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Did Capitalism or Socialism Reduce Poverty in China?

After the communist victory in the Chinese Civil War, the Maoist government began implementing socialist policy in mainland China. Most capitalists will assert that these policies failed, usually citing the Great Chinese Famine/Great Leap Forward and the World Bank extreme poverty estimate placing China at 88% in 1981…

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4 months ago · 1 like · Sathya Martin

According to Sathya’s case here, Maoist China supposedly had relatively low levels of extreme poverty, while market reforms later made poverty worse, peaking at 68 percent in the 1990s. He dismisses the World Bank poverty line. Then it swaps in the Sullivan, Moatsos, and Hickel basic-needs poverty line, or BNPL. He says the World Bank misses the lower cost of basic needs under socialism, claims a BNPL shows Maoist China outperforming peers, and leans on Hickel’s paper for the whole case. The problem is that this argument is only as good as the price data underneath it, and in China those prices are barely usable.

Even Sullivan, Moatsos, and Hickel acknowledge that China is ann awkward case in their own dataset. Their article notes that China is “the only country” for which Moatsos used a different method, that this adjustment is “far from resolving the problem,” and that the BNPL may be “particularly problematic” where food prices are unusually low.1

And there is a very obvious reason China is the awkward case. Under Mao, prices were low because they were administratively set, quantity constrained, and often disconnected from what ordinary people could actually obtain. Kent Deng documents that by 1979 the state controlled 100 percent of the pricing of industrial goods and 97.8 percent of the pricing of marketed goods. He also records that in 1978 an urban adult’s monthly non-cereal ration amounted to four eggs, 250 grams of pork, 100 grams of sugar, 300 grams of bean curd, and 50 grams of bean noodles, with even those meager quantities not always guaranteed.2 If a poverty measure treats ration prices as if goods were freely available at those prices, it will understate deprivation by construction.

That point matters because Hickel’s paper does not merely say the World Bank is imperfect. On that much, plenty of serious scholars agree. It says the Maoist system itself delivered unusually low poverty. But if your low-poverty data depends on posted prices inside a system built on rationing, procurement, queueing, and suppressed scarcity, you are not measuring what poor people could actually consume.

The 1981 baseline is not Maoist China

A second problem is temporal sleight of hand. The Hickel line treats the early 1980s as if they still reflected intact Maoist provisioning. They did not. Deng’s reforms began in late 1978, and the fastest, most important gains came first in agriculture. Martin Ravallion points out that from 1979 to 1983 China shifted sharply back toward private production by smallholders responding to more market-oriented incentives, and that the household responsibility system restored peasant farming by letting households keep the marginal product of their labor. Ravallion also notes that Lin estimates decollectivization alone accounted for about half of the aggregate output gains through the mid-1980s, while bringing procurement prices closer to market levels reduced the implicit tax on farmers and proved a powerful anti-poverty tool.3

Yasheng Huang tells the same story from the institutional side. He shows that the household responsibility system spread with stunning speed, from about 1 percent of rural households at the end of 1979 to 80 percent by the end of 1982, and then to roughly universal adoption by 1984. He also shows that it was a bottom-up escape from collective farming, later tolerated and then generalized because it worked. Huang’s wider thesis is devastating for the socialist case: China’s takeoff in the 1980s was centered on private entrepreneurship, rural liberalization, and improved security for proprietors, while the 1990s involved a reversal of many productive rural experiments.4

That means any poverty series beginning in 1981 is already contaminated, in the best possible sense, by capitalist reform. The gains of the early reform years cannot honestly be booked to the system they were dismantling. This is also why the debate cannot be settled by saying, “Well, China was still ruled by the Communist Party.” True enough. But the question is not whether the party stayed in power. The question is what changed in the actual economic order. On that question the answer is clear. What changed first, and most decisively, was the retreat from collectivized agriculture, the loosening of administered controls, and the reemergence of household production and private initiative.

The Mao years did not leave behind an anti-poverty miracle

Once you step away from the rhetoric and look at living standards, the Maoist record is ugly. Ravallion’s review of the period notes long-term rural stagnation, negligible growth in food availability per capita over the thirty years after 1949, and retained grain output for the rural population rising by only 0.6 percent per year from 1952 to 1977. He also summarizes the Great Leap Forward as a vast labor reallocation scheme that helped produce one of the worst famines on record, with roughly 30 to 40 million deaths.5 Kent Deng’s work records that China’s urban benchmark daily food intake in 1978 was about 2,009 calories, below both modern famine-relief benchmarks and the better-fed Republican-era comparisons he presents.6 If that is a poverty success, then one shudders to imagine what failure would look like.

Sathya tries to soften the Great Leap by calling it a specific administrative and pseudo-scientific error rather than a predictable socialist failure. But this is a false separation. In Maoist China, bad science did not float above the system like an unfortunate cloud. It wielded power because the system centralized power. Procurement quotas became lethal because peasants lacked property rights, lacked market exit, and lacked the legal capacity to refuse the state. The catastrophe was intensified by the very institutional pattern socialists keep asking us to admire. Both the low-price procurement regime and the attempted substitution of collective incentives for household incentives are precisely the mechanisms later reversed under Deng.

The broader poverty literature also cuts against the Hickel story

Chen and Ravallion’s later work is especially useful here because it deals directly with China’s poverty measurement disputes. They argue that the dominant success narrative has to be qualified, but not in the direction Hickel wants. They show that China’s official poverty lines are neither fixed absolute lines nor strongly relative lines. They are weakly relative, and when those official lines are applied consistently the progress against poverty is still substantial, just less theatrical than the World Bank’s most famous line suggests. Specifically, they report roughly 400 million fewer poor since 1981 by official lines, not the roughly 800 million often attributed to the World Bank line, and only about 140 million fewer poor since 1985 under official lines, compared with about 650 million under the World Bank line.7

Chen and Ravallion also show something else that matters. Using the current official rural poverty line, converted to 2011 prices at about $2.29 per day, they estimate a poverty rate of 94 percent in 1981 and 4 percent in 2014. So even if one rejects the celebratory World Bank line, one still does not automatically get a Maoist miracle. What one gets is a very poor country in the early reform era that then makes large gains over time. That is exactly the opposite of Hickel’s headline.

Notice the irony. The best escape hatch for the socialist side was supposed to be, “Ah, but your poverty measure is wrong.” Fine. Let us grant that the most popular measure needs careful handling. The moment we do that and move to the more nuanced literature, the socialist victory speech still does not arrive. Instead we get three propositions: official lines show China was still deeply poor in the early reform years, progress afterward was substantial, and the strongest relative-poverty readings often used in polemics are themselves not credible in the Chinese case. Hickel’s paper is useful mainly as a reminder that bad measures exist. It is not good evidence that Maoism beat markets at reducing poverty.

The comparisons to India, Taiwan, and North Korea do not rescue the case

The comparison to India is weaker than it first appears. Yes, China outperformed India on indicators. The real causal question is not whether China beat one other poor country on some metrics. The question is whether Maoist institutions reduced poverty relative to plausible paths China itself might have taken. That is why Ravallion does not use India as the decisive counterfactual. He uses South Korea and Taiwan, because they were regionally close, culturally close, poor in the mid-century, and still capable of state-led development without abolishing market allocation and household farming.

Most importantly, the India example ignores the actual points being made by the capitalist side. We are not claiming that any given “socialist” nation performs better than any given “capitalist” nation in any given metric in any given point in time. All things being equal, the capitalist system will beat the socialist one. That is the point. We acknowledge external factors such as war and sanctions, geography, culture, religion, and many different variables that can effect the outcomes of a nation. India and China have drastically different histories. Why not assess India independently of China, and vice versa? Probably because it makes socialism look bad.

And the move, “Taiwan was not laissez-faire,” proves far less than the socialist side imagines. Ravallion explicitly says the difference was not between pure laissez-faire and state intervention. South Korea and Taiwan had strong governments, industrial policy, and land reform. The decisive difference was whether the state itself owned the means of production and replaced family farming with collective agriculture. In South Korea and Taiwan, family farming remained intact, domestic producer prices for food grains moved roughly in line with world prices by the 1960s, and governments supported agriculture instead of crushing it under Mao-style extraction.

The North Korea argument is even worse. The point of citing North Korea is to say socialism can industrialize without famine if managed more competently. But the North Korea evidence in the literature does not end in 1960. Andrei Lankov’s study of the modern North Korean economy says the country’s principle of self-reliance was exposed as a myth when aid and trade collapsed in the early 1990s, and that since the late 1990s market forces and spontaneous private enterprise have been crucial to recovery. He estimates the private sector now accounts for roughly 30 to 50 percent of GDP, and notes that the regime treats private enterprise as a “necessary evil.” So even North Korea clawed its way toward stability through markets.8

If one insists on a broader lesson from East Asia, it is not that socialism beat capitalism. It is that countries with strong states did best when those states stopped trying to replace prices, ownership, and household incentives altogether.9 Weiying Zhang’s cross-provincial evidence says the same thing for China itself. He argues the “China model” is factually false, that marketization and the development of non-state sectors drove growth and innovation, and that across provinces the more market-oriented reform a province had done, the higher the growth it achieved. He also finds more marketized provinces more innovative. That is about as close as empirical social science gets to writing “case closed” in the margin.10

Going back to what I said about India, we can also assess it on a state-level. When we do that, and/or examine historical trends, we see that more capitalism leads to more prosperity

The trends we see in China are not just a fluke. Not only is this replicated in India, but it is even seen in “communist” Vietnam.

What the debate actually shows

The communist argument only works if you blur three distinctions at once. First, you treat posted ration prices as if they were real access prices in a shortage economy. Second, you treat 1981 as if it were still Maoist, even though key market reforms were already reshaping rural China. Third, you swap the real causal question, what Maoism did relative to plausible alternatives, for the easier question of whether China sometimes beat India on selected indicators. Once those tricks are taken away, the picture changes fast. Maoist institutions left China poor. Early market reforms delivered the first big escape. The deeper the marketization, especially in the countryside, the better the growth and welfare record. This is also seen in India, Vietnam, and everywhere else.

So no, socialism did not causally reduce poverty in China while capitalism increased it. That is backwards. Socialism in China created a shortage economy, extracted the countryside, wrecked incentives, and culminated in the deadliest famine of the modern era. The reforms beginning in 1978 reversed those institutions, first in agriculture and then beyond it, and that is why poverty fell. If socialism reduced poverty in China, it chose a very peculiar way to demonstrate it, namely by leaving China far poorer than its plausible peers until the market reforms arrived to bail it out.

Cabinet

• President: Me

• Vice President: Blake Masters

• Secretary of State: Rand Paul

• Secretary of Defense: Elbridge Colby

• Secretary of the Treasury: Robert P. Murphy

• Chair of the Federal Reserve: Jeffrey Herbener

• Attorney General: Edwin Meese

• Secretary of Homeland Security: Julian Sanchez

• Secretary of Commerce: Benjamin Powell

• Secretary of Labor: Donald J. Boudreaux

• Secretary of Health and Human Services: Dr. Michel Accad

• Secretary of Education: Larry P. Arnn

• Secretary of Housing and Urban Development: Salim Furth

• Secretary of Energy: Steven E. Koonin

• Secretary of the Interior: William Perry Pendley

• Secretary of Transportation: Marc Scribner

• Secretary of Agriculture: Bruce Yandle

• Secretary of Veterans Affairs: Chris Edwards

• Administrator, Environmental Protection Agency: Myron Ebell

• Administrator, Small Business Administration: Peter Klein

• U.S. Trade Representative: Dan Ikenson

• U.S. Ambassador to the United Nations: JD Vance

• White House Press Secretary: Savanah Hernandez

Senior White House & National Security Staff

• Chief of Staff: Thomas Massie

• National Security Advisor: Barry Posen

• Director of National Intelligence: Andrew McCarthy

• Director, National Economic Council: Peter Boettke

• Director, Office of Management and Budget: James Bovard

Senior Advisors

• Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy: Timothy D. Terrell

• Senior Advisor for Markets & Regulation: Joe Salerno

• Senior Advisor for Civil Society & Institutions: Charles Murray

• Senior Advisor for Constitutional Governance: Michael McConnell

• Senior Advisor for Privacy & Civil Liberties: Judge Napolitano

• Senior Advisor for Counterterrorism & Internal Security: Robert Chesney

• Senior Advisor for Trade & Globalization: Scott Lincicome

• Senior Advisor for Science, Technology & Innovation: Adam Thierer

• Senior Advisor for Strategic Communications: Nick Gillespie

P2: Marxism’s historical materialism applies this metaphysics to history: the economic “base” and material productive forces determine the “superstructure” of law, religion, morality, and ideology.

P3: Marx and Engels repeatedly oppose their view to “idealism,” reject the independent reality of mind, spirit, and abstract norms, and insist that their socialism is “scientific” precisely because it rests on materialism.

P4: Therefore, if metaphysical materialism is necessarily false, then any theory whose core framework depends on metaphysical materialism, including Marxism, is necessarily false.

C1: To show that Marxism is necessarily false, it is sufficient to show that metaphysical materialism is necessarily false.

P5: Rational inference requires that at least some beliefs are held because of their logical relations to other beliefs and evidence. That “because” is a rational because, not merely a causal sequence.

P6: If materialism is true, then every event, including every belief and inference, is fully determined by non rational physical causes, such as brain chemistry and neural firings, governed by physical laws.

P7: Under strict materialism, the full explanation of why a person believes something never needs to mention logical relations, truth, or evidence. It is complete once you have given the physical story.

P8: If the explanation of a belief is fully given in non rational physical terms, then the belief is not held because it follows from good reasons; it is held because certain molecules moved in certain ways.

P9: A belief that is not held because of its rational support is not rationally justified, even if it happens to be true by accident.

P10: Therefore, if materialism is true, no belief is rationally justified; all beliefs are products of blind physical causes, not of rational insight.

P11: If no belief is rationally justified, then the belief “materialism is true” is not rationally justified either. It cannot be known or believed on rational grounds.

P12: But materialism is presented as a rationally defended philosophical position, and Marxism in particular depends on reasoning, argument, and “scientific” critique of capitalism. So any world in which someone asserts materialism or Marxism already presupposes the existence of rationally formed beliefs.

P13: Therefore, in any possible world where rational inference exists and someone can argue for materialism, materialism implies that no one can ever rationally believe anything, including materialism and Marxism themselves.

P14: A theory that implies that it can never be rationally believed is self defeating. It cannot be true in any world where rational belief exists.

C2: Therefore materialism is necessarily false in every possible world in which rational thought and argument exist.

P15: At least some beliefs are rationally formed and justified, for example basic logical inferences (if all men are mortal and Socrates is a man, then Socrates is mortal) and basic mathematical truths.

P16: If you deny that any beliefs are rationally justified, you undercut every argument whatsoever, including any argument for materialism or Marxism. Any non skeptical reasoning presupposes that some rational inference is possible.

P17: Therefore, there are possible worlds, including the actual world, in which rational thought exists and some beliefs are rationally justified.

C3: By C2 and P17, materialism is necessarily false in every world where rational thinkers exist, including the actual world.

P18: Marxism as Marx and Engels present it presupposes both:

a) Materialism, as its metaphysical and methodological foundation.
b) The real possibility of rational theory, critique, and “scientific socialism,” since Marxist texts are extended arguments intended to persuade on the basis of reasons and evidence.

P19: From C3, materialism is necessarily false in any world with rational thinkers.

P20: Marxism can only be formulated, believed, or argued for in a world that contains rational thinkers, since writing Capital or The Communist Manifesto already presupposes rational inference, not mere random brain spasms.

P21: In every world in which Marxism could exist as a theory, materialism is necessarily false.

P22: If the core metaphysical presupposition of a theory is necessarily false in every world where the theory can even be proposed, then that theory is necessarily false in every such world.

C4: Therefore Marxism is necessarily false in every possible world in which Marxism could be proposed or believed.

Put briefly:

1. Marxism is built on materialism.

2. Materialism says all beliefs are fully caused by non rational physical processes.

3. If that is true, no belief is held because of good reasons, so no belief is rationally justified, including belief in materialism or Marxism.

4. But Marxism presents itself as a rational, scientific theory.

5. So Marxism can only be asserted in a world with real rational thought.

6. In any such world, materialism is self defeating and necessarily false.

7. Therefore Marxism, which rests on materialism, is necessarily false wherever it could be believed at all.

Do Free Markets Corrupt Morality and Community?

One of the most pervasive criticisms of capitalism is that it undermines virtue and community. From ancient philosophers to modern critics, many have argued that market economies breed selfishness, dissolve social bonds, and weaken institutions of civil society. If that were true, Christians would indeed have cause for concern. After all, Scripture calls believers to love of neighbor, honesty, and community. However, a growing body of empirical research and theory debunks the idea that free markets lead to moral decay. In fact, the evidence indicates that economic freedom and private enterprise tend to enhance social capital (measured by rates of participation in voluntary organizations, trust levels, civic engagement, charitable giving, and religious attendance).

Social capital refers to the trust, relationships, and norms of reciprocity that bind people together in community. Critics like sociologist Robert Putnam famously worried that modern capitalism, with its long work hours, suburban sprawl, and TV entertainment, was causing Americans to “bowl alone” and disconnect from civic life. Yet when economists Gabriel Benzecry, Nicholas Reinarts, and Daniel Smith put the relationship between capitalism and social capital to the test, the results told a very different story. Using country-level data from 2005–2021, they found “an unambiguously positive and significant relationship between capitalism and social capital”. In their study, nations with freer markets (measured by smaller government and less state ownership) consistently exhibited higher social capital, including greater civic participation and trust. In other words, far from atomizing society, economic freedom tends to go hand-in-hand with stronger communities. The authors even note that while some market economies still struggle with social cohesion, “we observe no instances of socialist countries achieving and sustainably maintaining robust social capital”.1

If free markets aren’t the culprit behind moral and social decline, what about socialism? Intriguingly, new research suggests that heavy-handed state control of the economy tends to choke the life out of civil society. Another comprehensive historical study by Benzecry et al. examined data on civil society organizations and religious participation in up to 200 countries, some going back to the 18th century. Their finding is striking: the higher the degree of state ownership in an economy, the worse the outcomes for civil society. More state control correlates with the “repression of, decline, and reduced participation in civil society and religious organizations”, to the point that socialism (defined as heavy state ownership) has been historically “detrimental” to social cohesion. Where governments monopolize resources and economic life, independent community groups wither. Churches and faith-based charities especially find themselves squeezed or suppressed under socialist regimes. The study showed that countries with extensive state ownership almost never achieve high levels of civil society participation or religious freedom. In fact, not a single country with “heavy to complete state ownership” of the economy has maintained a robust, autonomous civil society with free religious institutions.2 By overpowering other social bonds, socialism crowds out the very networks of trust and service that Christians hold dear. This evidence debunks the accusation that capitalism is the true threat to community. On the contrary, it is coerced collectivism, which often comes packaged with official atheism or hostility to religion, that leaves people “bowling alone.” It is no coincidence that Putnam’s own datasets document that the decline of clubs and associations in America perfectly coincides with the two largest expansions of the welfare state: The New Deal and The Great Society.

