All socialism-likes are inherently nationalistic.

TLDR. Every socialist-style economy – from the USSR to Sweden – needs to keep its citizens from leaving cheaply to function. The walls aren’t at the border; they’re in your pension, your tax residency, your accumulated obligations. Markets, by contrast, assume global economy and therefore more liberty of movement.

The cage

Well, you may like it, depending on where you live, how you treat your country and so on. This is increasingly still a cage. And cage not only for you to get out, but also for others to get in.
You may like it now, but it might not be forever, and sometime you might think that you want more freedom of movement to other places. By "freedom of movement" I don’t mean the right to physically cross a border – most countries already let you leave. I mean the bundle of laws, tax-residency rules, capital controls, pension portability, and accumulated obligations that make the act of leaving expensive.

Freedom of movement, in the sense that matters, is whether you can take your life with you when you go.

While Marx and Lenin did intend to bring in solidarity across borders, in practice – did not survive reality of dictators wanting to twist the ideology to gain power inside their own countries. The lock-in wasn’t only their doing, though. Any collectivist system by design – concentrates welfare in one place and redistributes it to citizens. That concentration has to live somewhere, in some national system, with some borders, on some ledger.
The alternative is the market model: each person keeps their share, and decides for themselves what to do with it. That model doesn’t need a cage, because there’s nothing to keep in.

Even later, from the 60s onward – having moved away from Stalinist command-economy orthodoxy – the projects that survived leaned toward more liberal economic management within their own borders. But they remained overwhelmingly isolationist in the political sense: each country built its version of socialism first, coordinated with others later, and the result was still iron curtains.
Thin, but still something you would feel.

Because the mechanism requires locking people in.
They started building walls to ‘protect’ what they had… defeating any notion of internationalism.

I’m using ‘socialist’ broadly – by which I mean any leftist movement that aims to organize economic life collectively rather than through free exchange. The main version I’m focused on is the current one: social democracies and welfare states, where you live, pay taxes, and receive benefits inside a single national system.
The Soviet-style command economy is the historical case of the same principle at its most concentrated – it ran the collectivist logic with full force, and collapsed under its own weight.
The principle didn’t die with it. It lives on, more quietly, in every welfare state that asks you to plug in locally and stay.

While I cant deny that many of them do favor internationalism – like open borders, confederate solidarity (EU style), global poverty reliefs – still they operate on same principle: Geographic lockdown.

While prioritizing own citizens is not any news (lol what did you expect?), they way its done – its somewhat disempowering for an individual.

What it looks like in practice

Socialist-like system think they own your ass. While open markets – understand that people – are moving goods, and treat you with, well, freedom to have own agency.

Socialist-leaning systems treat citizens as resources OWNED by the state.
States that design for freedom – even when they’re not perfectly free themselves – treat people as free agents who CHOOSE where to deploy themselves. The market never exists in a "pure" form; what exists is the design choice. Some states design for less friction; others design for more.

Socialist framing: "You are part of OUR collective. Your labor, your capital, your retirement – OURS!
These belong to the system we built together."

Market framing: "You are a free agent. Your skills, capital, time – these are YOURS to deploy wherever returns are best.
A free agent isn’t someone who lives in a frictionless world; it’s someone whose state does not insert itself between them and the world economy. Trade with whom you want. Move capital where it earns more. Live where your lifestyle fits. Exist in many places at once and so on.

Socialism implicitly assumes you belong to your country.
Markets implicitly assume your country has to EARN you.
Nobody forces you into some kind of 50% taxation agreement tied to a single place.

You pay high taxes, yes, you get roads, hospitals, universities. But all locked in a single place where they expect you would live your whole life. Or lost all the benefits in a instant you cross a border.

Whole system requires a captive participant to function.
You fund the system for decades, but the second you try to emigrate with your ‘investment,’ poof – it’s gone. Try taking your pension accrual to Portugal. Try packing your healthcare premiums in a suitcase.

Yes, they are not inherently evil, they are not building it specifically to keep you in. That is just how the system organized.
Any collectivist setup requires most of it to be locally concentrated. And the state doing the job of providing welfare vs you doing it for yourself.

Would you support such system? Think… would you like to have a house in a city but unable to ever sell it, sublet it, or take the equity with you?
Imagine living in a house that the government owns. They decide who lives there. They collect the rent. And ‘selling’ is not a legal category – the house was never yours. The only thing you can do is leave, and even then, you don’t get the equity you paid into it.
That is the socialist model applied to your entire life.

They don’t consider citizens as citizens of the world. Only a participant here and now, a cog in a system.
"We consider what this place is the best and you have to if you want to really have a good life you have to live here forever."
Main character syndrome of a nation, lol.

While being a mutual beneficial agreement – this one works only as long as you able to be in that club.
If you run a business there – good luck.
The system isn’t optimized for your prosperity, it’s optimized to extract from it.
Companies operating under socialist regimes are more pressured to serve national interests first – keep jobs local, pay taxes here, grow here.

The mirror

Capitalist firms have no loyalty to borders.
They expand where opportunity exists – a feature that allows plurality and global participation of all countries.
Everyone competes to attract capital, ideas flow faster, markets connect.
Walled garden versus exploring the world.

Capitalism treats geography as a variable, not a identity to protect.
It’s indifferent to place, which grants more freedom than the socialists inevitable focus on a patch of land.

Markets are governed by competition – fluid and flexible (to an extent), not so much favoring "our place is the best and only!".
States are inherently not movable – so they resort to circling back to same nationalistic ideas over and over to maintain integrity.
Socialism restricts movement of people/capital/goods to maintain the system; markets require fluid movement of all three to survive.

One might say market favor monopolies…but they are not forever. While states persist. (focusing here on peaceful last 50 years)
Market monopoly is unstable, fluid, contestable, someone WILL challenge it eventually.
State monopoly on your labor/capital – enforced by literal army, laws, borders, decades-long pension locks and so on.

The choice

I cant say what X respects you more than Y.
Both systems somewhat respect you and not.

Socialists – by denying your right to manage your own life as you see fit.
Capitalists – by having a flighty competitive environment with zero guarantees.

But the main beauty being capitalist first – you can move wherever, even into a socialist place, along with your capital and assets.

I would always support the latter – at least it respects you, your freedom of choice. I’ll take competitive uncertainty over benevolent captivity.

Now go and think, is your current system makes you more free or not? Think about not free as the current state but is would you be able to be free in the future?

Pretend tomorrow your country elects a leader you personally despise – someone who is openly going to wreck the things you care about. You want to leave. Very soon. This month, this year…

So: how much do you lose by leaving? What assets are tied to this place – your pension, your housing equity, your healthcare, your network, your work? How much friction is there to just pack and move? How much of the system is actively designed to keep you from stepping outside, even when leaving is technically allowed?

Even if you’ve spent your life optimizing for it – and most people haven’t – the state apparatus is built to retain you, and it doesn’t ask permission. The friction is the cage.