What’s So Great About Capitalism Other Than Prosperity and Freedom?

One of the problems with judging capitalism in a place like America is that we take so many of the good parts of it for granted because we don’t even realize what it’s doing for us. It’s like fish not seeing the water in the ocean. “Oh, that’s just what life is like!”

Is it?

You get out of your car to go to a gourmet burger place for dinner, then you type, “capitalism sucks” on your new iPhone, on a social media network created in America. Then your bougie friends, wearing over-priced Che Guevara shirts, talk about what their communist professor told them at a university their dad’s paid for with the exorbitant salaries they make as engineers, stock traders, and corporate accountants.

People have gotten so used to living like this that they just assume that this is how it is everywhere, and that’s not true.

People hear some story about some “free” something they have in another country, like healthcare, childcare, or education, and they think it sounds great. However, they don’t hear about the downsides that go along with it like extremely long waits for surgeries, much higher taxes, and reduced economic opportunities.

For example, I asked ChatGPT to compare the nations with the highest levels of disposable income. Guess what? It wasn’t one of those “socialist” countries that came out on top.

Here’s the top 20:

It’s worth noting that even though the United States came in first, it’s really not fair to compare a nation like the United States to countries the size of a postage stamp. When you compare the US to larger nations with more than 10 million people, we do even better:

Then, when you compare those numbers to the larger, more socialistic nations, the gap gets even larger:

It’s also worth noting that truly socialistic nations inevitably turn out to be non-free countries because the whole system is based on left-wingers pointing a gun at your head and forcing you to be a slave to people who don’t work as hard as you do. After all, anyone who’s willing to put in the effort is going to be better off in a capitalist system, where they have a much better opportunity to earn what they’re worth. On the other hand, the people who benefit most from a socialist system are the ones who want to parasitically live off of other people.

That distinction also applies to the poor. If you’re poor and content to stay poor, with more breadlines and people telling you what to do thrown in, you’re better off in a socialist system. Furthermore, you’ll have a lot more poor people around to keep you company. If you’re poor and you actually want to make a better life for yourself, you’re much, much better off in a capitalist system where your opportunities are maximized, as opposed to a socialist system, where your opportunities are limited.

We also can’t forget that it’s capitalism that created not just the wealth our society enjoys, but many of the amazing technological advances we spend that money on. As Jonah Goldberg correctly noted in his outstanding book, Suicide of the West: How the Rebirth of Tribalism, Populism, Nationalism, and Identity Politics is Destroying American Democracy:

The startling truth is that nearly all of human progress has taken place in the last three hundred years (and for many of the billions of non-Westerners lifted out of crushing poverty thanks to capitalism, it’s happened in the last thirty years).

People who love socialism tend to hate the richest, most successful entrepreneurs in our society, like Elon Musk, but they ignore the fact he’s created huge numbers of high paying jobs, paid the most amount of taxes in a year of anyone who has ever lived, has advanced space flight, driverless cars, AI, freedom of speech and is working on robots and merging our brains with technology.

In a socialist system? None of that would have ever happened because he wouldn’t have had the resources or motivation to make it possible. This kind of thing just gets discounted in a sea of, “It’s not fair he has so much money,” without so many of the people saying that ever thinking about the consequences of getting what they want.

Why? Because their dream world is somewhere where all the productive people get looted, and it creates an easy life for them from then on. Of course, the real world doesn’t work that way and probably never will:

Other than people with no work ethic, the only other people that really benefit from moving away from capitalism are well-connected, but talentless hacks who get paid exorbitant sums to badly manage bureaucratic projects. We’re talking about the sort of people Ayn Rand ferociously railed against:

“When you see that trading is done, not by consent, but by compulsion - when you see that in order to produce, you need to obtain permission from men who produce nothing - when you see that money is flowing to those who deal, not in goods, but in favors - when you see that men get richer by graft and by pull than by work, and your laws don’t protect you against them, but protect them against you - when you see corruption being rewarded and honesty becoming a self-sacrifice - you may know that your society is doomed.

If you’re successful in America, capitalism has given you the opportunity. If you’re poor in America, capitalism is your best hope to change that. If you’re a failure in America and want to be carried along on other people’s labor, you’re a lazy bum, and capitalism is not the system that will serve you best.

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