Beyond social capital, critics charge that market economies encourage vice and greed. We often hear claims that capitalism is fueled by selfishness, that competition rewards cutthroat behavior, and that a focus on profit erodes altruism and ethical norms. Superficially, this critique might sound plausible. After all, markets do rely on self-interest to function. But modern research into markets and morals paints a far more optimistic picture. Economists Virgil Storr and Ginny Choi directly confronted this question in their book Do Markets Corrupt Our Morals? and concluded that market societies do not make people morally worse. In many respects, they make people better. How so? Storr and Choi demonstrate that markets depend on virtues like trustworthiness, cooperation, and fairness, and in turn, participation in markets tends to reinforce those virtues. For example, a merchant who cheats his customers or a worker who chronically lies will quickly lose business; honest dealing and a good reputation become valuable assets in a free economy. The authors point out that people in market-oriented societies actually exhibit more pro-social behavior: they are on average more trusting, more trustworthy, and more inclined to cooperate with strangers than people in less market-driven settings. Far from “teaching people to be greedy,” open markets encourage us to serve others’ needs in order to prosper ourselves, what Deirdre McCloskey called the “sweet commerce” that cultivates civility and mutual gain. Indeed, Storr and Choi highlight research showing that individuals raised in market economies tend to be less materialistic and less tolerant of corruption than those in more closed economies. Commerce, when properly functioning, channels self-interest into socially constructive outcomes: I earn a living only by providing you with something you value, which is a fundamentally service-oriented dynamic.

None of this is to deny that vice can exist in markets, of course it can, as in any human endeavor tainted by sin. The Bible warns that “the love of money is a root of all kinds of evil” (1 Tim. 6:10), and Christians have long cautioned that wealth can seduce the heart. But the key insight of recent work is that markets themselves do not inherently reward vice. On the contrary, markets penalize many vices (fraud, theft, breaking contracts) and reward certain virtues (honesty, reliability, hard work) through the feedback of prices and reputation. In a market setting, one typically must cultivate trust to attract customers or secure business partnerships. Consider how much ethical behavior we take for granted every day in free economies: merchants give correct change, food producers avoid poisoning their patrons, employers pay wages on time, not solely out of the goodness of their hearts, but because ethical norms are woven into the fabric of long-term business success. As McCloskey has argued in The Bourgeois Virtues, the advent of widespread commerce helped elevate values like diligence, frugality, courtesy, and cooperation. History lends some fascinating examples: for instance, Quakers in 18th-century England became highly successful merchants precisely because their reputation for honest dealing was so strong in an era of shady business practices.3

When the state abolishes private markets in favor of centralized control, it often undermines personal moral agency and accountability. Storr and Choi make a provocative argument in this regard: policies that aim to curtail market activity for moral reasons can backfire and produce worse moral outcomes. How so? One example is the replacement of private charity with state welfare monopolies. If the government crowds out all space for personal generosity, people may become less habituated to giving and caring for one another, treating the welfare office as the answer to every need. Similarly, under communist regimes where economic life was micromanaged by the state, citizens frequently learned to cheat and steal to survive (think of the endemic black markets and bribery in the Soviet Union). What virtue is cultivated when pretending to work while the state pretends to pay you? By contrast, in a free society, individuals and churches remain responsible for practicing charity and stewardship, moral duties that Christianity strongly emphasizes. Storr and Choi put it bluntly: “Rather than there being moral costs associated with engaging in market activity, there are moral costs that result from curtailing market activity. The moral critics of markets seem to have it exactly wrong.”4

Is the Bible Anti-Capitalist? Scripture on Wealth, Property, and Exchange

Perhaps the most important question for Christians is what Scripture teaches about economic life. Those who argue that Christians cannot support capitalism often claim that the Bible itself mandates an anti-capitalist stance, that the economic ethic of the Old and New Testaments is fundamentally opposed to private property, commerce, and the profit motive. After all, didn’t the early church in Jerusalem “have all things in common” in a form of holy communism (Acts 2:44)? Didn’t Jesus warn against riches, praising the poor and saying one cannot serve both God and Mammon? And aren’t there Old Testament laws (like the Jubilee) that redistribute wealth?

On closer examination, however, the biblical text does not support a simplistic anti-capitalist interpretation. In fact, the core principles that undergird a market economy find strong affirmation in Scripture. The Bible upholds the concept of private property and repeatedly condemns theft and fraud. It honors productive work and thrift, while warning against laziness. Biblical law and Jesus’ parables assume the legitimacy of buying, selling, and earning a profit. At the same time, the Bible places heavy moral demands on the wealthy to be generous and just, and it envisions a community where extreme inequalities are mitigated by compassion. In short, biblical economic ethics are not socialist, but they are certainly not unbridled libertinism either. They align with what one might call virtuous capitalism.

The Bible’s endorsement of private property is so foundational we can easily overlook it. The Eighth Commandment, “Thou shalt not steal” (Exodus 20:15), establishes the principle that individuals have a right to their property, and that it is a sin for others (or the state!) to take what is not theirs. As economist Mark Hendrickson observes, it is “significant that there is one political-ethical issue confronting all societies about which both [Ludwig Von] Mises and the Bible insist is of paramount importance, and about which they are in full and perfect agreement: the principle of private property.”5 Throughout the Old Testament laws of Moses, one finds numerous regulations protecting property rights. Laws about restoring stolen goods, respecting boundary markers, paying damages for someone’s ox or field, and so on. These laws would be meaningless if the Bible considered private property a fundamentally evil or illegitimate concept. On the contrary, property is seen as a gift from God to be managed responsibly. Each Israelite family received an allotment of land in the Promised Land, which was their hereditary property (Leviticus 25). Notably, even the Jubilee provisions did not abolish private land ownership, rather, the Jubilee ensured that each family’s land would ultimately return to them after a period, protecting against permanent destitution or monopolization by a few. This was a means of preventing generational poverty, not a negation of property rights.6 In essence, the Old Testament combined respect for private property with mechanisms to curb extreme inequalities (more on that balance shortly).

Importantly, when the New Testament describes the early Jerusalem church’s radical sharing, it does so in a way that affirms the voluntary (not compulsory) nature of the giving. Acts 2:44–45 says the believers “had everything in common” and were selling their possessions to give to anyone in need. However, as biblical scholar Craig Blomberg has noted, Luke immediately clarifies that this was an ongoing, voluntary charity in response to needs, not a one-time abolition of private ownership. The Christians “continued to live in their own homes,” and their having “all things in common” meant they shared freely by selling goods to help the needy.7 In Acts 5, when Ananias and Sapphira are judged for lying about their donation, Peter pointedly says to Ananias: “Didn’t your property belong to you before it was sold? And after it was sold, wasn’t the money at your disposal?” (Acts 5:4). This question affirms that the land was indeed his to keep or give. His sin was not in retaining part of the proceeds, but in deceitfully pretending to donate all. As Dr. William J. Larkin puts it, Luke is describing a loving community, “not a coercive communism that dispenses with private property through once-for-all expropriation.”8 Nowhere does Acts suggest that the State confiscated believers’ goods, nor that all future Christians must live in a commune. In fact, outside Jerusalem, we don’t see other New Testament churches attempting to pool everything. Paul’s churches took up collections for the Jerusalem poor (2 Cor. 8–9), implying that most Christian communities managed their own possessions but were encouraged to be openhanded in helping others. St. John Chrysostom later preached that Christians should treat their possessions as available to those in need, which is a far cry from advocating that civil governments seize all wealth and redistribute it. The Bible consistently upholds giving that is voluntary and love-motivated: “Each one must give as he has decided in his heart, not reluctantly or under compulsion, for God loves a cheerful giver” (2 Cor. 9:7).

The Bible’s teaching on wealth is nuanced. Material wealth is portrayed sometimes as a blessing from God (e.g., to Abraham, Job, Solomon) and at other times as a spiritual danger that can lead to pride or injustice (e.g., warnings in James 5:1–6). This nuance undermines any blanket statement like “the Bible is against rich people” or “the Bible favors the poor as such.” In fact, Scripture never equates righteousness with poverty or sin with wealth per se. As Craig Blomberg observes, “No ungodly poor people are ever exalted as models, and no godly rich people who are generous and compassionate are ever condemned.”9 The Bible does not teach that it is morally superior to be poor; rather, it recognizes that both wealth and poverty carry unique spiritual challenges. Riches can tempt one to self-sufficiency and greed, forgetting God, whereas poverty can tempt one to envy or despair (Prov. 30:8–9). But either rich or poor can be faithful or unfaithful. Job was extremely wealthy and extremely righteous. The rich Zacchaeus, upon encountering Jesus, used his wealth justly and generously (Luke 19:8–9). On the flip side, the Bible also shows that idolatrous attachment to wealth is spiritually ruinous – as in the case of the rich young ruler who “went away sorrowful” because he loved his great possessions more than Christ (Matt. 19:22). The clear thrust is that wealth itself is value-neutral; it is one’s attitude and use of wealth that carry moral weight. The modern Russian Orthodox social doctrine reflects exactly this point, teaching that “wealth itself does not have any moral value (neither negative nor positive). What is important is wealth’s social dimension and religious motivation.”10 In other words, having money is not a sin; worshipping money or neglecting one’s duties with it is. A Christian business owner or investor can see his wealth as a tool to glorify God, to provide for his family, fund the church, create jobs, serve the community, rather than as an idol. The Bible encourages those who have economic means to enjoy God’s provision with gratitude (1 Tim. 6:17) and simultaneously to “be rich in good works, generous and ready to share” (6:18). These commands assume that private property and wealth will exist among Christians.

The Church Fathers and Eastern Christianity on Commerce and Property

A third pillar of the “Christians can’t support capitalism” argument is the appeal to church tradition, particularly the example of the early Church Fathers. It is often assumed (incorrectly) that the Church Fathers unanimously opposed commerce and advocated a communal, anti-profit lifestyle. One might hear quotes from St. John Chrysostom or St. Basil the Great lambasting the rich and seemingly denouncing private wealth. Some modern Orthodox leaders, too, have been vocal critics of global capitalism, decrying consumerism and inequality. Do these voices mean that historical Christianity took a fundamentally anti-market stance?

When reading these things in their entire context we discover a rich and varied tradition of thought rather than a simplistic rejection of economic life. The Eastern Fathers were indeed stringent in their moral expectations of the wealthy. They preached radical generosity and castigated greed as a soul-destroying sin. They often spoke in fiery terms about the need to share one’s surplus with the poor. However, no Church Father – not Chrysostom, not Basil, not Augustine – ever called for the abolition of private property or the forceful state redistribution of wealth. Quite the opposite. Chrysostom once said: “Should we beg the emperor to impose a tax on the rich so great that it reduces them to the level of the poor, and then to share the proceeds of that tax among everyone? Equality imposed by force would achieve nothing and do much harm. Those who combined both cruel hearts and sharp minds would soon find ways of making themselves rich again. Worse still, the rich whose gold was taken away would feel bitter and resentful; while the poor who received the gold from the hands of soldiers would feel no gratitude, because no generosity would have prompted the gift. Far from bringing moral benefit to society, it would actually do moral harm.”11 Their concern was with how wealth is used, not with establishing a socialist economy. In fact, there is a notable strain of positive thinking about commerce and wealth in patristic literature that is frequently overlooked. Early Christian leaders understood that trade and business could be a force for good, facilitating the mutual benefit of peoples. And in modern times, the Eastern Orthodox Church, while maintaining a cautious tone about materialism, has explicitly defended property rights and even given qualified endorsement to the free market’s role in reducing poverty.

St. John Chrysostom also taught that God’s providence deliberately made human beings dependent on trade so that we would form bonds of friendship across distances. Commenting on the diversity of the earth’s resources, Chrysostom marveled that God created the world and seas in such a way as to require people to trade with one another, lest any region be entirely self-sufficient and isolated.12 By needing goods from others, we are drawn into relationships and cooperation. He even said this prevents distance from “discouraging friendship” and makes the whole earth “as if it were one house inhabited by all.” Chrysostom was educated in Greek philosophy and clearly saw echoes of the Stoic idea of a common human household, yet he grounded it in the Christian belief of a single Creator’s design. His mentor, the pagan teacher Libanius, had praised the way commerce links nations, and Chrysostom (along with other Fathers) echoed this appreciation. St. Basil of Caesarea, another great Father, likewise wrote that the sea is good because it connects lands and enables the exchange of the earth’s fruits, so that “what one land lacks, another land’s abundance will supply” (paraphrasing Basil). In a homily, Basil noted that God could have made a world where each region had all it needed, but instead He chose to distribute different goods in different places to foster social bonds through trade.13 This is a remarkably pro-market insight: commerce is not just tolerated, but actually ordained as part of God’s plan for human civilization. The Fathers did not celebrate the profiteer’s avarice, of course, but they saw nothing inherently wrong with the buying and selling of goods. It was the greed and dishonesty that sometimes accompany trade that they condemned. In Chrysostom’s sermons, he distinguishes often between wealth gotten righteously and wealth gotten sinfully. “Let your riches be justly gained and without rapine,”14 he advised, urging lawful work and trade. If one’s wealth is obtained justly and used charitably, Chrysostom had no quarrel with the mere fact of being wealthy. He himself fundraised from the wealthy of Antioch to support hospitals and ministries for the poor.

It is true that several Church Fathers, especially in their ascetic moods, spoke of the ideal of holding all property in common or the notion that wealth is a trust from God. But when it came to practical ethics, they upheld the rightness of ownership. St. Gregory of Nyssa said that private property originated after the Fall (since before that, all was held in common in Eden), but none of the Fathers advocated reverting to a pre-Fall state by legislative fiat.15 This is remarkably similar to modern economic thought on scarcity. The Austrian School of Economics teaches that “...the absence of private property means no market trade and thus no money prices to guide profit seeking or loss avoidance or to signal the relative scarcity of resources.”16 None of the Fathers argued that the government should enforce the renunciation of property. When St. Basil excoriated the hoarders of grain during famine (calling them murderers for letting the poor starve), he was appealing to conscience and urging charlity. He was not proposing a new economic policy for the Roman Empire; he was preaching virtue to the Church. In fact, historical analysis confirms that the patristic witness affirms (or at least does not deny) a basic right to private property as part of God’s ordering. Orthodox ethicist Fr. Gregory Jensen notes that contemporary Orthodox social thought “presupposes” this right as fundamental.17

In our own times, the Eastern Orthodox Church has had to articulate its social teaching more explicitly, especially after the fall of communism. The Russian Orthodox Church in 2000 adopted an official Basis of the Social Concept, the closest thing to a Catholic-style social encyclical in the Orthodox world. Far from denouncing market economics outright, it actually takes a balanced view. It “does not negate entrepreneurship and wealth” but is “critical [of] the purpose and forms” those take.18 It warns against the idolization of money and the injustices of unbridled capitalism, yet also highlights that idleness and parasitic poverty are not virtues either. Indeed, the Social Concept explicitly says the Church opposes extreme inequalities and advocates fair distribution, but also it “demonstrates a softer approach toward wealth-creation”, acknowledging that wealth in itself is not an absolute barrier to salvation. One of its most striking lines affirms: “We consider that free market can create structures through which people can attain material goods.”19 This statement, coming from the Patriarchate of Moscow, shows a recognition that free-market mechanisms can lift people out of poverty (something the 20th century certainly proved in contrast to failed communist economies). The document upholds human freedom as a key reason to favor a market-oriented society, albeit a morally guided one. In summary, contemporary Orthodoxy does not bless all aspects of modern capitalism (it specifically critiques consumerism, environmental harm, and poverty amidst riches), but it has turned toward a basically pro-market stance. Private property is firmly defended as a part of the created order, “the Orthodox social doctrine is integral towards property ownership,” noting that property and labor have a spiritual dimension and must be used for good.

To tie these threads together: the legacy of Eastern Christian thought does not demand that believers reject capitalism wholesale. Rather, it calls believers to sanctify their economic lives. To be in the marketplace but not of it, to conduct business and ownership in a way that serves God and neighbor. It is telling that many Orthodox countries suffered under communism, which attempted to implement a secular version of egalitarianism, and the result was not holy community, but persecution of the Church and destitution of the populace. Those historical scars have led Orthodox writers like Fr. Jensen to assert that anti-market biases among some churchmen “reflect a faulty anthropology” and can inadvertently undermine human flourishing. In contrast, embracing a vision of property rights coupled with moral obligations can open fruitful collaboration between the Church and economic actors to bless society.

Conclusion

In light of tradition, we see continuity with our earlier findings. The moral critique the Fathers leveled at the rich is consistent with the biblical warnings. It’s about the heart and the duty to love others, not a blueprint for government ownership or class warfare. The Church Fathers and Eastern theologians never overturned the basic biblical economics of property and voluntary exchange; they sought to infuse those with charity and restraint. As one patristics scholar concluded, the Fathers “no more argue for abolishing private property or its forcible redistribution by the government than do the other fathers” of the Church. They wanted “righteous ownership and virtuous stewardship”instead. This is precisely what a Christian vision of compassionate capitalism entails.

So, can a Christian support capitalism? Yes, if by “capitalism” we mean a free-market economy ordered by justice and charity. In fact, Christians not only can support such an economy, but they have strong reasons to prefer it over the alternatives. A free economy, combined with a virtuous citizenry, offers the best material environment for the Church’s mission and for the temporal well-being of our neighbors. By contrast, coercive economic systems that idolize the state or promise utopia have consistently delivered religious oppression and moral bankruptcy. Capitalism without Christ can certainly fall into greed, but capitalism with Christ-informed consciences has proven capable of great good: building hospitals, funding missions, relieving poverty (think of how many Christian charities are funded by the wealth generated in market economies).

The early Christians proclaimed Jesus, not Caesar, as Lord. It relativized all earthly powers and warned against trusting in princes (or their economic edicts). In our day, it reminds us not to put messianic hopes in socialism or any ideology, but to use our freedom virtuously. As the modern Russian doctrine wisely quotes Nikolai Berdyaev: “The problem of bread for myself is a material question, but the problem of bread for my neighbor is a spiritual question.”20 In a capitalist framework, one can seek one’s daily bread by honest work (material question) and also take on the joyful burden of helping feed one’s neighbor (spiritual question). In a socialist framework that liberty is removed. Everyone is reduced to a material problem for the state to solve, and the spiritual dimension of freely given charity is lost. I will tackle the issue of socialism head-on in the sequel to this paper.

The grim truth is that the electorate’s knowledge of government and policy is dismayingly low, and it has stayed low for generations. Political scientists Michael Delli Carpini and Scott Keeter, surveying data from the 1940s through the 1980s, found no significant improvement in the public’s political knowledge over time.1 The average American in 1990 was about as uninformed as the average American in 1950, despite the dramatic rise in schooling and the advent of the internet. It’s not that people can’t learn; it’s that they don’t want to. In a famous study, Scott Althaus observed that public opinion often fails to resemble any kind of rational “will of the people” at all, precisely because so many people lack basic information. What surveys often reveal is a mishmash of collective preferences biased by the fact that some groups are much better informed than others (and thus have outsize influence in polls), while vast swaths of citizens know next to nothing.2 In short, democracy does not magically aggregate wisdom; more often it aggregates ignorance and bias.

To be clear, I’m not engaging in elitist snobbery here (well, maybe a little bit), ignorance of politics is an entirely rational response for someone more concerned with paying the bills and living their life than with parsing the Federal Register. As economist Ilya Somin documents, even very basic political facts elude most Americans. Many cannot name their representatives or identify major policy issues. A sizable chunk of voters literally don’t know what the three branches of government are. In one illustrative poll, 80% of Americans agreed that the government was hiding evidence of space aliens, and 50% believed aliens have abducted humans. (I’d love to say that one is a fluke outlier, but given the popularity of retard-level conspiracy theories, it’s not far off the norm.) Huge numbers also hold wildly incorrect beliefs about budget priorities, economic data, and history. We are dealing with a populace that, by and large, does not care to learn the things we might consider crucial for responsible voting. And frankly, expecting that to change by means of patient education is bordering on delusional at this point. As Somin notes, the persistence of such ignorance despite rising general education levels and unprecedented information access is best explained by rational ignorance. People choose not to know.3 Supply of information isn’t the problem; lack of demand for information is. Most people figure (not incorrectly) that their individual political knowledge won’t make any difference, so they devote their attention elsewhere. And they’re probably right.

