The recent high-profile victories of socialist candidates in New York and Colorado have caused concerns among defenders of capitalism, with some worried that figures like Zohran Mamdani reflect the growing movement away from free markets and toward greater government control.

I was a proponent of capitalism long before I became a beneficiary of it. And I’m not terribly worried about this latest generation of would-be central planners. We’ve been down this path before. Like herpes, bad ideas have a way of lying dormant for years before unexpectedly returning.

A hundred years ago, the Socialist Party of America was the forerunner to today’s Democratic Socialists of America. In 1920, there were more than 1,000 self-avowed socialists in elected offices across the US. More than 350 cities and towns had socialist mayors, councilmen and aldermen. There were dozens of socialist state legislators. Three different socialists served as mayor of Milwaukee for most of the 50 years from 1910 to 1960. Wisconsin and New York each elected socialists to serve in the US Congress. Union organizer Eugene V. Debs was the Bernie Sanders of the early twentieth century, running for president five times, garnering almost a million votes in 1912 and 1920.

Somehow our country survived.

Socialist systems can work—or even thrive—in certain conditions. The members of the system must trust one another, have very similar goals, and the central planning must be conducted by a trusted, invested and benevolent dictator. Socialism can work for a family. Parents make the money and decide on its allocation. Neither the kids nor the neighbors get to decide how the family’s assets are spent. This system works as long as the dictator has equal concern for all members of the group and is personally responsible for the creation of the wealth being distributed.

That model breaks down in a system as large and diverse as the US. Federal decision-makers aren’t personally benevolent; they simply give away other people’s assets. But to be redistributed, wealth must first be created.

The purpose of a country isn’t simply to maximize GDP, but without economic output, there is nothing available to redistribute. And over the past quarter-century, US GDP growth has outpaced every other developed nation—including the pseudo-socialist Nordic darlings Sweden, Denmark and Norway.

There is a fundamental difference between an economic system focused on redistribution vs. creation. And that’s a lesson that is difficult to understand if your highest paying job is some elected public office.

History shows that these socialist fever dreams flare up periodically, only to fizzle when confronted with the stubborn realities of human nature, scale, and incentives.

David Moon is president of Moon Capital Management. A version of this piece originally appeared in the USA TODAY NETWORK.