Is Actor Mark Ruffalo Right When He Says We Need to Replace Capitalism with Socialism?

Absolutely not, but you can learn a lot about liberals from seeing WHY he’s wrong.

This video featuring actor Mark Ruffalo has been getting a lot of traction:

To begin with, there’s something incredibly ironic about a generally annoying actor whose net worth is a staggering 35 million dollars because of capitalism, railing against capitalism:

Furthermore, you might be thinking, “Mark Ruffalo is not an intellectually impressive person. His basic schtick is that he’s a liberal actor who passionately supports whatever the ‘current thing’ happens to be on the Left. Why bother responding to what he said at all?”

It’s worth responding to what he said because he managed to wrap multiple bad takes that are popular on the Left into one video, which is just over a minute long.

Let’s start with this:

“What do we do to make life better for everybody? We certainly have enough. I mean, we just created the most number of billionaires in the history of the world, you know?”

This ties together two constant refrains you hear from the Left.

First, that we essentially have limitless money, and second, that we can have billionaires pay for everything.

It is worth noting that the United States has more billionaires than any other nation. A little less than 1/3 of the world’s total – and that’s a good thing because the more wealthy people there are in your country, the more jobs they can create and the more that they can invest in your nation.

However, do you know how many billionaires we have in America? There are only roughly 900 of them that have a combined net worth of somewhere around 7.6 trillion dollars. That sounds like a lot of money. Heck, IT IS a lot of money, but keep in mind that they’re not just sitting on vast hordes of gold coins like dragons. That net worth does contain some liquid assets, but also things like stocks and corporations that produce large amounts of tax revenue.

We’re constantly told that these people don’t really pay any taxes, but that isn’t even remotely true. Yes, they can do things like live off borrowed money that reduces their income tax burdens in any one year or pull some accounting tricks to try to avoid paying most of their fortunes to the government via the death tax, but when you combine everything they pay, their tax burden is anything but small:

In other words, yes, we could try to wipe these people out and “redistribute” the money, but it would be a “killing the goose that laid the golden egg” situation. The amount of taxes they pay, their corporations pay and the people they employ pay is going to produce orders of magnitude more revenue for the country over the long term than the amount of money we’d get from liquidating them – and certainly, some of them would find ways to protect their money, so the total amount we collected would end up being much smaller than their total net worth.

We also can’t forget that the amount of money they have isn’t really very large compared to what the government spends. In 2024, the federal government spent 6.75 trillion dollars, and we’re 37.6 trillion dollars in debt. So, as a starting point, we’d probably have trouble funding the government for a single year on the actual amount of money we got out of confiscating all the assets of our billionaires, and the amount of tax revenue our government collected each year onward would also shrink significantly as a result.

Furthermore, so many people (I’m looking at you, Mark Ruffalo) simply ignore the fact that we’re funding our government by racking up massive debt. If you’re making 10 million dollars every year, but are spending 20 million dollars each year, how “rich” are you? You may have a rich person’s lifestyle and income, but you don’t have “enough.” On the contrary, you’re getting considerably deeper into the hole every single year.

Ruffalo also said this:

“It’s going to take some reimagining of what America is. What our economic system is. What’s clear is it’s not working and it’s not sustainable.”

First of all, is he right that our system is “not working?”

Well, to answer that, you have to ask, “Not working in comparison to what?”

Per capita GDP in the US has more than tripled since 1960, and it’s roughly 4.5 times higher than the average country in the world. Additionally, once you get past the irrelevant flyspeck countries with tiny populations, people make more money in the United States than anywhere else. I asked ChatGPT to make a list of countries with populations over 10 million and rank them by median disposable income. Here are the results:

In other words, if you want to have as much disposable income as possible, you’re far better off in the United States than in any other large country in the world. To the extent that it’s “unsustainable,” it has nothing to do with capitalism and everything to do with wasteful, big government socialism layered over the capitalism that creates massive amounts of debt.

What Ruffalo seems to be suggesting is getting rid of the capitalism that’s putting all the income in people’s pockets, so it can be replaced by Elizabeth Warren, AOC, and Bernie Sanders managing the whole economy, even though none of them could successfully run a late shift at a Wendy’s. That’s getting rid of what’s working and quadrupling down on the “unsustainable” part of our system.