Even those who do pay some attention are not exactly wise sages. They tend to be “political fans” who follow the news the way sports fanatics follow the NFL, not to become better-informed citizens, but to cheer on their team and boo the rivals. They consume information in a highly biased way, seeking confirmation of their pre-existing views. (Sound familiar? It’s basically X in a nutshell.) So much for the dream of the vigilant, informed voter. We have to confront a painful reality: voting is not a graduate seminar, and most voters are not interested in learning what we wish they would. Piling more libertarian white papers on their desks will not change their behavior at the ballot box. As Philip Tetlock’s famous study on expert judgment showed, even supposed experts are often dismally bad at predicting political or economic outcomes, so imagine expecting average voters to absorb complex policy analysis. In Tetlock’s research, political experts scarcely did better than “dart-throwing chimps” at forecasting events, highlighting that more knowledge and credentials didn’t necessarily translate into better political judgment.4 If the PhDs and think-tankers are often wrong, the idea that we’re going to enlighten hundreds of millions of ordinary folks into consistently voting for liberty is a pipe dream.

Alright, so people are ignorant and likely to stay that way, grim but true. Where does that leave us, those of us who actually do care about doing policy the right way? It means that if we want to change the political status quo, we can’t rely on some mass public epiphany. We have to get a lot more practical and a lot less naïve. We need to think in terms of incentives and power, not just education and persuasion. In other words, it’s time to play hardball politics, what H.L. Richardson called “confrontational politics.” As uncomfortable as it might make our idealistic sensibilities, politics is largely a game of pressure and inducement. Policies change not because the majority suddenly achieves enlightenment, but because key players are pressured to fear the consequences of not changing, or enticed by the rewards of changing.

Libertarians and principled conservatives have traditionally been lousy at this game. We figured truth was on our side and that would be enough; we’d win by the force of superior ideas. Meanwhile, the other side brought a gun to our knife fight (sometimes, literally). The activist Left has spent decades mastering the art of political confrontation: they form tight interest groups, they make loud demands, they punish politicians who cross them and lavish support on those who toe their line. And it works. As Richardson observed from his time in the California State Senate, small, organized factions can wield power far out of proportion to their numbers by using carrot-and-stick tactics. A labor union with a few thousand members can intimidate a legislature of millions because it shows up, delivers votes and money to its friends, and mercilessly attacks its enemies. “They punish and they reward…thus, they are listened to,” Richardson quips about such special-interest leaders.5 A tiny cadre of motivated activists can “father” candidates (recruiting and bankrolling those who support their agenda) and destroy incumbents who don’t. Consider how a relatively small group like, say, organized environmental lobbyists or teachers’ unions, manages to get its way even when polls show the general public is lukewarm or opposed: it’s because they show up with pitchforks and treasure chests. Meanwhile, how often have we seen vast swathes of Middle America, the proverbial silent majority, completely ignored? It wasn’t that their values were truly a minority view; it’s that they weren’t organized to either punish or reward the politicians. Silent majorities might as well not exist in politics. (If a majority falls in the forest and no one is mobilized to push its interests, does it make a sound?)

For a stark example, look at the difference between two constituencies: the Christian conservative community versus the LGBTABCD+ lobby. Traditional Christians are far more numerous in raw numbers. Yet for a long time, their political influence was meager. Why? Because, as Richardson wryly notes, most were politically passive, content to pray and hope rather than plan and act, “delegating to God all political action” as if expecting divine intervention at the ballot box. The result: politicians took them for granted or even openly maligned them. By contrast, LGBT activists, though a much smaller fraction of the population, became a force to be reckoned with. They formed well-funded organizations, ousted lawmakers who opposed them, and rewarded those who advanced their agenda. The outcome was predictable: within a couple of decades, they achieved policy victories (from marriage laws to anti-discrimination rules) that the passive moral majority could only gripe about on talk radio. This is not about who had the better or correct arguments in some abstract sense, it’s about who applied power effectively.

The lesson for libertarians and liberty-leaning conservatives is clear: we need to get off the soapbox and into the trenches. Education alone, without organization and confrontation, leaves us perpetually preaching to a choir that never swings into action. We must start behaving like a disciplined political faction that rewards its friends and punishes its enemies. This means marshaling votes and dollars in a targeted way. It means not voting for the “lesser evil” unless that lesser evil has earned our support with real concessions, and being willing to politically kneecap the people who take us for granted. We have to cultivate politicians who depend on our backing, and make it painfully obvious to any would-be turncoats that betraying liberty principles will end their careers.

Does that sound harsh? Good. Politics is harsh. I’m not suggesting anything immoral or uncouth, only that we use the same levers of incentive that every successful political movement uses. We of all people (as students of economics) should understand that incentives matter! Ideas do not win just by their merit; they win when attached to incentive mechanisms. Politicians, for the most part, do what will get them elected or keep them in office. So we must make supporting our agenda the rational choice for them. That might involve, for example, flooding a primary to oust a big-spending Republican with a liberty-minded challenger. Or it might mean withholding support in a general election to teach a lesson to a GOP candidate who treated the liberty wing with contempt (I’m looking at you, Neocons). Conversely, it definitely means vocally and financially backing those few courageous elected officials who do stand up for our principles, letting them know we have their backs, so that they can more effectively fight on the inside. Incentives aren’t just about punishment; they’re also about rewards, building reputational and electoral benefits for doing the right thing.

Now, part of this strategic reorientation involves a question: What vehicle should we use to exercise this influence? Some libertarians insist on independence from the “two corrupt parties” and cling to the Libertarian Party (LP) as the pure expression of our ideals. I admire the intention there, but as someone who wants actual political change in my lifetime, I have to be blunt: the Libertarian Party has been, at best, a noble dead end. When it comes to wielding power (even at the local level, let alone nationally), the LP just hasn’t delivered. Meanwhile, working within the Republican Party has yielded some genuine inroads for liberty advocates. Think of Ron Paul’s insurgent campaigns, which awakened millions of people and put “End the Fed” on the national radar. Ron Paul ran as a Republican. By running in a major-party primary, he injected our ideas into the mainstream debate in a way no third-party candidate ever has. Hans-Hermann Hoppe even pointed out that the so-called Alt-Right figures who attended Phis meetings knew and respected Ron Paul and Murray Rothbard. Hoppe once dryly noted that the Libertarian Party’s recent presidential candidates were so out of touch that one “had never even heard of Rothbard,” whereas every one of the Alt-Right speakers he interacted with was well-versed in Rothbard and had supported Ron Paul’s GOP run.6 That should tell us something. The libertarian instincts among the public (and even among anti-establishment right-wingers) find expression through Republican mavericks far more effectively than through LP doctrinaires.

In terms of raw strategy, fusionism with the Republican Party is simply a more viable path for us. The GOP is a big, fractious tent that already houses a substantial constituency that is skeptical of big government, people we can work with, persuade, and if needed, leverage. Yes, the establishment Republican leadership often stinks. Yes, many Republicans are hawks or crypto-socialists with whom we vehemently disagree. But that party is the field where the game is being played. If we pick up our ball and insist on playing in the LP’s empty sandbox, the game goes on without us. By contrast, if we organize within the GOP, especially at the local and state level, we can become the kingmakers in primaries and a feared bloc in general elections. Just as the radical Left succeeded by becoming the “base” of the Democratic Party (eventually pulling it ever leftward), liberty lovers can become the deciding base of the Republican Party if we commit to that path. We’ve already seen glimpses of this: a staunch libertarian-ish contingent in Congress (like the House Freedom Caucus) has at times forced leadership to reckon with issues like auditing the Fed, curtailing surveillance, or ending endless wars. Those victories, modest as they are, utterly dwarf anything the Libertarian Party has achieved in policy terms. And they came because liberty people worked within the GOP framework. Even Richardson, writing in the 1990s, argued that conservatives should pragmatically choose the Republican Party as their vehicle, because it offered the best shot at gaining leverage and ousting entrenched leftists: “The selection of which party to register must be a pragmatic choice… At the present time, the Republican structure is the one where the Conservative has the best ability to consolidate control,” he wrote, noting that opportunities for influence were far greater there than in the Democrat Party8. That insight still holds. The two-party system isn’t fair or ideal, but it is the battlefield. We either fight on it, or we relegate ourselves to spectator status.

A fusionist strategy doesn’t mean surrendering our principles; it means finding common cause with allies and using the existing machinery to advance shared goals. Libertarians and principled conservatives actually have a lot of overlap, certainly more with each other than either has with the progressive Left. We all want to be left alone to run our businesses, raise our families, and cling (peaceably) to our religion or lack thereof. We all distrust centralized social engineering. We all prefer personal responsibility over government paternalism. These common values form the basis of a potent coalition, if only we seize the opportunity. And crucially, working within the GOP gives us the numbers we need to matter. Politics, at the end of the day, is a numbers game, as the leftist strategists understood when they systematically took over institutions. The faction that can reliably deliver votes will get the policy concessions. The Left spent years making the Democratic Party their instrument; they didn’t waste time on hopeless third parties. We must be equally ruthless in playing the long game on the right. That means sometimes swallowing the imperfect in order to move the ball forward. It also means not falling for the old GOP establishment trick of coopting us with rhetoric and then betraying us, we have to be willing to “throw the bums out” whenever they double-cross on core issues like spending or gun rights. We reward conditionally and punish mercilessly. That is how political movements earn respect. Politicians, like dogs, respond to training. Time to get out the rolled-up newspaper (or in this case, primary challenges and well-funded PACs) when they shit on the carpet.

Beyond electoral mechanics, we should also focus on localism and parallel institutions. Hans-Hermann Hoppe’s strategic insights in What Must Be Done are especially relevant: he argues that we will never achieve liberty by begging for scraps from Washington, DC. Instead, we should concentrate on decentralizing power and creating pockets of freedom that can thrive on their own. This might involve pushing for devolution of authority to states and localities, nullification of unjust federal laws, and even private community-building outside the direct purview of the state. Hoppe suggests a “bottom-up revolution,” whereby libertarians take over smaller jurisdictions like towns, counties, maybe a state or two, and implement radically free-market policies there, creating showcase examples of how liberty works in practice. He even advises that we stop wasting energy on doomed national races like the presidency, and focus on places where a committed minority can actually win.7 It’s hard to disagree: I’d rather see 10 libertarian mayors and governors actually governing according to our principles than one libertarian presidential candidate getting 2% of the vote. If we can establish even a few “free zones” that flourish (imagine a city with no income tax, minimal regulations, school choice, etc., that experiences a boom), we create real-world proof that can’t be ignored. Success breeds success. People vote with their feet, as Hoppe reminds us, and the more we can allow for political competition between jurisdictions, the better. This aligns with the basic idea of federalism that conservatives hold: let Texas be Texas and California be California. Well, I say let’s make some parts of America actually free and see which model attracts more residents and investment. (I have a strong hunch how that experiment ends.)

So, to summarize our strategic framework: Refute the myth that simply enlightening enough people will fix our politics (it won’t). Replace it with a confrontational, incentive-based approach: use pressure, coalitions, and political hardball to achieve tangible victories even with an inattentive electorate. Fuse with allies on the right in a pragmatic way, because dividing our strength is a fool’s errand (the goal is to win, not to hold hands in pure isolation as the ship goes down). Reward those who advance liberty, punish those who impede it, make politicians fear losing our vote more than they fear CNN calling them names. And build liberty from the ground up: strengthen local bastions of freedom, encourage secession of mindset even if not of territory (yet), and make our enclaves so prosperous and vibrant that even the indifferent can’t help but notice. This is not a quick or easy program, but it’s one grounded in reality and historical experience. It beats waiting around for a “Libertarian Moment” that never quite materializes because, shocker, most people weren’t studying their Mises.

And we should be bold. As Murray Rothbard and others have often emphasized, there’s no point in trimming and shuffling with half-measures. Our job is to make the state’s representatives worry about us (not the other way around). When they consider some new tax or regulation, we want them looking over their shoulder, hesitating, remembering the last time they got burned for crossing that band of fanatical liberty voters. Politics at its core comes down to that old question: “Who, whom?” (Who rules whom.) Right now, despite our superior ideas, we liberty advocates have been the “whom” far too long, on the receiving end of the ruling. Time to. If we do this right, we’ll not only gain the power to roll back government overreach, but we’ll also have a lot more fun doing it. And nothing confounds the statist busybodies more than a liberty movement that is effective, unapologetic, and maybe even a little confrontational. They expect us to be aloof think-tank gooners or naive idealists; let’s instead be cunning, gutsy political entrepreneurs.

Libertarians often quote Economics in One Lesson, but perhaps we need to heed Politics in One Lesson: People (and politicians especially) respond to incentives. If we want a freer society, we must create the incentives that make freedom the rational choice for those in power. That means wielding sticks and carrots, not just chalkboards and lectures. We can still educate the willing, but let’s dispense with the fantasy of mass conversion. Instead, let’s identify the leverage points in the system and apply force. We’ll educate ourselves, deeply, so that we know what to fight for and how to articulate it, but when it comes to the masses, we’ll focus on delivering results they can appreciate (like a booming economy in a low-tax town) rather than abstract theory.

I know this sounds like a tall order. It is. But the alternative is to keep doing what we’ve been doing (and getting what we’ve been getting): namely, nowhere. I refuse to accept that fate. We have the right ideas, and now we’re crafting the right strategy to actualize them. I’m done waiting for the average voter to see the light. I’m ready to grab the light switch, along with a coalition of the willing, and flip it on ourselves. If that means a little confrontation, so be it. I’d rather libertarians be known as the principled fighters who get stuff done than the brilliant wallflowers who “educate” while the world burns. So let’s embrace a superior model of political action: one that doesn’t rely on mass enlightenment at all, but rather on good old-fashioned pressure, incentives, and alliances to make liberty win. We’ll educate those who want to join our cause, but for the rest, we’ll speak in the only language they truly understand: victory. And once we’re winning, who knows? Maybe then the education theory of politics will finally come true: nothing educates the public quite like the example of success. When we start rolling back government and people tangibly benefit, even the ignorant will take notice. And if they don’t, well, we’ll free them anyway, whether they know it or not. As I often remind my libertarian friends who fret about the unenlightened masses: we’re not trying to have coffee with every voter; we’re trying to take power and change the damn policies. The rest will follow. That, in a nutshell, is how we will advance liberty in our time: by confronting the system head-on, using incentives wisely, and never losing sight of the strategic big picture. It’s time to leave the lecture hall and charge the arena. Let’s get to it.

Karl Marx is often remembered as a theorist of class struggle and revolution, but less discussed is his explicit fascination with war as a catalyst for revolutionary change. In Marx’s view, history advanced through violent ruptures. He believed that only through cataclysmic conflict could the old capitalist order be demolished to make way for a socialist world. As one biographer notes, the “real, historic, living Marx was a man who glorified war. He dreamed of total wars…lasting for decades and generations, wars that would shatter capitalist civilization and steel the proletariat for the ruthless exercise of dictatorial power.”1 This was not a flight of poetic exaggeration but a sincere conviction: Marx saw international class war as the midwife of a new world. In the Communist Manifesto of 1848, he and Engels famously called upon workers of all countries to unite, implicitly preparing them for a coming struggle. The Manifesto thundered with assurance that a “new and harmonious Communist world would be born from the blood and wreckage of international class war,” a prospect that emotionally exhilarated its radical readers.2 Marx’s followers were meant to scarcely notice the chilling implication: this new world required unprecedented violence. Society torn asunder by conflict on a global scale.

Marx’s appetite for conflict was not merely theoretical. Throughout his career, he welcomed wars among the existing powers as events that might destabilize the status quo. During the Franco-Prussian War of 1870, Marx privately cheered for Prussia to defeat Emperor Napoleon III’s France, calculating that a French military collapse could spark a revolutionary upheaval in Paris. “The French need a thrashing,” Marx wrote to Engels as soon as war was declared, and Engels exulted when the Prussian armies triumphed at Sedan.3 Indeed, France’s defeat in 1870 did unleash the Paris Commune, a brief workers’ revolution that Marx hailed as a harbinger of the future. Similarly, Marx and Engels looked to other international conflicts for their revolutionary potential. They spoke openly, at times chauvinistically, about certain wars they wanted to see. Engels indulged in German nationalist fervor, imagining a crusade against the “rotten” Slavic realms on Germany’s borders, and urged war against Tsarist Russia to create a “greater German Reich.”4 This early war-mongering by Marx and Engels was not driven by mere patriotism or geopolitics; it was rooted in their ideology. They assumed that by accelerating the downfall of reactionary or rival powers through war, history’s dial would be advanced toward proletarian revolution. War, in their eyes, could be a cleansing force. A furnace in which the old social order would melt down and from which the iron of a new socialist order could be forged.

In Marx’s dialectical philosophy, capitalism was doomed to destroy itself, and war was one possible trigger for that destruction. He theorized that capitalist competition on a world scale would inevitably lead to military conflicts as great powers jockeyed for markets and colonies. Those conflicts, while tragic for the people caught in them, could hasten capitalism’s demise. As historian Sean McMeekin observes, Marx “saw the revolutionary potential of modern wars”, understanding that a sufficiently ruinous war could produce social collapse and radicalization among the survivors. This outlook was vindicated, in Marx’s mind, by the Commune of 1871: the war between France and Prussia directly gave birth to the first experiment in working-class rule. Marx’s ideological commitment to revolution thus overlapped neatly with an embrace of war’s destructive energy. In private correspondence he went so far as to envision apocalyptic conflagrations. He “dreamed of total wars, conducted by entire peoples under arms” which would wipe away the old order in fire and blood, leaving the ground fertile for socialism.

This sanguinary vision might seem at odds with Marx’s image as a humane champion of the oppressed. Yet as economist Nathaniel Weyl points out, an “irony and paradox” of Marx’s legacy is that a man venerated as a prophet of brotherhood in fact believed fervently in the regenerative power of violence.5 Marx held in The Communist Manifesto that the proletariat had “nothing to lose but [their] chains” and a world to win, a world that would be gained, he made clear, only through the defeat and destruction of the existing capitalist states. There was no gradual or peaceful path in Marx’s program; the old world had to be broken. From the very start, Marxism’s revolutionary program was steeped in this kind of militant eschatology, anticipating that an epochal war, between classes or between nations (as proxies for classes), would usher in the final confrontation. For Marx, therefore, war was not an aberration to be avoided at all costs, but a historically necessary and ultimately positive force if it advanced the cause of proletarian revolution.

Lenin’s Strategy: Turning Imperialist War into Revolution

If Marx provided the theory of war as a revolutionary crucible, Vladimir Lenin provided the playbook for how revolutionaries could actually exploit a war among capitalist powers. Lenin, leading the Bolsheviks amidst World War I, faced exactly the scenario Marx had anticipated: A catastrophic war between great “capitalist-imperialist” states. Lenin’s contribution was to insist that socialists should not rally to their national flags in such a conflict, but rather should welcome their own government’s defeat as an opportunity for revolution. He distilled this in the slogan of “revolutionary defeatism,” the idea that the worst outcome for a capitalist country at war (military defeat) was actually the best outcome for the proletariat.6 Lenin argued that a government weakened and discredited by a lost war could be brought down by armed uprisings at home. In 1915, as World War I raged, he scandalized orthodox socialists by declaring that “the defeat of one’s own [bourgeois] government in the imperialist war” was a lesser evil compared to that government surviving the war intact. Only through defeat could the cycle of war be transformed into class war.

