint
I do not romanticize American aviation. It is cramped, nickel-and-diming, and often maddening. But its failures are the failures of a system you can still exit, sue, switch, or shame. When Valdez’s airline loses your bag, there will be no competitor to flee to and no regulator that is not also the owner. The Amtrak she admires has absorbed more than $100 billion since 1971 without turning a profit — and that is the good version, the one that still runs beside private alternatives. Europe already ran this experiment with a real airline: Italy propped up state-owned Alitalia for decades and buried it anyway in 2021. Remove the alternatives, and you do not get a better Amtrak. You get Aeroflot with American paint.
So, here is the test I would offer any traveler tempted by the pitch. Ask not what the nationalized airline charges, but who boards first when the flight is full. In a market, it is whoever paid or planned ahead — irritating, but knowable, and open to you. In the system Valdez describes, it is whoever the state decides matters most that day, and you will spend your life trying to become that person. I have met the people who spent their lives that way. They did not look free.
MAMDANI AIRWAYS: SOCIALISTS NOW WANT TO NATIONALIZE YOUR FLIGHTS TOO
The socialists are not hiding the itinerary. They said “abolish PreCheck” out loud, on a podcast, with a laugh. They are telling you exactly how the doors close. The least a free country can do is listen — and hold onto its seat.
I have already flown the only airline socialism could build. It was called Aeroflot. America does not need a sequel.
Emzari Gelashvili is a San Francisco–based geopolitical analyst and investigative journalist who monitors Russian-language media. From 1996 to 2008, he served as a senior official across Georgia’s Ministry of State Security, Ministry of Defense, and Ministry of Internal Affairs, with a counterintelligence career focused on Russian and Iranian intelligence operations, and he was a member of the Georgian Parliament from 2008 to 2012. His work has appeared in Newsweek, the Hill, the Washington Examiner, RealClearDefense, and RealClearWorld, and at emzargelashvili.substack.com.
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[ H/T Washington Examiner ]