Afterward, Ruffalo goes into a bit of utter nonsense, implying that the Founding Fathers, who were rabid fans of small government who didn’t believe in welfare programs, were endorsing socialism somehow because of the motto, “E Pluribus Unum.” That’s such a dumb idea that there’s no need to even refute it.

From there, Ruffalo finished up with something many liberals believe, but few liberals actually say out loud. Here’s how he thinks we get to socialism:

“It’s physics. It’s got to come to a point where there’s so much movement. It’s chaotic. It’s chaotic. It’s chaotic. Boom. Up. Something new comes out of it. Water to steam. There’s no other way to actually change. And that’s painful. It’s like giving birth. I mean, birth is painful. It’s dark. We don’t know. It’s scary. Will it ever end, you know?”

What Ruffalo is verbalizing here is something near and dear to the heart of many liberals that you seldom hear them discuss because the implications of it are horrific. It’s something I’ve referred to in passing in a number of articles:

First of all, there have always been a lot of liberals who want to see our current system leveled to the ground. Some of them do truly hate this country, but a lot of them are just extremely naïve and believe that if they can get rid of our system and gain total control, they could build some beautiful socialist utopia on the other side of it.

Incidentally, as you’d expect, I wasn’t the first person to say something like this.

Machiavelli referred to this kind of thinking more than 500 years ago:

“And many writers have imagined for themselves republics and principalities that have never been seen or known to exist in reality; for there is such a gap between how one lives and how one ought to live that anyone who abandons what is done for what ought to be done learns his ruin rather than his preservation…”

More recently, the late, great David Horowitz alluded to this type of liberal mindset a number of times.

“For progressives, the future is not a maze of human uncertainties and unintended consequences. It is a moral choice. To achieve a socially just future requires only that enough people decide to will it.”

“For two hundred years, the radical Left has believed in a religion promising a heaven on earth whose end justifies any means. That is why progressives like Lenin and Stalin, and Pol Pot killed so many innocent people.”

“In my own passage out of the Left nearly 20 years ago, it occurred to me that my revolutionary comrades never addressed to themselves what should be the obvious questions for social reformers: ‘What makes a society work?’ ‘What will make this society work?’ In all the socialist literature I had read, there was hardly a chapter devoted to the creation of wealth, the problem of getting people to work or to behave in a civilized manner. Socialist theory was exclusively addressed to the conquest of power and the division of wealth that someone else had created. Was it any surprise that socialist societies had broken world records in making their inhabitants poor?”

The truth is that an awful lot of liberals don’t love America and don’t mean it well. They see the current system as terrible, not because it really is compared to the rest of the world, but because it doesn’t match up to the beautiful world they’ve imagined in their heads without any consideration at all of what it would take to make that work. People like Ruffalo are imagining a world where everyone has plenty of money, everything is free, and crime or war will barely exist because they’ll finally be the ones in charge and show everyone how much they care.

Of course, there’s nothing in history, economics, the most basic understanding of human nature, or even our country today that suggests that beautiful liberal daydream is possible. Look at wealthy places like New York City and San Francisco, where liberals essentially are completely in charge with no real conservative input, and what do you see? Out-of-control crime, sky-high taxes, ludicrously expensive housing, the worst income inequality in America, along with lots of drugs, degeneracy, and badly behaved homeless people. To the vast majority of Americans, living like that would be a major DOWNGRADE to their current lives .

With that said, keep one last quote from David Horowitz in mind:

“An SDS radical once wrote, ‘The issue is never the issue. The issue is always the revolution.’ In other words, the cause - whether inner city blacks or women - is never the real cause, but only an occasion to advance the real cause, which is the accumulation of power to make the revolution.”

Why do liberals encourage people of different races to hate each other? Why do they protect criminals and do everything in their power to encourage illegal immigration while trying to make it impossible for the police to do their jobs? Why are so many of them literally in favor of murdering their political opponents?

Because they want things to be “chaotic.” They want “pain.” They literally want to destabilize the system. Why? Because they foolishly believe that they can create a magical unicorn socialist land where faeries babysit your children and leprechauns give everyone their gold. Because liberals will be in charge and they’re such good people. Because “duh, all liberals are good people by default,” so it has to work!

The rest of us know better and don’t want to be dragged down by people that are completely out-of-touch with how the world really works.

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