This was no mere abstract doctrine. In practice, Lenin made “revolutionary defeatism” the Bolshevik strategy during World War I, and it paid off dramatically. As the war dragged on and the Russian Empire’s fortunes faded, Lenin’s Bolsheviks agitated relentlessly among soldiers and workers to “turn the imperialist war into a civil war.” In March 1917, Saint Nicholas II was overthrown amid military disaster and internal unrest. By late 1917, as Germany’s armies still pressed on Russian soil, Lenin and his party seized power in Petrograd, directly leveraging the collapse of state authority caused by the strain of war. The Russian Revolution of 1917 confirmed Lenin’s premise that absent the catalyst of war, Communist revolution was inconceivable. As Historian Sean McMeekin observes, neither in Russia nor anywhere else did Communists come close to power except in the chaotic conditions created by war: “a series of world wars that rent the social fabric and put lethal arms in the hands of millions” was the prerequisite for any communist victory.7 Indeed, Communists nowhere came to power through peaceful elections or purely internal class struggle; it was the World War that made Russia ripe for Lenin’s coup.

Lenin was fully conscious of this, and he generalized the lesson for future revolutionaries. In 1918–19, he founded the Communist International (Comintern) explicitly to spread revolution worldwide, hoping to capitalize on the war’s aftermath. He assumed that Europe was on the brink of proletarian revolution, especially in defeated Germany and Hungary where short-lived communist uprisings did occur in 1919. However, these postwar upheavals fizzled out. Outside of the former Russian Empire, the revolutionary wave receded by the early 1920s. This failure chastened the Comintern, but it also reinforced a grim corollary of Lenin’s doctrine: perhaps only an even larger and more devastating war than the first world war could create the conditions for communism to spread beyond one country. As Lenin’s early critic (and anarchist rival) Mikhail Bakunin had presciently warned, Marxism in practice meant substituting one form of violent rule for another, and Lenin’s experience showed that such rule could triumph only amidst “massive violence and a preponderance of force.”8

Nonetheless, Lenin’s approach set a template. He had shown that a disciplined revolutionary organization, if it survived the initial onslaught of war, could exploit the disarray on the “losing side” of a conflict. Lenin forged his strategy in conscious emulation of Marx. He carefully studied Marx’s analysis of the 1870 Franco-Prussian War and how the French defeat spawned the Paris Commune. He also drew lessons from the Russo-Japanese War of 1904–05, after which Russia experienced the Revolution of 1905, a dress rehearsal for 1917. These episodes convinced Lenin that modern war naturally bred revolution under the right circumstances. As one account summarizes, Marx and Lenin alike perceived the “revolutionary potential” of such wars for “the losing side” defeat shattered old authorities and emboldened the masses to rise up.9 Lenin systematized this insight: when World War I broke out, he openly hoped for the defeat of Czarist Russia (his own country) because he believed that only utter military collapse could bring about the proletarian revolution he desired.

History vindicated Lenin in Russia. But notably, even the cataclysm of World War I was not enough to trigger world revolution at large. The Communists in power in Moscow found themselves isolated as Europe’s other revolutions were crushed by recovering capitalist regimes in 1919–1920. This led Lenin and his successors to a sobering but logical conclusion: a second world war might be needed to finish the job that the first had started. Indeed, as the 1920s progressed with no global revolution in sight, the Soviet leadership kept the idea alive that another great war among the capitalist powers could open the path for Communism to expand. Lenin died in 1924, but his strategic legacy, the opportunistic view of war as both inevitable under capitalism and potentially favorable for communists, lived on in the conclaves of the Comintern and in the mind of his most successful acolyte, Joseph Stalin.

War as “Opportunity”: Stalin and the Comintern Line in the 1930s

By the mid-1930s, Joseph Stalin had consolidated power in the Soviet Union and placed loyal stalwarts at the helm of the Communist International. Publicly, the Soviet line oscillated between militant revolution and cautious diplomacy, but beneath the surface Stalin never abandoned the ultimate Marxist-Leninist goal: world revolution. The lessons of World War I were not lost on him. Stalin understood clearly that the Bolshevik Revolution had triumphed thanks in large part to the chaos of war, a lesson driven home by Lenin and by Marxist writings. As international tensions mounted again in the 1930s, Stalin and his circle in the Comintern actively contemplated how a new global conflict could be used to the advantage of Communism.

For most of the 1930s, Stalin had outwardly pursued “collective security” against Nazi Germany, even joining the League of Nations and advocating anti-fascist Popular Fronts with Western democracies.10 This was a pragmatic response to the immediate threat Hitler posed. Yet even during these years, Stalin’s commitment to working with the West was skin-deep. The Communist International’s ideological line still ultimately held that capitalism was doomed to internecine war. And indeed, as Axis aggression increased (Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Spanish Civil War, Japan’s war in China, Hitler’s annexations), Stalin began to see a second world war not as something to be averted, but as something to be leveraged. The logic was pure Marxist-Leninist realpolitik: if the capitalist powers (now including fascist states as well as Anglo-French “democracies”) could be provoked into warring with each other, the resulting carnage and exhaustion could recreate 1917 on a broader scale. “World revolution”, so elusive since Lenin’s time, might be realized in the ashes of a general war.

This outlook was explicitly articulated at the highest levels of the Comintern on the eve of World War II. On August 31, 1939, with Europe on the brink of conflict, Georgi Dimitrov, the secretary-general of the Comintern and Stalin’s close ally, took to the airwaves of Radio Moscow. His message left no doubt about the revolutionary wager Stalin was making. Dimitrov explained to Communists worldwide that the Soviet Union’s recent diplomatic about-face, a reference to the shocking Nazi–Soviet pact signed days earlier, was driven by the aim of precipitating an imperialist war that could be turned to the proletariat’s advantage. He laid out a series of questions and answers for Communist Party cadres across the globe, a catechism of revolutionary strategy in the new situation. The core points were as follows:

• Have the basic aims of the Comintern changed? No – the goal remains world proletarian revolution.

• Is a world revolution possible now? Not yet – all attempts to spark revolution so far have failed.

• What are the natural prerequisites to a revolution? “A prolonged war, as expounded in the writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin.”

• Is a war in Europe in the interests of the Comintern? Yes – because it will bring nearer the moment when the masses explode in revolt.

• Would an alliance of the USSR with Britain and France hasten the outbreak of war? No – such a bloc would likely deter Germany from military ventures.

• Would a pact between the USSR and Germany hasten the outbreak of war? Yes – with the USSR neutral, Germany would feel free to act.

• What, therefore, must the attitude of the USSR be to hasten world revolution? “To assist Germany in a sufficient degree so that she will begin a war and to take measures to insure that this war will drag on.”11

This extraordinary directive, broadcast by Dimitrov, essentially spelled out Stalin’s strategy in plain terms. The Soviet Union, as the leading socialist state, would facilitate the start of a war among the capitalist powers (by aligning with Germany) and then work to ensure that the war was as long and draining as possible for those involved. The longer and more devastating the war, the more ripe the conditions for communist revolution in the belligerent countries. Here was Marx’s and Lenin’s logic taken to its ultimate conclusion: rather than merely waiting for imperialist war to erupt, Stalin was willing to help set it in motion if it served the revolutionary cause. Dimitrov’s reference to the “writings of Marx, Engels, and Lenin” was no perfunctory genuflection, it acknowledged that this strategy was grounded in core Marxist doctrine. All three founders of their ideology had taught that a great war could be the midwife of revolution, and now Stalin was acting on that teaching.

It is important to grasp how shocking this Comintern pronouncement was, coming as it did on the literal eve of World War II. Just weeks earlier, communists worldwide had been denouncing Hitler and urging collective security; many ordinary Party members were stunned and confused by the sudden pact with Nazi Germany. Dimitrov’s broadcast was meant to justify this about-face ideologically. He essentially told the global communist rank-and-file: trust us, this war will be good for the revolution. The Nazi–Soviet Pact was defended as a necessary gambit to ignite the long-awaited crisis of the capitalist system. The Comintern even instructed Western communist parties to propagate this line, for example, a secret guidance was sent to Communist leaders like France’s Maurice Thorez, warning them not to support their own “bourgeois” governments in the coming war but to undermine the war effort.12 The official stance, once World War II began, was that this was an “imperialist war” on both sides, and communists should work to transform it into civil war and revolution, rather than siding with any capitalist government. (This line only changed in 1941, when Hitler betrayed Stalin and invaded the USSR, at which point the war was redefined as a just “anti-fascist” war. Tellingly, as Stalin had hinted, the Soviets were quite capable of switching sides when it suited the larger goal.)

Stalin’s perspective in 1939 was candidly recorded by Dimitrov in his private diary as well. On September 7, 1939, one week into the war, Dimitrov met with Stalin in the Kremlin and noted Stalin’s satisfaction at how events were unfolding. “A war is on between two groups of capitalist countries…for the redivision of the world, for domination of the world!” Stalin said. “We see nothing wrong in their having a good hard fight and weakening each other.” Stalin observed with grim approval that Hitler, “without understanding it or desiring it, is shaking and undermining the capitalist system.” In other words, Hitler’s aggression was unwittingly serving communism by battering the established powers (Britain, France, etc.). Stalin, as a Communist in power, felt it was his prerogative to “maneuver, pit one side against the other to set them fighting with each other as fiercely as possible.” The nonaggression pact with Hitler was one such maneuver “to a certain degree helping Germany,” Stalin admitted, but only as a means to a greater end. “Next time, we’ll urge on the other side,” he quipped, indicating that the USSR could later shift support to the opposite camp to keep the war balanced and prolonged.13 These stunning remarks encapsulate Stalin’s cold-blooded strategy: encourage a mutually ruinous war among the capitalist states, feeding the flames just enough to ensure no quick victory by one side, and thereby pave the way for communist power to expand when the time was right.

Setting the Stage for World War II: Stalin’s Deliberate Moves in 1939

Stalin’s ideological calculus about war did not remain in the realm of theory or radio broadcasts; it translated directly into concrete policy decisions that helped unleash World War II. In 1939, in a series of calculated moves, Stalin effectively lit the fuse that set off the European war, adhering closely to the strategy Dimitrov outlined. Three key steps can be identified in Stalin’s orchestration of the conflict:

1. Purging the Peace-Maker: The Removal of Litvinov (May 1939).

2. Sabotaging the Anglo-French Alliance Talks.

3. Courting Hitler: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact (August 1939).

Each of these actions was a piece of the puzzle by which Stalin cleared the way for Hitler’s aggression and ensured that no “Triple Alliance” of Britain, France, and the USSR would stop the coming war. Taken together, they show Stalin deliberately steering events toward the outcome his ideology desired: A general war among the capitalist powers, from which he planned to profit.

Purging the Peace-Maker: The Removal of Litvinov

In the 1930s, Soviet foreign policy had been personified by Maxim Litvinov, Stalin’s long-serving Foreign Minister. Litvinov, who was Jewish and an advocate of collective security, had been the architect of Soviet attempts to form an anti-Hitler coalition with the Western democracies. However, as Hitler turned his attention to Poland in early 1939, Stalin’s intentions shifted sharply. On May 3, 1939, Stalin abruptly sacked Litvinov in a brutal internal coup at the Foreign Commissariat. NKVD troops physically surrounded the Foreign Ministry building in Moscow, and Litvinov along with his top aides (especially those of Jewish origin) were literally thrown out of their offices.14 Just two days later, Astakhov, the Soviet ambassador to Germany, sought the Nazis’ approval of Litvinov’s removal.15 In Litvinov’s place, Stalin installed his hard-line confidant Vyacheslav Molotov, a man unencumbered by ties to the West and, importantly, ethnically Russian and acceptable to the Nazis. Molotov had earned Stalin’s trust as a loyal “Old Bolshevik” who shared Stalin’s ruthlessness (Molotov had co-signed thousands of execution orders during the Great Terror). His very name, Molotov means “hammer”, befitted the task ahead of forging a new pact with Hitler’s Germany.

The dismissal of Litvinov sent a clear signal internationally. By removing the Soviet Union’s most prominent advocate of cooperation with Britain and France, Stalin was telegraphing a new openness to deal with Hitler. In fact, Molotov later recalled that Stalin explicitly ordered him to “purge the [Foreign] Ministry of Jews” as part of this shuffle, a grotesque concession to Nazi sensibilities, effectively an olive branch to Berlin.16 The Nazi leadership understood the message. Propaganda chief Joseph Goebbels noted with satisfaction that after Litvinov’s fall, Soviet anti-Nazi rhetoric in the press toned down. On May 5, 1939 (two days after Molotov took over), Goebbels ordered Nazi media to cease attacking the Soviet Union “until further instructions.” Hitler himself, in a secret speech on May 23, acknowledged the possibility of a deal with the USSR now that “political relations have improved”, though he wanted those improved relations without giving up Germany’s anti-Communist alliances if possible.17 By ousting Litvinov, Stalin had courted Hitler’s attention. As one historian succinctly put it, “Stalin was courting Hitler” by jettisoning Litvinov’s pro-Western stance and making ideological gestures (like expunging Jews from Soviet diplomacy) that the Nazis would appreciate. Hitler got the hint: the door to a Berlin-Moscow understanding was now wide open.

This decision cannot be divorced from Stalin’s larger ideological game plan. Litvinov’s approach of partnering with the West to contain Hitler had outlived its usefulness in Stalin’s eyes. It ran contrary to the emerging strategy of playing the fascists and democracies against each other. By 1939, Stalin preferred to encourage Hitler’s aggression rather than thwart it, since Hitler’s march to war was the trigger for the capitalist Armageddon Stalin sought. Therefore, Litvinov, a Jew and symbol of anti-Nazi collaboration, had to go. The change in personnel signaled a change in policy: the Soviet Union was ready to make terms with Hitler if it would hasten the war. Stalin’s ideological commitment to inciting an inter-capitalist war was now guiding Soviet statecraft at the highest level.

Sabotaging the Anglo-French Negotiations

Even as Stalin was sending signals to Hitler, Britain and France were still desperately trying to forge a defensive alliance with the Soviet Union in the summer of 1939. Throughout July and into August, talks took place, fitfully, and ultimately futilely, to create a “Triple Alliance” that might deter Hitler from attacking Poland. Stalin, however, approached these talks in bad faith, ensuring they would not yield a binding agreement before he concluded his deal with Hitler.18

The Western Allies, for their part, were halting and clumsy in their diplomacy. In August 1939, they dispatched a joint military mission to Moscow led by two relatively low-ranking officers, British Admiral Reginald Drax and French General Joseph Doumenc. Tellingly, Drax and Doumenc did not even fly to Moscow; they came by slow boat, taking six days to arrive, a lack of urgency that has often been criticized. Stalin exploited this lethargy. By the time the Allied mission arrived on August 12, Soviet-German secret talks were already well underway. Stalin and Molotov pointedly did not meet the British-French delegates at all. Instead, they assigned the negotiations to Soviet Defense Commissar Kliment Voroshilov, a Stalin yes-man with little inclination to strike a sincere deal.19

From the outset, Voroshilov approached the talks “in bad faith but good humor,” as McMeekin notes.20 He made deliberately excessive demands, the centerpiece of which was that the Red Army be allowed to transit through Polish territory to engage the Germans if war began. In essence, Voroshilov kept insisting that the Soviet Union must have the right to send troops into Poland (and also into Romania) as part of any agreement, a sovereignty violation that he knew Poland (and Britain) would reject.21 The French negotiator Doumenc, who had more authority than his British counterpart, tried to find a compromise, suggesting that if Germany invaded Poland, perhaps Poland would then invite Soviet assistance. But Voroshilov was unswayed; he flatly noted that it was “not at all clear” the Poles would ever consent to Red Army entry, and he feigned offense that the British and French had come without a Polish assent in hand for this issue. In reality, Stalin had no real interest in mutual defense of Poland, indeed, he was already plotting Poland’s partition with Hitler. The entire negotiation seems to have been a charade, maintained just long enough to provide cover until the Nazi–Soviet pact could be finalized.

By August 17, the farce was nearly played out. At Soviet urging, the French did send an urgent query to Warsaw about the transit rights (as a last-ditch effort to satisfy Moscow’s condition), and the Poles predictably replied with a resounding no. On August 21, even as Drax and Doumenc were still nominally awaiting further talks, Stalin abruptly suspended the negotiations, because that very day he received confirmation that Hitler’s foreign minister was en route to Moscow with the draft of a Nazi–Soviet deal in hand.22 The British and French mission went home empty-handed, bewildered at how thoroughly they had been stonewalled. In truth, Stalin had never intended to join a pact to stop Hitler; he wanted Hitler to feel free to launch the war. The endless haggling in Moscow was a stalling tactic, ensuring that no Anglo-French-Soviet front would coalesce. As the historian Sean McMeekin argues, it is unfair to say only Allied ineptitude doomed the talks. Stalin and Voroshilov “abandoned any pretense about collective security” and made demands they knew would torpedo any agreement. The collapse of the negotiations was a direct consequence of Stalin’s strategic choice: instead of aligning with the West to prevent war, he was aligning with Hitler to provoke war.

Courting Hitler: The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact

The final and most fateful step was the Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact, signed on August 23, 1939. This Soviet–Nazi agreement was far more than a typical nonaggression treaty. It was a literal carte blanche for Hitler to invade Poland, and it included secret protocols by which Hitler and Stalin agreed to partition Eastern Europe between themselves. Stalin knew exactly what he was doing. By granting Hitler a free hand against Poland (and, implicitly, against the Western powers who were pledged to Poland’s defense), Stalin lit the fuse that detonated World War II one week later.

From Stalin’s perspective, the pact achieved multiple aims. Tactically, it secured the USSR a slice of Poland and the Baltic states as a sphere of influence, territorial gains which Stalin coveted. Strategically, it kept the Soviet Union out of the war’s first phase, allowing the capitalist powers to savage each other while the USSR remained ostensibly neutral. But ideologically, as we have seen, the pact’s greatest value was that it made the war possible. Hitler had been hesitating to strike at Poland so long as he feared a two-front war (with the USSR attacking from the east). The Molotov–Ribbentrop Pact removed that fear. Hitler himself admitted as much to his generals in the final days of August 1939, essentially saying that the pact with Stalin made his attack on Poland feasible. With the Soviets delivering grain, oil, and other raw materials to Germany (per their trade agreements), Hitler could weather a British blockade. And with a secret agreement that the USSR would invade Poland from the east after Germany attacked from the west, Hitler was assured that Poland would be quickly crushed and that the Western Allies, even if they declared war, would be unable to save their Polish ally.

Stalin’s ideological fingerprints are all over the logic of this deal. In the aforementioned (alleged) secret speech of August 19, 1939, which circulated in foreign intelligence reports, Stalin supposedly explained his rationale to Soviet leaders: if the USSR allied with Britain and France, Hitler might back off his plans, no war would occur. But if the USSR made a pact with Germany, war was certain, as Germany would invade Poland and drag in Britain and France. “We must accept the German proposal,” Stalin is reputed to have said, since war between the capitalist camps was in the USSR’s supreme interest.23 He further outlined the advantages to the USSR no matter which side emerged weakened: If Germany lost, it would likely go communist; if Germany won, it would still be exhausted and a communist uprising in a defeated France would be on the agenda, with the Soviet Union ultimately intervening to “assist” a socialist France. Whether or not Stalin uttered these exact words (historians still debate the speech’s authenticity), the subsequent Comintern Q&A and Stalin’s own remarks to Dimitrov strongly confirm that this was indeed Stalin’s mindset (so the speech is genuine, or written by some sort of mystic who could read Stalin’s mind). He expected the Nazi-Soviet Pact to trigger a war that would either Sovietize Europe in one scenario or at least weaken the capitalist powers enough for the USSR to expand its influence in another. In either case, world communism stood to gain, as long as the war was protracted and brutal.

