Imagine a day without capitalism.
You wake up to a decently sized apartment, just suited to fit your needs. Housing is a human right, after all, but penthouses aren’t. But how can you complain? You barely have bills. Food, education, energy, medicine, and transportation aren’t for-profit businesses. They’re common goods.
Those are some of the bold thought experiments of the Democratic Socialists of America, which—in a manner consistent with the imaginings of children—pose more questions than they resolve.
For example, if “comfortable” housing is a right, who defines what constitutes comfort? Can that be quantified or calculated, and, if it can’t, how can it be guaranteed?
Those practical oversights, translated into the language of a world where scarcity exists, typically mean long wait lines, shortages, and fewer options for goods. But the deeper—and, I would argue, more devastating—cost of socialism is not found in the bureaucratic inefficiencies it creates, but in the innovations it will never inspire.
Treating industries as “common goods” rather than for-profit businesses might sound good on paper. In the minds of many young Americans, profit is the source of social inequalities and economic woes, the reason behind high healthcare and grocery prices.
The assumption is that private business models carry a dangerous incentive to maximize profits, which, as Zohran Mamdani recently put it, leaves consumers “priced out of dignity.”
But the incentives of capitalism aren’t as misaligned with human dignity as Gen-Z has been led to believe. Business owners must also win your dollar, motivating them to make their products faster, better, and cheaper than their competitors. In a free and competitive market, the pursuit of profit isn’t a path to lower living standards.
On the contrary, a free market helps improve living standards and prosperity by encouraging business owners to make faster, cheaper, and better products. In other words, a free market encourages something crucial for prosperity: innovation.
The sheer scale of our modern abundance and prosperity is a blip on the historical record that would have been inconceivable to a medieval peasant. Many of the modern luxuries we enjoy are the result of innovation drastically improving living standards over generations: shorter workweeks, labor-saving technologies, household appliances, cars, air conditioning, and modern healthcare—just to name a few.
The visionaries behind those inventions didn’t have to rely on a central planner to decide whether their ideas should or shouldn’t be produced. They were free to experiment, take risks and shoulder losses, using market signals such as prices, profits, and loss to determine how much or how little to produce.
Conservatives agree that people should be free to enjoy the beauty of life without being weighed down by bills. But that is precisely why we should build an economic system that fosters growth and innovation that can, for example, replace the expensive and slow bus with a cheap high-speed train, giving you more weekends with your family in a different city.
The innovation fueled by a free market gives ordinary Americans what central planning never can: cheaper goods, better services, and more choices. Turning critical industries into “common goods” is a surefire way to strip the economy of the incentives that make them good in the first place.
If socialists want higher living standards and prosperity, they should be fighting for more business—not less.
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[ H/T The Daily Signal ]