On September 1, 1939, Hitler invaded Poland, and World War II began. True to his agreement, Stalin invaded Poland from the east two and a half weeks later, on September 17, once Poland’s defeat by Germany was assured. Poland was dismembered exactly as Stalin and Hitler had agreed in their secret protocol. In the months that followed, Stalin further cemented his gains, occupying the Baltic states and attacking Finland (the Winter War of 1939–40), all territories in his allotted “sphere.” Meanwhile, Britain and France found themselves at war with Germany, but the USSR was not initially their enemy. To the contrary, Stalin continued to supply the Nazi war machine with vital materials as per the pact, even as the German blitzkrieg rolled west in 1940, conquering France. From 1939 to 1941, Stalin stayed formally out of the fighting, an ostensibly neutral party, but a deeply involved one: he was both the armourer and the geopolitical beneficiary of Hitler’s conquests in Eastern Europe.

Stalin believed he was the ultimate beneficiary of the war he had helped unleash. His confidence is evident in that September 7, 1939 conversation: “It would be fine if at the hands of Germany the position of the richest capitalist countries (especially England) were shaken,” he told Dimitrov.24 Hitler was, unwittingly, doing Stalin’s work by attacking the Western imperialists. When Stalin toasted the Nazi foreign minister Ribbentrop in Moscow, calling for the destruction of the “Anglo-French clique,” he was essentially blessing Hitler’s war on the West. Yet Stalin had no intention of letting Hitler run away with a quick victory either. The longer the war dragged on, ideally for years, the more both sides would be drained. Stalin expected to stay above the fray until the moment to strike arrived, much as the Bolsheviks had waited out much of World War I before striking in Russia.

Of course, history took some turns that Stalin did not anticipate. Hitler’s triumph over France in 1940 came faster than anyone imagined, leaving Britain alone and vulnerable. Then, in June 1941, Hitler turned on Stalin and invaded the Soviet Union, nearly toppling Stalin’s regime in a brutal surprise attack. Stalin’s grand design to have the capitalist powers exhaust each other while the USSR remained untouched was upended by Hitler’s betrayal. Ultimately, the Soviet Union had to fight a devastating war of its own to survive, and did so, with massive aid from the Western powers Stalin had expected to collapse. The postwar reality still allowed Stalin to seize half of Europe (establishing communist regimes across Eastern Europe), so in a twisted way his strategy did result in the expansion of communism. But the price was far higher and riskier than he initially calculated. World War II did indeed weaken and bankrupt the old European empires, paving the way for the Soviet Union’s rise as a superpower, at the cost of tens of millions of lives and untold destruction, including within the USSR itself. Stalin got his “war of shatterings,” though it nearly shattered his own state in the process.

Conclusion: Ideology as the Driver of Stalin’s War

In retrospect, the question of who “started” World War II must include Joseph Stalin in the answer, not as a passive bystander but as an active, even primary agent. This is not to absolve Adolf Hitler of his obvious guilt, Hitler was the one who ordered the invasions that began the war. (Interestingly enough, Hitler’s motivations for war also came from Marxist thought. But that is a conversation for another day.) But Hitler’s war of aggression was facilitated and encouraged in crucial ways by Stalin, whose Marxist-Leninist worldview led him to make choices that ignited and expanded the conflict. Stalin’s removal of Litvinov and abandonment of collective security, his duplicitous handling of negotiations with the West, and his embrace of Hitler in 1939 were decisions born of ideological calculation. He was determined to engineer the “greatest conflagration” among the capitalist states, exactly as Marx and Lenin had foreseen might be necessary. The evidence from Soviet archives, Comintern directives, and Stalin’s own words leaves little doubt that Stalin wanted a second world war, and worked to bring it about, because he believed it would create the long-sought opening for global communist revolution.

Far from being a purely reactive realpolitik move, the Nazi–Soviet Pact and Stalin’s strategy in 1939 followed a Marxist logic. This was a stark case of ideology driving geopolitics. Stalin was a Marxist revolutionary before he was a statesman, and he never forgot Marx’s dictum that bourgeois society would have to be drowned in a bloodbath of conflict for socialism to emerge. In 1939, Stalin set that bloodbath in motion. As Dimitrov’s August 31 broadcast made plain, Stalin and the Comintern wanted a war, a “prolonged war”, because they believed it was the “natural prerequisite” for revolution. They took actions to ensure such a war occurred. The tragedy of World War II, therefore, cannot be told as a simple tale of good democracies versus evil fascists, with the Soviet Union switching sides from collaborator to victim. A more nuanced truth is that Stalin, driven by Marxist ideological commitments, chose to play the arsonist in 1939, lighting Hitler’s way to war in hopes that the blaze would consume the capitalist world and clear the ground for Communism.

In tone and outcome, Stalin’s gambit was fiendishly Machiavellian, but Machiavelli did not supply the script; Marx did. The ideological pedigree of Stalin’s war-making is unmistakable. He was implementing the ideas Marx voiced about the old world perishing in fire and Lenin’s strategy of turning imperialist wars into revolutions. The Second World War turned out to be even more apocalyptic than the First, and it did indeed rearrange world power to Stalin’s benefit (the USSR emerged as a superpower and communism spread farther than ever before). Yet the cost was almost unspeakable, and the communist utopia Stalin hoped for never quite materialized beyond a new empire under Moscow’s grip. Still, from Stalin’s standpoint in 1939, the wager made sense: without a second world war, the expansion of communism seemed impossible. With war, there was a chance history would finally tilt his way.

In making that wager, Stalin proved himself a true disciple of Marxist revolutionary doctrine, willing to gamble millions of lives on the belief that out of capitalist self-destruction a redemptive new order would arise. If World War II can be said to have had an architect beyond Hitler, Stalin deserves that dark distinction. He set the stage, he rigged the game, and he did so consciously, armed with the convictions of Marx and Lenin. The war that broke out in 1939 was, in no small part, Stalin’s war. A war he wanted, a war he helped start, all in service of an ideology that justified any crime, any pact, and any devastation if it promised to bring about the final triumph of his cause.

However, some on the Left claim that Cuba is not only a socialist success story but that it boasts a higher quality of life than even the United States. This claim often surfaces on social media platforms like Twitter or Reddit, but occasionally finds its way into more mainstream outlets, such as The Guardian.1

Another leftist strategy is to acknowledge Cuba’s struggles but blame them on the United States embargo. These two positions are obviously mutually exclusive, because Cuba cannot be both prosperous and impoverished at the same time. And yet, I have encountered innumerable apologists who take both positions, sometimes even in the same debate.

The Left has caught itself in a paradox. Is Cuba flourishing from the embrace of socialism, or is it failing under the weight of the US embargo? It can’t be both. To know which position is right, if any, we’ll have to examine the current and historical evidence.

Did Socialism Make Cuba Rich?

One approach we can use to evaluate the claim that Cuba is prospering is to examine the Human Development Index (HDI), a metric published by the United Nations. The HDI takes into account various metrics, including health, education, income, and living conditions, to assess the well-being of a country’s citizens. In the data we see the United States ranks 21st on the HDI, while Cuba occupies the 83rd spot. So, based on this globally accepted measure, it’s clear Cuba doesn’t have a higher quality of life than the United States.2

However, proponents of socialism might then argue that even though Cuba doesn’t surpass the United States, it still fares better on the HDI than several non-socialist countries in Latin America, such as Peru, Mexico, Brazil, and Colombia. This raises the crucial question: Can Cuba’s comparatively higher quality of life be attributed to socialism?

To answer this question, we have to look at Cuba’s historical economic performance. What this reveals is that Cuba was once a remarkably developed and prosperous nation. A study in the Journal of Economic History found that pre-revolutionary Cuba was “a prosperous middle-income economy” with income levels that were “among the highest in Latin America” and almost on par with some European countries. However, after the adoption of socialism in 1959, “Cuba slipped down the world income distribution.” So Cuba’s relative success predates socialism and has actually seen a decline post-revolution.3

Poor, but Healthy?

Another focus in the defense of Cuban socialism is the supposed success of its healthcare system. Proponents argue this by pointing to metrics like infant mortality rates and doctors per capita.

This argument also falls apart when we consider the historical context. In 1957, Cuba had the 13th lowest infant mortality rate globally—an achievement that, over the years, has slipped to 49th place today.4

The infant mortality rate may be even worse once we account for the flaws in the Cuban government’s data. Some have already tried to do this, such as economist Roberto M. Gonzalez. He found that the “ratio of late fetal deaths to early neonatal deaths in countries with available data stood between 1.04 and 3.03” but Cuba “with a ratio of 6, was a clear outlier.” These data indicate that doctors have likely been re-categorizing late fetal deaths as early neonatal deaths, thus skewing the data. Taking this into account, the infant mortality rate probably stands between 7.45 and 11.16 per 1,000 births.5 That would put Cuba in 60th place in the world, at best. Many more corrections could be made to these data, but that one correction is enough to demonstrate that Cuba’s ranking is rather bleak.6

The claim about doctors in Cuba is also missing context. Cuba has many doctors per capita, but this is because the government has incentives for it to be this way. Doctors are Cuba’s most valuable export.7 The government only sees them as a commodity to be exploited. Brazil and other nations pay the Cuban government millions for their doctors and medical services. But the doctors themselves see very little of that money8. In some cases, they receive as little as 10%.9 Doctors who defect from Cuba often describe their roles as being akin to slavery.10 The status of Cuba’s doctors is hardly something to brag about. It is a failure of socialism, not a success.

The Bleak Picture

Another piece of evidence that can shed light on the claim of Cuban prosperity is the migration rate. It stands to reason that people want to leave countries with poor living conditions. It is noteworthy, therefore, that for 60 years Cuba has consistently had a net negative migration rate, while the United States and many other capitalist countries have had net positive migration rates.11 Why are people so eager to leave if life is so good in Cuba?

We don’t often see surveys of Cubans in Cuba, leaving us to rely on anecdotes and the little accurate data we can access. But one rare survey ones showed that, in 2017, only 13% of Cubans viewed the economy as “good”. Many of the Cubans agreed that issues such as poverty (41%), low internet access (41%), and corruption (38%) plagued day-to-day life.12

A more recent survey revealed that many Cubans do not fall for the utopian socialist propaganda. There is low trust in the laws being just (49.1%), a lack of trust in the justice system (49.9%), and many believe that the Communist Party does not respond to the people’s needs (56.5%). Additionally, 37.7% of Cubans believe the government cannot guarantee the right to health and 44.1% do not trust the government to ensure the right to work.13 The socialist facade is broken.

Can We Blame the Embargo?

We’ve established that Cuba’s prosperity is a myth. But here the Left falls back on their second claim: that Cuba is only poor because of the US embargo.

Yet, even Fidel Castro and Che Guevara didn’t believe this narrative. Their accounts suggest that the embargo, far from crippling the Cuban government, actually strengthened the revolution and solidified anti-US sentiment. When asked if the US blockade was effective, Castro said it was effective “in favor of the revolution.”14 Political scientists like Steve Chan and A. Cooper Drury argue that “sanctions may create a ‘boomerang effect.’ Instead of increasing public discontent against the ruling elite, they may produce a ‘rally ’round the flag’ syndrome and stiffen the target population’s resolve to resist foreign coercion. Economic hardship can be attributed to the externally imposed embargo rather than the incumbent regime’s poor performance.”15

Guevara said the embargo would do “nothing” to the Cuban economy.16 But why? In a 1985 interview, Castro explained in more detail. He said that other socialist countries “not only pay us much higher prices and sell their products to us at lower prices, but also charge us much lower interest for credit.”17 We can confirm this with the historical evidence provided by Cuban economist Carmelo Mesa-Lago. In his book Market, Socialist, and Mixed Economies, he points out that Cuba began trading with socialist countries like the Soviet Union as early as 1960, and confirms that “all socialist imports combined significantly surpassed US imports in the early part of that year.”18 Aid from the USSR was not unsubstantial. It peaked at $6 billion right before the collapse. Cuba was granted privileged access to Soviet markets for key export, above-market prices for sugar, and trade credits. The Soviet price per pound of sugar was, on averaged more than a 100% difference until 1973. Meaning the USSR paid Cuba double what other countries were paying.

This challenges the argument that the embargo was the primary cause of Cuba’s economic difficulties, as these economic struggles became apparent immediately following the revolution.19 Most effects of the embargo were not felt until the fall of the Soviet Union in the early ’90s. So Cuba went through 30 years of economic struggle while being propped up by the USSR, until its fall. There was a substantial downturn in the ’90s because of this, and the Cuban government resorted to moderate liberalization reforms to offset the resulting problems. The success of these reforms is further proof that Cuba would be better off as a capitalist nation.20

Cuba Needs Capitalism

We’ve resolved the Cuban Socialist Paradox. Cuba is not successful because of socialism—its successes predate the socialist government and have dwindled rapidly since the revolution.21 Cuba is also not a failure because of the sanctions; the embargo historically had little effect on their economy. The bleak truth is that the common conception is correct: Cuba is, in fact, a textbook example of the failures of socialism.

Still, it is possible that the best way to help Cuba along is by abandoning the ineffective embargo. It seems to have only served to strengthen the communist government and give it a scapegoat for its socialist failures. If America expands trade relations with Cuba, we may see the phenomenon that some economists call “Contagious Capitalism.” That is, trade will open up Cuba to more influence from capitalist ideals.22

And that’s exactly what the Cuban people need: economic freedom, not more excuses for failed socialist policies.

One of the most potent drivers of anti-capitalist feeling is simple envy, a bitter resentment of others’ success. Mises did not mince words on this point. “They are socialists because they are blinded by envy and ignorance,” he wrote of capitalism’s detractors, accusing them of hating the market because they believe that it harms them . In Mises’s view, many people emotionally feel harmed by capitalism whenever someone else achieves wealth or status that they themselves desired. The market economy is a relentless meritocracy; it rewards those who best serve consumers, not necessarily those with the loftiest degrees or most refined talents. This breeds resentment. As Mises observed, individuals often see “the prizes which – as they believe – by rights should have been given to themselves” go to business rivals or former classmates, leaving them with “feelings of frustrated ambition” . Unable to admit envy openly (even to themselves), they redirect their anger toward an abstract scapegoat: “society’s economic organization, the nefarious system of capitalism” . In other words, the dissatisfied nurse their wounded pride by blaming “the system” for their own comparative shortcomings.

Nowhere is this dynamic more apparent than among the educated “intellectual” class. Mises gives the example of the mediocre physician who must watch a peer from medical school rise to eminence and wealth, or the struggling artist who sees a contemporary’s work celebrated and commercially successful . Professional codes of courtesy prevent them from lashing out at their more successful colleagues openly, so instead they “indict… capitalism” itself for unfairly rewarding the other person . The result is a passionate antipathy toward the whole free-market system, born out of personal resentment. Mises argued that much anti-capitalist ideology is a mere rationalization for this envy-driven anger at specific “villains” who have succeeded where the resentful person has not . In short, hostility toward “the rich” often isn’t about principled objection to capitalism at all. It’s sour grapes in the psychological sense, a resentment of flesh-and-blood individuals that gets masked as a high-minded critique of an economic order.

Modern writers have reached similar conclusions. Historian Rainer Zitelmann, in The Rich in Public Opinion, describes envy and covetousness as “twin vices” driving popular hostility toward the wealthy . He argues that irrational hatred of “the rich” has become a socially accepted prejudice, comparable to “racism” or “bigotry” in its intensity . Zitelmann even labels it “upward classism,” a form of negative stereotyping and scapegoating of the successful . In today’s “woke” cultural climate, most hateful biases are frowned upon, but caricaturing the wealthy as greedy, evil exploiters remains not only acceptable but often politically popular (“eat the rich!”) . Envy, in this sense, has fused with ideology. Many people who desire what others have, but can’t or won’t attain it, find it gratifying to support political programs that promise to tear down the successful. As Zitelmann observes, “the desire to have what others possess and the accompanying frustration-driven hatred directed at [those people] have fused into a political program” for many over the centuries . In every society, there have been those “consumed by these powerful prejudices”, who seize on egalitarian rhetoric as an outlet for their envy . Vilifying “fat cats,” taxing billionaires, and railing against “corporate greed” all provide a psychological release valve for resentment.

This envy is often cloaked in moral rhetoric. Few will admit “I resent the rich because I’m jealous”; instead, they frame their anger as a noble championing of equality or justice. Zitelmann’s research shows that many people sincerely believe negative stereotypes about the wealthy. That rich people are mostly lucky or dishonest, which makes the rich seem deserving of punishment. In a comprehensive survey in Germany, 55% of respondents attributed wealth primarily to having the right connections or family background, and 41% believed “most rich people become rich only through inheritances”, not personal effort . About one-third agreed that “people who are rich mainly have good luck,” and a similar proportion said the rich “only became rich because there was injustice in our society” . In other words, a large segment of the public sees wealth not as earned or beneficial, but as ill-gotten gains from a zero-sum game. This zero-sum mentality (the notion that one person’s gain must come at someone else’s expense) is a classic envy narrative. If the rich got rich by taking from others, then hating them feels justified. Zitelmann notes that this “zero-sum fallacy” underlies much anti-wealth prejudice . It is the belief that “the rich have obtained their wealth at the expense of others” , and thus any fortunes they have are implicitly depriving someone else. Coupled with envy, such beliefs create a potent rationale to attack the wealthy: people convince themselves they are not tearing others down out of jealousy, but rather righting wrongs and pursuing fairness.

Proponents of anti-capitalist policies like heavy taxation of the rich, income leveling, and socialist economic plans often couch their arguments in terms of fairness and compassion. They claim the free market is “unjust” or “greedy” and that redistributing wealth would create a fairer, more utilitarian society. Are these noble sentiments the genuine drivers of anti-capitalist attitudes? Social scientists have begun to disentangle people’s stated motives from their underlying psychological ones, and the findings are revealing.

A 2017 study by Daniel Sznycer and colleagues investigated what really motivates support for redistribution (taking from the rich to give to the poor). They identified three key psychological drivers:

• Compassion – empathy for those who have less. People who are more compassionate truly want to help the poor, even at a cost to themselves .

• Envy – resentment toward those who have more. Those prone to envy are motivated to knock the rich down a peg, even if it doesn’t directly benefit the envious person, simply to reduce the others’ advantage .

• Self-Interest – a straightforward calculation: will I benefit? People who would personally gain from redistribution (typically lower-income individuals) tend to support it, whereas those who would lose (the affluent) oppose it .

Sznycer et al. tested fairness as a separate motive: The idea that people support redistribution because they have an abstract taste for equality or fair outcomes for society as a whole. Their finding, as the title of their paper declares, is that support for redistributive policies is “shaped by compassion, envy, and self-interest, but not a taste for fairness.” In their experiments, fairness ideals by themselves did not significantly predict a person’s stance on redistribution . In other words, despite all the rhetoric about fairness, people’s actual opinions on soaking the rich or expanding welfare were better explained by emotional impulses (caring for the poor or begrudging the wealthy) and by self-serving interest than by a neutral principle of fairness .

Subsequent research has largely reinforced these conclusions. Lin and Bates (2020) replicated Sznycer’s study with new samples, again finding that compassion and self-interest robustly influence who favors redistribution, while abstract fairness has no independent effect . Interestingly, their replication found the role of envy to be more “ambiguous”. Dispositional envy did not show a statistically significant link to pro-redistribution attitudes once other factors were accounted for . This doesn’t mean envy is unimportant, but it suggests envy often operates in subtle ways or overlaps with self-interest. After all, someone with less wealth may simultaneously feel envy and also recognize their self-interest in taxing the rich. But disentangling the two can be tricky. What’s clear is that cries of “fairness” often mask other emotions. When people demand “the government should reduce income differences,” it may sound like a principled stance, but those with strong egalitarian views typically either have compassionate concern for the poor or harbor resentment toward high earners (or both), rather than a dispassionate love of equality.

Even the form of redistribution people choose can reveal their true motive. In the Lin & Bates study, individuals high in compassion were more likely to engage in charitable giving to help the poor directly, whereas those high in envy were more inclined to support policies that punish the wealthy even if there’s no benefit to the poor . Compassionate people, for example, donate to food banks or support welfare benefits (which clearly assist the needy). Envious individuals, by contrast, might cheer for a wealth tax or caps on CEO pay (actions that hurt the rich), even if they don’t clearly help anyone else. The researchers indeed found that compassion correlated with charitable aid, while envy correlated (though weakly) with preferring policies that harm wealthy individuals financially . In public debates, both groups might invoke “fairness,” but one group’s fairness means lifting up those at the bottom, whereas the other group’s “fairness” really means bringing down those at the top.

Mises, writing decades earlier, intuited this dynamic. He observed that the common man’s “social philosophy” often blamed the rich for all manner of social ills and assumed that any wealth held by others was wealth taken from him. This mentality, Mises said, was fueled by envy and ignorance rather than any sound theory of justice . People believe socialism will improve their lot and that capitalism has kept them down, so these beliefs justify their resentment . In reality, as Mises pointed out, the average person in a capitalist society enjoyed a far higher living standard than in any socialist country. But envy “stubbornly refuse[s] to take cognizance of the undeniable facts” . To the envious, what matters is that relative gap: someone else has more, and that feels intolerable, “unfair.” Modern studies like Sznycer’s put empirical flesh on Mises’s claims: appeals to fairness is often a mask, while envy and empathy are the heartstrings that move public opinion on economic policy.

Anti-capitalist sentiment is not only about personal emotions; it’s also fed by cultural narratives and stereotypes that pervade our society. From school textbooks to movies and media, the portrayal of “the capitalist” or “the rich” is often unflattering: Greedy bankers, corrupt tycoons, heartless factory owners... These narratives provide ready-made villains for people to direct their frustrations toward. Rainer Zitelmann’s work discusses a lot about how mass media and public discourse reinforce a biased image of the wealthy. He documents widespread stereotypes: that the rich are less ethical, that they “stole” their fortunes or had unfair advantages, and that wealthy elites are to blame for the struggles of ordinary folks . Zitelmann calls this prejudice against the rich a “dangerous” yet normalized bias.

Survey data bear this out. Many people assume immoral behavior by the wealthy as a default. In Zitelmann’s German survey, 43% of people agreed that rich people “are rich only because they ruthlessly pursued their own interests,” and 35% said “the rich obtained their wealth at the expense of others.” Meanwhile, only 22% believed that the rich might generally be very hardworking . In other words, the public tends to ascribe wealth to vice, luck, or injustice rather than talent or effort. Such beliefs create a narrative in which the wealthy are cast as an out-group of undeserving villains. Psychologically, it is much easier to resent and vilify a nebulous out-group (“the 1%”) if one believes that group gained its status through wrongdoing. This is classic scapegoating. Just as demagogues in history have scapegoated ethnic or religious minorities for a nation’s problems, modern populists scapegoat “billionaires,” “Wall Street,” or “big business” for society’s ills. It becomes socially acceptable to direct anger and contempt at this target. In fact, as one commentator of Zitelmann’s book noted, negative stereotyping of the wealthy is not just tolerated but “often positively socially encouraged” in our culture . Politicians win votes by vowing to “tax the rich” or by blaming unemployment on corporate greed.

Another prevalent narrative is what Zitelmann and others term the zero-sum myth. This is the belief that the economy is like a fixed pie. If one person has a big slice, everyone else must have less. In this view, great fortunes can only be accumulated by plundering or exploiting others. Zitelmann counters it with the reality that wealth creation is positive-sum: entrepreneurs often enrich themselves by creating value for society (new products, companies, jobs) . Yet the zero-sum myth remains intuitive to many and is deeply rooted in human history (where, in pre-market feudal times, one could mainly get wealth via conquest or extraction). Modern anti-capitalists frequently invoke zero-sum thinking without realizing it. For example, saying “billionaires only exist because others are poor” or “rich countries are wealthy by stealing from poor countries” reflects the assumption that wealth is taken, not made. This naturally fuels moral outrage: if one truly believes all wealth is stolen or zero-sum, then demanding redistribution isn’t just envy. It feels like justice, reclaiming stolen goods. Thus, cultural narratives about greedy fat cats, exploitative sweatshops, and rigged systems provide the storytelling framework that validates envy and resentment as righteous anger.

It’s worth noting that these stereotypes can persist even in the face of contrary evidence, partly because of confirmation bias and the emotional satisfaction of having someone to blame. Zitelmann notes how even in reunified Germany decades after the fall of communism, former East Germans were far more likely to hold negative views of the rich than West Germans, despite living under the same economic system by then . The cultural conditioning of seeing wealth as suspect ran deep. Similarly, in countries like the United States, anti-market attitudes often flourish in academia and the arts, where the narrative of capitalism as soulless or oppressive has been popular for generations. Mises devoted an entire chapter to “The Anti-capitalistic Bias of American Intellectuals”, noting how writers and thinkers in capitalist America enjoyed freedom and prosperity unparalleled in history, yet often exalted communist systems and castigated their own . Part of this, he argued, stemmed from intellectuals feeling underappreciated in a consumer-driven market (as discussed, their status frustrations). But part was also ideological fashion, or a kind of groupthink in elite culture that romanticizes collectivism and demonizes commerce. This cultural bias then trickles down to popular culture and education, crafting the perceptions of each new generation. As a result, many people grow up imbibing an implicit suspicion of capitalism: associating “profit” with selfishness, “big business” with corruption, and “wealth” with moral compromise. This then set the stage for the emotional and self-interested motives discussed earlier to flourish.

How Strength, Beauty, and Brains Shape Beliefs

Psychology isn’t just about emotions; our own personal attributes can influence our economic attitudes in surprising ways. Research indicates that certain individual traits, from physical attractiveness to cognitive ability, correlate with how one views capitalism and redistribution. In general, those who feel advantaged in society (whether due to looks, talent, or smarts) are more likely to favor free-market ideals, while those who feel disadvantaged are more inclined toward leveling mechanisms. This isn’t absolute, of course, but statistical trends bear it out.

Consider physical attractiveness. A 2021 study by Andrea Fazio, Attractiveness and Preferences for Redistribution, found that good-looking people tend to have less support for redistributive policies. Using survey data from Germany, Fazio showed that “beauty is associated with lower support for redistribution” and that more attractive individuals are more inclined to believe success should depend on individual achievement rather than government handouts . In fact, attractive respondents in the study more often voted for a pro-market political party and their views held even after controlling for income and other factors . It seems that being attractive confers certain social advantages. People treat you better, you may get jobs more easily, etc. and over time, attractive individuals might subconsciously internalize these advantages as “earned.” This leads to what Fazio suggests could be a self-serving bias: the attractive come to see the world as fair and meritocratic (since it has treated them well), so they oppose redistribution because they think everyone gets what they deserve . In plainer terms, if life’s been giving you extra credit for being pretty, you might not notice the unfair breaks others get and you’re more likely to attribute anyone’s poverty to lack of effort, not bad luck.

But what about those who worked for their physical advantages? A related line of research looks at physical strength (especially in men) and economic ideology. Evolutionary psychologists Michael Price and colleagues (2017) tested the old idea that the strong have less incentive to favor equality. They measured men’s bodily and facial formidability (strength, muscularity, etc.) and compared it to their socio-political egalitarianism. The result: stronger men were generally less egalitarian in their views . In particular, men with greater upper-body strength tended to oppose wealth redistribution more than weaker men. This fits a social bargaining model: those who have physical power (a proxy for the ability to compete and take resources) are more inclined to favor competition over equalization . Historically, a physically strong individual could acquire resources or status without needing communal charity and might even lose out if resources were shared equally. Meanwhile, a weaker person would benefit more if the group “leveled” differences. The study indeed found a negative association between male physical formidability and support for redistribution . Interestingly, when the researchers experimentally boosted some men’s self-perceived formidability (through feedback), it didn’t instantly change their politics . This suggests these attitudes form over a lifetime of social experiences rather than momentary confidence. But the overarching pattern was clear: men who are literally strong in build often show a kind of economic self-confidence, a preference for self-reliance and unequal outcomes, whereas men who are less physically imposing more readily endorse egalitarian, protective policies. It’s as if, subconsciously, people size up their own ability to thrive in a competitive world, and those who (literally) feel stronger are less likely to want the playing field artificially evened out.

Perhaps the most studied personal trait in this realm, though, is cognitive ability, in particular, intelligence. Intelligence influences how one understands and navigates the world, so it’s no surprise it would correlate with political-economic beliefs. But the direction of this correlation has sometimes been debated. Several rigorous studies in recent years point to a consistent story: higher intelligence tends to coincide with more pro-capitalist (or economically conservative) attitudes. For instance, an analysis by Mollerstrom and Seim (2014) in Sweden found that the more cognitively able a person is, the less redistribution they desire . Using military draft IQ tests matched to survey answers, they discovered that a one standard deviation increase in measured cognitive ability corresponded to about a 5 percentage-point drop in support for income redistribution, an effect about as large as a big jump in income itself . Why would this be? Part of the answer was income: smarter individuals tended to earn more, and higher earners naturally prefer lower taxes on themselves. But that was only half the story. The researchers also found that high-ability individuals were more likely to believe that economic success comes from effort rather than luck, and this belief in meritocracy independently led them to oppose redistribution . In short, brighter people both do better under capitalism and think differently about it (seeing it as fairer or more merit-based), which makes them less eager to upend it.

Longitudinal studies back up this link. Research by Lewis and Bates (2018) tracked British individuals from childhood and found that children with higher IQ scores grew up to be more economically conservative in adulthood . Even after accounting for family background and education, the smarter kids tended to become the adults who opposed big government redistribution and supported free-market policies . Some of this was mediated by educational and career success (higher IQ leads to better jobs, which can lead to more conservative leanings), but even controlling for income and social status, a direct effect of childhood intelligence on economically conservative beliefs remained . In the United States, a study by Carl (2014) zeroed in on verbal intelligence (vocabulary and verbal reasoning skills) and found a similar pattern. Americans with higher verbal IQ were less likely to agree that government should heavily intervene in the economy. For example, they were more skeptical about government price controls, income redistribution, or guaranteed jobs for all . This correlation held even after controlling for factors like the person’s education level, income, race, and so on . In other words, it wasn’t simply that smarter people were richer and acting selfishly; even comparatively poor people with high verbal intelligence showed more faith in market mechanisms and less in state redistribution. This suggests that intelligence might foster a greater appreciation of the complexity of economies, a skepticism toward simple government fixes, or an understanding of unintended consequences that make sweeping redistribution seem unwise.

The upshot of all these findings on personal traits is that people’s positions on capitalism vs. socialism are often extensions of their own life experiences and genetic advantages. Someone who is strong, successful, or smart might feel they personally thrive under competition and thus view capitalism favorably (and any gripes they have are muted by their confidence in navigating the system). In contrast, someone who feels disadvantaged or left behind whether due to less success, less education, or even factors like looks and charisma might emotionally favor a leveling of the playing field, even if they don’t consciously connect it to their personal situation. They’re more receptive to the promise that a different system could give them or their in-group a better shot. This doesn’t make either side’s policy arguments automatically invalid, of course, but it explains a great deal about the passion behind those arguments. As Mises observed, “people do not ask for socialism because they know it will improve their conditions… They are socialists because they believe that it will,” often guided by wishful thinking born of envy or frustration . Psychological drivers nudge different individuals to believe different things about what system is fair or foul.

Conclusion: Understanding (and Overcoming) the Anti-Capitalist Mindset

Anti-capitalist sentiment is a complex phenomenon, but its roots become clearer when we examine the psychology behind the economics. Far from being purely about high-minded principles, the drive to attack markets and millionaires is frequently fueled by raw emotions (envy of the successful, resentment of perceived slight), moral intuitions (compassion for the underdog, outrage at imagined injustice), and self-interest (what policy benefits me or my group). Ludwig von Mises, writing in the 1950s, diagnosed much of this in his Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, arguing that personal failure and envy lay at the heart of the clamor against capitalism . Modern research has largely vindicated his view. Envy and resentment remain powerful but unacknowledged motives, while claims of “fairness” often serve as post-hoc rationalizations. Cultural narratives propagated in media, politics, and academia then reinforce these feelings by painting capitalism as a rigged game and the wealthy as villains, giving people permission to hate the rich as a class . And at the individual level, a person’s own strengths or weaknesses in life can predispose them to either appreciate the opportunities of free markets or to seek the safety net (or leveling force) of collectivist ideas .

For those of us who champion free enterprise, recognizing these psychological drivers is crucial. It’s not enough to recite GDP growth statistics or moral arguments about liberty. To change minds, one must also address the emotional narratives people hold. That means acknowledging the very real feelings of unfairness and loss that rapid market changes can create, while gently challenging the notion that envy or zero-sum thinking leads to good policy. It means highlighting, as Zitelmann does, that anti-rich bigotry is still bigotry, and that painting any group with a broad brush, even the wealthy, is unjust . It means appealing to compassion without stoking envy: encouraging help for the poor, for example, but through positive-sum means (job creation, philanthropy, education) rather than destructive ones. And it might involve pointing out, as Mises did, that the true reality of capitalism has been to improve the common man’s lot immensely, a fact that raw emotion often blinds people to .

Ultimately, the psychology of anti-capitalists teaches us that economic beliefs are not formed in a vacuum of logic. They emerge from our deeply human tendencies. Our hopes and fears, pride and jealousy, tribal biases and personal experiences. Capitalism, by its very nature, produces unequal outcomes; it creates big winners and losers (though even the “losers” under capitalism often live better than they would under any other system). As long as disparities exist, the emotional fuel for anti-capitalism will be with us. But by understanding it, we can better communicate across the divide. We can show the frustrated student or worker that more government control born of envy will only choke opportunity for all. We can remind the compassionate idealist that markets have done more to lift up the poor than any utopian scheme. And perhaps most importantly, we can empathize with the psychological impulses even as we argue against the conclusions. After all, envy and resentment are human universals; the key is not to let them harden into destructive ideologies.

In the end, the battle for hearts and minds over capitalism may be less about refuting theories and more about soothing souls and dispelling the hatred and mistrust that cloud the debate. As the research and history suggest, when envy gives way to enterprise, and when people see the success of others not as a threat but as inspiration, the anti-capitalist mentality can gradually fade. Replacing zero-sum fantasies with positive-sum realities, and prejudice with understanding, is not easy. But it is essential if we are to defend and extend the freedom and prosperity that capitalism has brought to the world. In the long run, facts and feelings both matter in winning the argument. By addressing the latter, we stand a much better chance that the former will be heard.

…in consequence of public ownership of the means of production, there is in a socialist economy no market on which capital goods are actually exchanged there are obviously no prices of capital goods in the sense of exchange ratios on a market.1

By “exchange ratios” Lange is referring to the fact that a market price is the exchange ratio between the exchanged goods. Murray Rothbard elaborates on what this means:

…the price of one good in terms of another is the amount of the other good divided by the amount of the first good in exchange. If two cows exchange for 1,000 berries, then the price of cows in terms of berries ("the berry-price of cows") is 500 berries per cow. Conversely, the price of berries in terms of cows ("the cow-price of berries") is 1500 cow per berry. The price is the rate of exchange between two commodities expressed in terms of one of the commodities.2

As Lang says, socialist economy can have prices, albeit centrally planned prices. Chinese economist Weiying Zhang explains the difference:

Under central planning, prices are set by the government and serve only as an accounting tool. In the market economy, price is determined by the relationship between supply and demand, and it adjusts resource allocation.3

MIT economic historian Peter Temin makes a very similar point:

In a market system, prices move to guide resources into uses, both in production and consumption. Fixed prices clearly could not fulfill this function. Profits also lost their allocative function, as profits based on fixed prices do not carry the information of profits with market prices. Both economic systems therefore eliminated profits as an indicator of desirable investments.4

In the case of Peter Temin, he is referring to the difference between a market economy and the economies of Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union. The Nazis did not have market prices. They did have prices, but they were set by price commissars. Economist Otto Nathan gave one of the most detailed descriptions of the Nazi price controls:

Price control was the entering wedge and before long it became one of the basic instruments of total economic control. The entrepreneur continued to be the owner of his enterprise. But the cost accounting system which was imposed upon him, in connection with price control, enabled the government to supervise and control minute aspects of the enterprise and every single move the entrepreneur made.5

While some of the property (factories, shops, etc) in Germany may have been privately owned on paper, that doesn’t mean much when capital goods are controlled by the state. There may be prices on these capital goods but, if the state is setting them, the state is the entity allocating the goods and determining their usage.

A market or capitalist economy is characterized by the freedom of property owners to pursue their own interests and profit. They have the right to produce what they want and when they want. Many systems that are known as “mixed” or “hampered” economies do have strict regulations on production. But generally speaking, these economies still largely run on this fundamental freedom. It’s just that this freedom is not being maximized. They are not socialist.

In a socialist economy, this freedom is virtually destroyed. The state dominates the market. Any “private ownership” is meaningless because the private owners can’t make any decisions without consulting some sort of central planner. The businessmen in Germany often had to sacrifice profits and their preferences to meet the state’s demands. In practice, it was not much different from the Soviet Union’s branch of socialism.

The Marxist economist Gunter Reimann lived under the Nazi regime and saw firsthand how the sanctity of private property was destroyed and the businessmen were bullied into being tools of the state:

The owner of the property was helpless, since under fascism there is no longer an independent judiciary that protects the property rights of private citizens against the State. The authoritarian State has made it a principle that private property is no longer sacred.6

He described what he called a “price dictatorship”:

To increase his prices a dealer must have a special permit from the Price Commissar. A request for a price increase must first be certified to by the group leader; it must be accompanied by a detailed statement of necessity and other pertinent data, such as production and distribution costs.7

With all of this in mind, it’s very difficult to make the case that Nazi Germany had a capitalist economy. Germany was a socialist state absent from market prices, just as Lange and others described.

Occasionally they’ll also reference a paper by Kimberly Singer Babiarz et al.1 The paper claims that “China's growth in life expectancy at birth from 35–40 years in 1949 to 65.5 years in 1980 is among the most rapid sustained increases in documented global history.” But I have a big problem with this. My contention can be summarized in the form of:

Selection bias can’t simply be ignored in studies like this. China experienced mass mortality during the Great Famine and the Cultural Revolution. Up to 45 million people starved to death.2 Now, it stands to reason that the first people to starve were among the poorest, sickest, oldest, dumbest, etc. These are the people who would already have lower life expectancies. So once a huge chunk of the population with lower life expectancies is gone, the average life expectancy would increase. It could even increase if those with higher-than-average life expectancies see a decrease in their lifespans. 

To demonstrate this I’d like to point to a paper from The Journal of Development Economics.3 The authors start by discussing the importance of height:

Height is closely related to nutritional intake during childhood. Height is therefore increasingly used as an indirect measure of the material conditions that prevailed during childhood in developing country and historical settings, where direct measures of economic conditions are unavailable or unreliable.

Then they make a similar observation as myself:

When childhood mortality rates are high and if taller children are more likely to survive, bias due to height-related selection can be an added complications for these studies.

Famine will generally cause stunting. But, as the authors say,

If selection outweighs stunting, famines create taller populations, which may be mistakenly interpreted as evidence of an improvement in economic conditions.

The goal of the paper is to measure and control for said selection effects. Looking at the raw data, it appears as though height increased after the Great Famine. However, after controlling for selection effects, the authors found:

…that rural famine survivors who were exposed to the famine in the first 5 years of life are stunted between 1 and 2 cm.

There’s no reason to think that life expectancy is much different. Researchers have observed this happening many times with life expectancy. Most notably in studies of the 1974-1975 Bangladesh famine,4 and the 1866-1869 Finnish famine.5

I was able to find one study published in 2010 in the journal Social Science & Medicine that looks at China specifically.6 The authors also have an almost identical observation as myself:

Selection effects… …refer to the possibility that famine survivors (the surviving part of the famine cohort) tend to be unusually well endowed with some genetic or congenital traits that may reduce mortality risk later in life.

Their findings showed that the famine survivors (famine cohort) were highly selective and well-endowed:

The fact that the famine cohort had a higher mortality than the non-famine cohort for over 11 years until the mortality crossover occurred, combined with the evidence for selection effects as revealed by the positive correlations between frailty in infancy and frailty in childhood, provides so far the best evidence for the presence of both debilitation and selection effects of the 1959-1961 Chinese Leap Forward Famine.

I would love to see someone recreate the life expectancy graph using this new information, but I’m not sure that’ll ever happen. But these papers do show that we should be highly skeptical of data like this. I’m just summarizing and quoting the most important parts of these papers, feel free to go check them out on your own. They’ll all be listed below.

Who is behind socialism?

The first man to label himself a “socialist” was the French gentile economist Pierre Leroux.1 Leroux was a disciple of the early utopian socialist Henri de Saint-Simon, another French gentile. Leroux became quite popular in socialist circles. He even received a highly sought-after nomination from Karl Marx for membership on the Central Council of the International Working Men's Association.2 Leroux, as with many socialists, had a deep-seated hatred of capitalism. But if there was anything he hated more than capitalism, it was Jews. He saw the two as inherently linked. He once wrote

It is quite evident, is it not, my friends, that when we speak of Jews we mean the Jewish spirit, the spirit of profit, of lucre, of gain, the spirit of commerce, of speculation…3

Not only was the first socialist not a Jew, but he was a raging antisemite. Leroux was not alone in this regard. Many early socialists explicitly hated Jews because of their perceived connection to capitalism or hated capitalism because of its perceived connection to Jews.

The French socialists were especially outspoken in this regard. Charles Fourier frequently referred to Jews as “parasites” and usurers, the Mutualist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon advocated for a violent expulsion or genocide of the Jews, and journalist Alphonse Toussenel was well-known for his antisemitic rants.4 The historian Zosa Szajkowski performed an exhaustive study of 100 years of French socialist literature from 1820 to 1920, and he couldn’t find a single positive word about Jews.5

The socialist movement in Germany was not always quite as antisemitic.6 However, two men played significant roles in changing that: Wilhelm Marr and Eugen Dühring. Marr is credited with doing “more than any single figure in the last quarter of the 19th century to popularize racial hatred of Jews in Germany.”7 He popularized the term “anti-Semitism” and viewed it as a “Socialist movement.”8

Dühring’s racial antisemitism was also very influential. Perhaps the biggest influence he had was on a nationalist socialist activist by the name of Theodor Fritsch, who was also an avid fan of Marr.9 Fritsch would go on to be one of the founders of National Socialism and a major influence on Adolf Hitler. There is even evidence that Fritsch’s 1887 book Anti-Semites Catechism was the biggest influence on Hitler’s antisemitism.10

Early American socialism wasn’t very Jewish either. Robert Owen, Josiah Warren, Stephen Pearl Andrews, and Joseph Weydemeyer were all Gentiles. Although these men were heavily inspired by the aforementioned French socialists, American socialism was not nearly as antisemitic. There were prominent Jewish socialists to be found, such as August Bondi, Morris Hillquit, and Emma Goldman. Except for Goldman, these Jews had far less influence than other American socialist figures.

Only a “small but salient minority of Jews” came to embrace communism or socialism, according to historian Jerry Z Muller.11 Those who did join these movements often did so not because of their opposition to capitalism, but because of their opposition to nationalism.12 In my opinion, there are no good arguments for why Jews would be drawn toward socialism, other than those presented by Muller. 

Marxism and the Jews

The supposed Jewish role in Marxism and communism is much more of a discussed topic than their role in traditional socialism. Antisemites will point to Karl Marx’s Jewish heritage, and claim Jewish overrepresentation in or role in funding Russia’s Bolshevik movement. Naturally, these conversations seldom contain nuance or good faith. 

Marx may have been ethnically Jewish, but he grew up a Lutheran, had no Jewish education, and rejected Judaism and his Jewish heritage.13 Marx didn’t just reject his Jewishness, he despised it. Marx is known to be a vehement antisemite. It’s quite ironic that his existence is meant to prove some sort of Jewish-communism conspiracy, while in reality, he wrote things about Jews that would have modern antisemites shouting in agreement. He claimed that money was the “jealous God of Israel,” referred to Jews as “dirty” in body and soul, and believed they were both inherently bourgeois and inherently counter-revolutionary.14

The antisemites almost always ignore Engels. When they do bring him up they typically lie and say he was Jewish, such is the case with the neo-Nazi “documentary” Evropa: The Last Battle. Engels was white and also grew up Christian, but later turned atheist like Marx. Engels played a key role in the development of Marx’s philosophy.15 Marxism could just as easily have been called Engelism, but that doesn’t roll off the tongue in the same way. Engels was very much antisemitic just like Marx. He even praised Marx’s takes on Jews. But there is evidence that later in his life Engels became opposed to antisemitism.16

Judeo-Bolshevism

When it comes to the Jewish role in the Bolshevik Revolution, there is a lot of disinformation. Antisemites often claim that the Jews funded the revolution from the very beginning. Their sources often trace back to banker Stephen Goodson’s book The History of Central Banking and The Enslavement of Mankind, which is largely complete nonsense. Goodson both cites nonexistent sources and misrepresents credible ones. Goodson claims the “Judeo-Bolshevik” revolution was funded by the Rothschilds, but gives no actual sources for this claim.17 His footnotes point readers to an article by Winston Churchill, but Churchill does not refer to the Rothschilds.

Goodson goes to claim that the Jews funded the revolution through banker Jacob Schiff.18 His only source for this is a, quite funny, satirical article by a Jewish journalist, that doesn’t even mention Schiff.19 He cites the satirical article via The White Man’s Bible, a Nazi cult Bible which calls for the genocide of black people. Schiff’s role in the revolution is a long-debunked myth, there was never any evidence for it. Records show that Schiff funded anti-Bolshevik groups.20

Goodson should have known this, and maybe he did because one of his sources proves it. In his bibliography, we see economist Anthony Sutton’s book Wall Street and The Bolshevik Revolution, which observes that “the investment banker Jacob Schiff, often cited as a source of funds for the Bolshevik Revolution, was in fact against support of the Bolshevik regime.”21

And he goes on to completely refute anyone who claims Jews were the ones behind funding the Bolsheviks:

The persistence with which the Jewish-conspiracy myth has been pushed suggests that it may well be a deliberate device to divert attention from the real issues and the real causes. The evidence provided in this book suggests that the New York bankers who were also Jewish had relatively minor roles in supporting the Bolsheviks, while the New York bankers who were also Gentiles (Morgan, Rockefeller, Thompson) had major roles.22

Further evidence against the Judeo-Bolshevism conspiracy is the Bolshevik’s explicit hatred of Zionism and Hebrew culture. In 1918, the Bolsheviks created a Jewish faction of the party known as “Yevsektsiya” or “Evsektsii.” Lenin ordered them to destroy “traditional Jewish life, the Zionist movement, and Hebrew culture.”23 Historian Richard Pipes wrote that in September of 1919, 

…the Evsektsii shut down the Zionist Central Office and the following year got the Cheka to arrest and exile numerous Zionists. In 1922, the campaign resumed with arrests and trials in Russian and Ukrainian cities. In September 1924, police raids resulted in the detention of several thousand Zionist activists. The movement managed, nevertheless, to survive underground for several years longer, so deep were its roots.24

Antisemites will also share random memes that claim Jews were 85-98% of the Bolshevik government but they are not based on any actual data. Some of these numbers can be traced back to Robert Wilton, a British journalist. Wilton claimed that out of 556 “important functionaries of the Bolshevik state,” 457 of them were Jews, without evidence.25 Even the Institute for Historical Review, a Holocaust “revisionism” nonprofit, doubts his assertions.26 He also claimed that 9 of the 15 members of the  Bolshevik Central Committee were Jews, but we now know only 4 of them were: Sverdlov, Trotsky, Zinovyev and Sokolnikov.27

The actual prevalence of Jews in the party was quite low. The historian Benjamin Pinkus used data from the Communist Party of the Soviet Union's annual party congresses to assess the statistical and organizational representation of Jews within the party's power institutions—the Central Committee, Politburo, Secretariat, and government bureaucracies.

Pinkus writes that the question of “whether the Bolshevik regime was 'the handiwork of the Jews' is misconceived - it has no historical basis…”28 Looking at the available membership data he found that in 1922, “the year of the membership census, there were 19,564 Jews in the Party - 5.21% of all Communist Party members…”29 And in 1927, “there were 49,627 Jewish members, 4.34% of all Party members.”30

Jews were more prominent in the leadership of the party. Although, their numbers were much lower than the antisemites claim. Pinkus writes:

In 1939 there were eleven Jewish full members and three candidate members, in all 10.1% of the ruling body, at a time when the Jews formed just over 4% of the Party membership. In the Politburo in the first half of the 1920s the Jews comprised from 23% to 37% (Trotsky, Kamenev and Zinovyev), but after the 'United opposition' had been ousted from the party leadership in 1926 not one Jew remained in the Politburo.31

While there was some “overrepresentation” in the party leadership, this is to be expected based on the socioeconomic status, high urbanization, high education levels, and high average IQ of the Jews in Russia. 

Jews were more likely than Gentiles to be literate. This substantially higher literacy among Jews was the result of religious and educational reforms that began in the 2nd and 1st centuries BC and became the primary goal of religious leaders beginning in the 3rd century AD. Literacy was essential so that Jews could read and study the Torah and Talmud.32 Christianity, and Europeans in general, historically were not very concerned about widespread literacy until the spread of Protestantism.33 Russia’s 1897 census shows that it was 69% Orthodox, 9% Catholic, and less than 5% Protestant.34 With these demographics, it isn't surprising that Jewish literacy was above average.

In 1926, 85% of Jews were literate, compared to 58% of Russians; in 1939, 94% of Jews were literate, compared to 83% of Russians. Compared to 7.8% of the Soviet Union's total population and 8.1 percent of Russians living in the Russian Federation, 26.5 percent of Jews had completed high school in 1939.35 In 1926, researchers found that in the US, the children of Jewish immigrants from Russia had IQs 9.5 points higher than the children of Gentile Russian immigrants.36

The Bolshevik party certainly had thousands of Jews within it, but leftist Jews tended to favor other socialist parties rather than the Bolsheviks. For a while, some of the explicitly Jewish socialist parties had more members than the Bolsheviks did.37 Jerry Z. Muller observed that among socialist Jews, “most identified with the Yiddishist Bund, a smaller number with the Zionist Poalei Zion, a smaller number yet with the Mensheviks, and the tiniest minority with the Bolsheviks.”38

Even Stalin called attention to the Jewish representation in the Menshevik party and referred to them as “a Jewish faction” and the Bolsheviks as “a genuine Russian faction.”39 These Jewish parties were explicitly opposed to and in conflict with the Bolshevik party.40 If even the socialist Jews were overwhelmingly against the Bolsheviks and their strategies, it’s hard to argue that Bolshevism was a Jewish conspiracy. 

Stalin and the Jews

What Jewish representation that did exist within the Bolsheviks was largely eliminated after Joseph Stalin took power. Towards the end of his reign, Jews made up less than 1% of the Soviet elite.41 This was largely because many Jews were killed or forcibly removed from power in and after Stalin’s purges.42 Even Hitler viewed Stalin’s purging of the elites as a turning point for Russia, and because of it he no longer believed in the Judeo-Bolshevik conspiracy.43 Stalin even directly told Ribbentrop, the Nazi foreign minister, that he was waiting for a wide enough stratum of local intelligentsia to be formed before finishing off the Jews as a ruling elite.44

One specific Jew that Stalin targeted was Maxim Litvinov, the Commissar for Foreign Affairs. The Nazis despised Litvinov. They called him Jewish slurs and referred to him as “Finkelstein-Litvinov.”45 Stalin had realized that it would be much more favorable to the Soviet Union, and communism, to side with the Nazis and start a Great War than to form an alliance with Great Britain and France.46

Stalin initially favored Litvinov, but he realized he had to go to make the war happen. On May 3rd, 1939, NKVD troops marched into the Soviet Foreign Ministry and removed Litvinov, along with most of the Jewish employees.47 Just two days later, Astakhov, the Soviet ambassador to Germany, sought the Nazis’ approval of Litvinov’s removal.48

Once Litvinov was replaced with Molotov, Stalin was free to establish closer relations with Germany and eventually sign the Molotov-Ribbentrop pact. After the pact was signed, Stalin handed over the gift of about 600 German Communists, most of whom were Jews, to the Gestapo in Brest-Litovsk.49 Many more prisoners were later handed over to the Nazis. The transfer of prisoners happened several more times through the NKVD-Gestapo conferences. The existence of these conferences refutes anyone who claims this was not a Soviet-Nazi alliance. 

Stalin and his Soviet Union could be considered the first Holocaust deniers. Stalin’s government actively covered up what the Nazis were doing after they invaded Poland. Journalist Louis Rapoport writes:

In the spirit of the Stalin-Hitler pact, all Soviet organs deliberately remained silent about the genocidal slaughtering of the Jews by the Nazi conquerors of Poland between September 1939 and June 1941, when the Nazis invaded the USSR.50

Later researchers confirmed this by reviewing all available Pravda (the official newspaper of the Communist Party) archives from 1938 to 1942.51 Because so many people were left in the dark, many Eastern European Jews had no clue they had to fear the Nazis. A July 1941 Wehrmacht report remarked how Jews were “strikingly ill-informed” about the Nazis’ attitudes and intentions.52 Even after Operation Barbarossa the Soviets very rarely acknowledged the Jewish victims of the Nazis.53 Their report on the crimes at Auschwitz didn’t mention Jews once.54

Capitalism and the Jews

The notion that capitalism and Jews are inherently connected has been touched on previously. Quite a few individuals have espoused this belief, notably Karl Marx and Adolf Hitler. Hitler even asserted that Jews were responsible for both capitalism and communism. However, it’s evident that Jews did not "invent" capitalism. 

The most prominent thinkers who contributed to modern capitalism, such as Adam Smith, Richard Cantillon, Jean-Baptiste Say, John Locke, and Carl Menger, were not Jewish. Although some later figures like Ludwig von Mises, Milton Friedman, Murray Rothbard, and Ayn Rand were Jewish, this does not support the notion that Jews invented capitalism. It does, however, refute the idea that Jews inherently align with Bolshevism. Mises even played a key role in preventing a second Bolshevik revolution from occurring in Austria.55

Though Jews have played an important role in spreading capitalism and contributing to economic theory, it was mainly white Protestant Christians behind it.56 Protestants, and almost all other Christian denominations, are far more pro-market than Jews, but Jews are still largely in support of markets.57

The broad Jewish and Christian preference for markets largely stems from the Old Testament’s support for private property rights.58 Christians are likely more pro-market because of the virtue ethics taught in the New Testament and their incompatibility with big government.59 Economist and Rabbi Meir Tamari has noted that Judaism “recognizes the legitimacy of private property, the profit motive, and market mechanism.”60

But, as Tamari points out, Judaism doesn’t adhere to laissez-faire capitalism, or a system of “unlimited private property”, so that explains the religious gap in pro-market views.61 But Judaism’s recognition of private property institutions still excludes it from socialism.

Another reason for the Jewish preference for capitalism over socialism is that Jews are far more successful and free in comparative capitalist societies than in socialist ones.62 Jerry Z Muller argues that the Jew’s “premodern commercial experience, together with their emphasis on literacy, predisposed them to do disproportionately well in modern capitalist societies, where success increasingly depended on commercial acumen and book-learning.”63

Conclusion

The economic argument for antisemitism doesn’t hold up. Jews are not the ones behind socialism or communism. In fact, most of the major figures in these ideologies have been brazen antisemites. Jews are not behind capitalism either, although some Jews have been majority contributors to economic theory and Jews are generally successful and less persecuted in capitalist societies. 

Further reading

Judaism, Capitalism, and Marx by David Gordon

Judaism, Capitalism, and Communism by David Gordon

Why Are Most Socialists Anti-Semitic? By L.K. Samuels

Jewish Theology and Economic Theory by Corinne Sauer

Alt-Right Lies: Russian Revolution Not Actually Dominated by Jews by Colin Liddell

Videos

Bolshevism and The Jews by Lucien Wolf

Modern Economics in the Talmud - Nobel Prize Winner, Professor Yisroel Aumann

The Marxist analysis fails on many grounds. The labor theory of value was discredited long ago with the marginalist revolution. A lesser-known problem with Marx’s exploitation theory is that it fails to account for an economic phenomenon known as “time preference,” as economist Eugen von Böhm-Bawerk pointed out. Time preference is the assumption that with everything else held constant, humans prefer a given end to be achieved sooner rather than later.

The reality of time preference can be demonstrated through something called the Marshmallow Experiment. The experiment was developed by Stanford psychologist Walter Mischel and is one of the most famous psychology experiments ever. In the experiment, a child (usually around 5–6 years old) is placed in a room under observation and offered one sweet (usually a marshmallow). The child is typically more than happy to accept the treat, but the twist comes when a second option is presented: if the child abstains from eating the marshmallow for 15 minutes in the room alone, then they get two marshmallows. Many kids are excited at the opportunity to double their treat, but a portion of them still fail to abstain from the first marshmallow and thus lose out on the reward.

Why would a child eat one marshmallow when they could have two? After all, aren't two better than one? Not exactly. The child’s actions show us that they do value one marshmallow more than two, but only when the factor of time is added. Every minute spent waiting for the second marshmallow is a minute spent not enjoying the first. Another minute of not satisfying their craving.

The preference for one immediate marshmallow over two in the future is referred to as "high time preference," while those who wait for two have "low time preference." Following the original experiment, it was observed that the time preferences exhibited by the children tended to stay with them as they grew. For example, kids who expressed lower time preferences tended to be more economically successful as adults.

To see how time preference is relevant to employment and wages, let’s consider two hypothetical child participants in the marshmallow experiment: Christianna and Carlos. 

Christianna and Carlos were two young children participating in the classic psychology experiment known as the marshmallow test. The children were each given a single marshmallow and told that if they waited 15 minutes without eating it, they would be given a second marshmallow as a reward.

As the timer began, Christianna sat patiently, her eyes fixed on the tempting treat before her. She fidgeted a little and glanced around the room, but ultimately she managed to resist the urge to eat the marshmallow. Carlos, on the other hand, couldn't wait even a minute. He grabbed the marshmallow and stuffed it into his mouth, devouring it with gusto.

As they grew older, Christianna and Carlos began developing very different life approaches. Christianna learned the value of patience and self-control, choosing to save up her money and focus on her long-term goals. She eventually opened up her own coffee stand, where she worked tirelessly to build a successful business.

Carlos, on the other hand, was always focused on immediate gratification. He spent his money as soon as he earned it, never worrying about the future. He was constantly searching for new ways to indulge his every desire, no matter how fleeting or superficial.

Despite his best efforts, Carlos never seemed to find true happiness or fulfillment. He bounced from one job to the next, always seeking the next thrill or pleasure. Eventually, he found himself working as an employee at Christianna's coffee stand, serving the drinks she had worked so hard to create.

As he watched Christianna's business thrive, Carlos began to realize the value of patience and long-term thinking. He learned that true success and happiness came from putting in the hard work and making sacrifices in the present to build a better future. And he knew that it was all thanks to the lesson he had learned from the marshmallow test all those years ago.

Eugen Bohm Bawerk in Capital and Interest argued that the idea that a worker should receive the full value of their product could be understood to mean either that they should receive the full value of the product at the time it is produced or that they should receive the full value of the product at some point in the future. However, socialists interpreted this idea to mean that the worker should receive the full future value of their product immediately at the time of production.

We can see Carlos is not exploited because he showed he valued immediate consumption more than future consumption. He prefers a small amount of present money over a larger amount of future money. Christianna has a reverse preference order and ranks more future money more highly than less present money. These different preferences create an opportunity for mutually beneficial exchange. Without Christianna’s expectation of a return on her time and money invested, Carlos would be worse off because he would have to wait out his current consumption. Without Carlos’ preference for present consumption, Christianna would be worse off because she wouldn’t be able to expand her business and assets without additional labor.

In the last 200 years, the share of the global population living in extreme poverty has decreased from 75% to 10%. Accompanying this decline, there have been significant improvements in health, education, and peace. Factors such as the rise of private property, the social division of labor, advancements in technology, and the spread of philosophies advocating freedom have collectively transformed the world for the better. However, while most of the world has experienced these improvements, China stands out as a country that has seen especially remarkable progress.

When presented with overwhelming evidence of capitalism's successes, some critics of capitalism, including anti-capitalists, often cite China's economic development as a counterargument. For instance, in a YouTube video produced by the Gravel Institute, Marxist economist Richard Wolff attributes China's emergence from poverty to “socialism” rather than capitalism.

Although China remains under Communist Party rule and has experienced significant socialist influences throughout its history, the pivotal reforms that catalyzed the nation's dramatic economic growth are widely recognized as market-oriented. Wolff's argument appears post hoc, especially when considering historical Marxist rhetoric regarding China's economic transformation. For example, Michael Parenti in 1997 characterized China's shift as “sliding down the free-market path.”1

China under socialism

Mao’s apologists today describe pre-CCP, or Republican, China as a sort of hell on earth. A country rife with poverty and misery. Recent scholarship, however, has challenged this viewpoint. Xavier Paulès, a French historian, has noted:

There is no serious empirical evidence to support the thesis of a generalized impoverishment of the peasants, nor of a trend towards concentration of land in the hands of landowners.2

These aren’t just recent myths. Mao’s followers released statements claiming the top 10% controlled 70% to 80% of all land. In reality, it was between ⅓ and ½, a non-inconsequential difference.3 They used this inequality and narratives of oppression to justify the brutality that followed their victory over the nationalists.

Economic historian Kent Deng has documented that from 1900 to 1927 China was rapidly modernizing, expanding its network of railways and telegraphic lines.4 And while China had not reached the status of developed capitalist nations like the USA and England, its capitalist sector was growing tremendously. It is a shame the that, because of the Japanese invasion and communist revolution, we never got to see what Republican China would have become.

The Communist takeover of China in 1949 marked a dark period. Anyone or anything considered "counter-revolutionary" faced swift and severe consequences. According to historian Jean-Louis Margolin:

…it is clear that there were between 6 million and 10 million deaths as a direct result of the Communist actions, including hundreds of thousands of Tibetans.5

The impact of these actions was profound, resulting in millions being imprisoned and hundreds of thousands committing suicide. During the land reform initiatives of the early 1950s, between 200 and 240 million acres of land were redistributed.6 The Great Leap Forward further intensified these efforts.

The establishment of the first commune in Henan Province's Suiping County at Yashan saw over 9,000 households relinquishing not only their private plots but also their homes and numerous other possessions. So much for the supposed Marxist distinction between personal and private property. Many homes were even dismantled to build communal buildings.7 Mao claimed that all of the violence and chaos the party caused was justified because he would give the workers a better quality of life than those who came before him. Was it really worth it?

In 1957, Mao tasked a group of statisticians to perform detailed studies on the current and past quality of life of the Chinese people. The researchers found that in most cases the quality of life had declined since 1937.8 Citizens were malnourished and they experienced significant worsening of living expenses, working conditions, and living conditions. Under Mao’s regime poverty, inequality, access to housing, and access to food all worsened.9 Mao’s promises to be better than the nationalists had failed.

Things did not improve under Mao after 1957 either. Economic historian Kent Deng has noted that “by 1978, the real average wage in the industrial sector was virtually halved from its 1957 level.”10 Two-thirds of peasants in 1978 had an income lower than they did in the 1950s, and some even lower than under Japanese occupation.11

Economist Martin Ravallion, a world-class expert on poverty, estimated that two-thirds of China’s poverty in 1980 was a direct result of Mao’s policies since 1950.12 These facts completely undermine any argument by leftists that socialism brought China out of poverty. On the contrary, socialism further impoverished China. But is that a surprise to any of us?

Even then, all of that was nothing compared to The Great Famine. Calculations vary, but some say up to 45 million perished.13 Many factors contributed to the famine. These include collectivization, Lysenkoism, the killing of the sparrows, and centrally planned production quotas. Mao did not seem to care much. He continued to seize food from starving peasants and every step of the way he exacerbated the famine.14 Had he changed his policy Professor Felix Wemheuer estimates he could’ve saved up to 26 million lives.15

A turn for the better

Economist Steven Radelet granted Mao the highest compliment he deserved by pointing out “In 1976 Mao single-handedly and dramatically changed the direction of global poverty with one simple act: he died.”16

The nation started taking a turn thanks to the effort and ingenuity of a few farmers in Xiaogang. It was 1978 and China was grappling with the aftermath of Mao's Cultural Revolution and facing severe food shortages. Eighteen families in Xiaogang village, clandestinely signed a pact to divide commune land into family plots. This bold move, risking death or imprisonment, marked the onset of China's rural reform. The experiment's success boosted regional production by 600%.

This caught the attention of Deng Xiaoping, China's then-new leader, who was completely shocked to see this act of rebellion and its incredible results. Since he couldn’t argue with the results, he had to just leave the farmers alone. There’s a myth that reform came from the party, a top-down reform, but only 3 out of 29 party secretaries supported agricultural reforms at the outset.17

A reform official named Bao Tong later said that during the Eighth Party Congress in 1978 “reform wasn’t discussed. Reform wasn’t listed on the agenda, nor was it mentioned in the work reports.”18 A bottom-up liberalization campaign began, completely contrasting with Mao’s top-down approach. Liberalization not only revitalized agriculture but also laid the groundwork for broader economic reforms, including the opening of Shanghai, Guangdong, and Shenzhen to market forces.19

As noted by socialist economist Thomas Piketty, from 1978 to 2015, the income share of the top 10% rose from 27% to 41%, while public property's share in national wealth declined from 70% to 30%.20 Concurrently, the public sector's share in production fell from 80.7% in 1978 to 28.2% in 1999, as the private sector's share increased from 19.3% to 71.8%.21 Additionally, from 1978 to 2002, urban employment saw a dramatic shift; the public sector's share dropped from 78.3% to 22.7%, whereas the private sector's rose from 21.7% to 77.3%,22 marking a substantial move towards a market-oriented economy with diversified ownership.

Private property had finally returned, and economic calculation with it. In 1920, Ludwig von Mises observed that socialist economies were incapable of performing economic calculation.23 In a capitalist economy, capital goods are privately owned and entrepreneurs sell them to each other, creating a market. Socialism abolishes private property and thus this market of capital goods cannot exist. Joe Salerno explains:

Without recourse to calculating and comparing the benefits and costs of production using the structure of monetary prices determined at each moment on the market, the human mind is only capable of surveying, evaluating, and directing production processes whose scope is drastically restricted to the compass of the primitive household economy.24

This problem was very apparent in socialist China. In 1978, 100% of the prices of production goods were set by the state. At this time the extreme poverty rate was over 90% and rising. By 2004, only 12.5% of prices were set by the state. The extreme poverty rate was 22% and falling.25

Capitalist China?

China today engages in a lot of, what some call, “industrial socialism.” Many socialist advocates brag that China was able to achieve its current status as an economic and technological super-power because of central planning. But as we now know, China only became successful after abandoning all-out socialism.

China’s modern industrial policy is not at all what built the nation up from the rubble Mao put it in. Economist Barry Naughton explains:

Between 1978 and about 2005, China’s government steadily retreated from its initially all-encompassing control of the economy, growth accelerated, and comprehensive upgrading took place. New policies began to be initiated in 2006, starting slow and then accelerating. From 2009 through 2020, the government has strongly re-engaged in direct economic intervention, all while the economy has been steadily slowing (even before the coronavirus impact in 2020).26

China’s current industrial package is just too recent to explain China’s success over the past several decades. China is abandoning what made it strong, to its own detriment.

Another way China has turned from capitalism is by focusing on government-led poverty alleviation programs rather than economic growth to reduce extreme poverty. The communist party and socialists credit these programs for reducing poverty, but these programs are also far too recent to be the cause behind the historic decline. Even if we just focus on recent years, these policies don’t seem to be very effective.

A 2022 Chinese study found that the CCP’s Anti-Poverty Fund had no statistically significant impact on poverty from 2011 to 2017. There wasn’t any evidence for income transfers reducing poverty either. They did, however, find strong evidence that the liberalization of agriculture decreased poverty.27 A 2023 Chinese study found that transfer payments actually decreased incomes because of drops in the labor supply.28

So is China socialist? Well, it’s a bit more complicated than that. Among its reforms, China established "special economic zones," which are characterized by economies that are more market-oriented than those in other parts of the country. Presently, China's economic landscape is highly diverse, varying significantly not only from province to province but also from city to city.

In some areas, state-owned enterprises dominate, accompanied by high corporate tax rates, whereas other regions feature a minimal presence of state-owned enterprises and benefit from low corporate tax rates. Thus, China exhibits characteristics of both socialism and capitalism, with the specific mix depending on the geographical location.29

In a cross-regional analysis of China’s economy, economist Weiying Zhang notes, 

China’s high growth over the past 40 years has come from marketization, emerging and booming private sectors, as well as the technology accumulated by the West over three hundred years, not from the powerful government and the large state sector.30

He compared different regions in China, which varied by economic policy. By breaking China up into regions he was able to see:

…on average, the more the market-oriented reform a province had done, the higher economic growth it had achieved.31

and

…the provinces whose economies are more ‘privatized’ are likely to be more innovative.32

Thus providing definitive proof that China’s relative success completely originated from capitalist reforms, despite its government’s historic and recent socialist tendencies. China still has a long way to go, to be sure. But life for the average citizen in China is far better than it was under Mao. And it is certainly far better than it would have been had Mao’s policies lived beyond the 1970s.

Many Democrats cite this graph as proof abortion laws don’t work and that Democratic presidents and laws reduce abortions. However, I will demonstrate how this is misleading and self-defeating.

The Supreme Court case Casey v Planned Parenthood was decided in 1992, right before Bill Clinton was president. According to Roe v Wade, laws governing abortion must pass "strict scrutiny," the standard Supreme Court test for restrictions on core constitutional rights. Casey reiterated that the right to abortion is based on the general sense of liberty and privacy guaranteed by the constitution but instead accepted the lower, undue burden criterion for examining state abortion restrictions. This means Casey allowed states to have more restrictions on abortions, and many of them did. One study provided evidence that several types of state-level anti-abortion legislation resulted in statistically significant declines in the abortion rate and the abortion ratio. Furthermore, a series of natural experiments provide further evidence that abortion restrictions are correlated with reductions in the incidence of abortion.

And, of course, we know that Roe v Wade was overturned during Biden’s Presidency. Following the Supreme Court's ruling, laws banning abortion have been imposed in at least 13 states, where most abortions are now illegal. It is anticipated that almost half of the states will try to ban abortions. While judges decide whether current or new restrictions can go into force, abortion is still permitted in some of these states for the time being. So while abortion is legal in the remaining states, access may still be limited, or restrictions may apply.

Furthermore, the Guttmacher Institute's own data shows a massive uptick in abortion laws during Barack Obama’s presidency. States passed a record 205 abortion restrictions between 2011 and 2013, more than the entire 30 years prior. As a result, many abortion providers closed down. This indicates that these laws have effectively reduced the number of abortions.

And we don’t just see these laws working in America. One study examining the effects of abortion bans in Eastern Europe also found that 

…modest restrictions on abortion in Eastern Europe reduced abortion rates on the order of 25 percent, but also reduced pregnancy rates on the order of 10 percent with little net effect on births.

There are several reasons why abortion rates increase when abortion becomes less restrictive. Less restrictive abortion policies can be thought of as a reduction in the cost of abortion, which has two effects. One effect of lowering the cost of an abortion is that a woman who is already pregnant will be more likely to have an abortion and less likely to give birth. A second effect is that a woman will be more likely to become pregnant in the first place. This is because lowering the cost of abortion reduces the expected cost of a pregnancy, particularly for women who think it is likely they would terminate the pregnancy. This, in turn, reduces the optimal level of contraceptive intensity. Overall, the existing academic research paints a very clear picture. Legal protections for unborn children reduce abortion rates and save lives.

Harsh critics of individualism often point out that individuals are not atomized and independent. They say that we are born into families and have many different and important social relationships throughout our lives. While these observations are true, they are nothing more than strawmen of the true individualist position. Libertarian thinker Murray Rothbard has noted

Libertarians are methodological and political individualists, to be sure. They believe that only individuals think, value, act, and choose. They believe that each individual has the right to own his own body, free of coercive interference. But no individualist denies that people are influencing each other all the time in their goals, values, pursuits, and occupations.1

Friedrich A. Hayek, in his book Individualism and Economic Order, notes the confusion surrounding the meaning of individualism and the fact that Burke, a representative of true individualism, is often seen as an opponent of the "individualism" of Jean-Jacques Rousseau. Hayek writes that Burke, De Tocqueville, and Adam Smith, among others, all stand for true individualism, which he defines as

a theory of society, an attempt to understand the forces which determine the social life of man, and only in the second instance a set of political maxims derived from this view of society.

He traces the development of this philosophy from its roots in the work of John Locke and its full development in the work of Scottish philosophers and English Whigs.2

At first glance, Burke's emphasis on the importance of social constraints and limitations on individual freedom may appear to be at odds with the individualist focus on maximizing personal autonomy. However, upon closer examination, it is clear that Burke's conception of liberty is not incompatible with the individualist values of scholars like Ludwig von Mises and Murray Rothbard.

In his critique of collectivism, Mises asserts that "society is nothing but the combination of individuals for cooperative effort."3 He argues that within the sphere of private property and the laws protecting it against encroachments, the pursuit of individual interests is not at odds with the interests of society as a whole. Burke pointed out in a similar vein that the marketplace

obliges men, whether they will or not, in pursuing their own selfish interests, to connect the general good with their own individual success.

Mises highlights that society is created through the cooperation of individuals and that individualism and social cooperation are not mutually exclusive. In other words, individuals can pursue their own goals and interests within the framework of a cooperative society rather than being forced to conform to the will of the state or a dominant group.

Similarly, Rothbard writes that

what libertarians are opposed to is not voluntary persuasion, but the coercive imposition of values by the use of force and police power.

He emphasizes the importance of individual freedom to persuade and be persuaded, but not the use of force to impose one's values on others.4 Like Mises, Rothbard recognizes that individuals can interact and cooperate voluntarily without the need for government coercion. Burke, seemingly, was in agreement with this viewpoint. He once wrote:

It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, leaving much to free will . . . than to attempt to make men machines and instruments of political benevolence.  The world as a whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist.5

Given these views, it becomes clear that Burke, Mises, and Rothbard all value individual freedom and recognize the importance of social cooperation in a free society. Burke's emphasis on the necessity of social constraints and limitations on individual freedom may seem at odds with individualist values at first glance, but upon closer examination, it is clear that Burke's conception of liberty is not incompatible with the individualist values of Mises and Rothbard. Rather than seeing social constraints as a threat to individual freedom, Burke sees them as necessary for protecting individual rights and maintaining a just and virtuous society.

Although Edmund Burke, Ludwig von Mises, and Murray Rothbard may use different terms and emphasize different aspects, all three authors value individual freedom and recognize the importance of social cooperation in a free society. Rather than immediately labeling Burke as an all-around opponent of individualism, it is important to examine and understand different perspectives on this complex and multifaceted concept. By considering the full range of ideas on individualism and liberty, we can gain a deeper understanding of the ways in which individuals can live freely and cooperatively in society.

But it is highly questionable to suggest that a lack of obscenity laws had a more significant negative impact on society than major events and policies such as the Federal Reserve, World Wars I and II, the New Deal, Social Security, The Civil Rights Act, The Great Society, and the Vietnam War. These events and policies, which have had far-reaching and significant consequences, are not even mentioned by Knowles.

Contrary to what Knowles has claimed… for too long, republicans and conservatives have turned a deaf ear to the voices of libertarians, choosing instead to succumb to the seductive call of state power and control. They have erected institutions that are fundamentally flawed, institutions that cannot be considered right-wing or conservative by their very nature. This contravenes O'Sullivan's 1st law of politics, which dictates that "all organizations that are not actually right-wing will eventually become left-wing." Conservatism is fundamentally about natural hierarchy, but the hierarchy of state institutions is anything but natural. By prioritizing the expansion of state power and control over the safeguarding of pre-political institutions like the family, the church, and the community, conservatives have undermined their own principles and values.

As Edmund Burke astutely observed, it is not the role of government to legislate morality. He once wisely proclaimed

"It is better to cherish virtue and humanity, leaving much to free will . . . than to attempt to make men machines and instruments of political benevolence.  The world as a whole will gain by a liberty without which virtue cannot exist."

Burke believed that society's moral values should be organic and grounded in tradition, rather than imposed by the state. When conservatives try to legislate morality, they risk creating “reactance” or boomerang effects, whereby individuals push back against these imposed values and become more resistant to them. This is counter-intuitive, as conservatives often aim to promote traditional values through legislation. This approach can actually have the opposite effect, leading to a rebellion against these values rather than a reinforcement of them.

Unfortunately, the republican and conservative embrace of state power and control has resulted in the development of institutions like the EPA, the NSA, and public schools that have become weapons in the hands of the left, used to suppress conservative voices and values. These institutions have become instruments of oppression, used to restrict the freedoms and rights of individuals, businesses, and communities. They replace our vital pre-political institutions with utter bastardizations. Homeschooling and private schools once taught morality and life skills, now children are indoctrinated into moral subjectivism and useless skills in public schools. Churches and voluntary associations once took care of the poor and built social capital, but state welfare engulfed society and tore down relationships. Children were once raised to grow up and be successful while taking care of their parents, now the state controls the elderly through social security and various senior welfare programs. We have lost nearly everything.

But it does not have to be this way. There is still hope for a better future, a future in which republicans and conservatives can reclaim their values and principles. All they need to do is listen to the voices of libertarians, those who have been warning them for decades about the dangers of state power and control. Let us pursue a better future, a future in which we can build and protect pre-political institutions like the family, the church, and the community. They have shown us the way to a society that is truly free and virtuous, one that is not beholden to the oppressive power of the state.

It is not too late to turn things around. We can still dismantle the state power that has been used against us, and build a better society. But we must act now, before it is too late. We must embrace the wisdom of libertarians and the insights of Burke and other intellectuals, and work together to build a better future for ourselves and our children. This is the only way forward, the only way to reclaim our values and principles. We must act now, and we must act together. 

Milton Friedman’s reforms

Milton Friedman was an economist who advocated for free-market principles and the privatization of certain industries, including education. After Hurricane Katrina hit New Orleans in 2005, Friedman's ideas on education reform were influential in shaping the post-disaster policies implemented in the city. These policies included the closure of many traditional public schools and the expansion of charter schools, which are publicly funded but privately operated. Friedman's ideas were controversial, and were criticized by some for prioritizing profit over the interests of students. However, they were also seen by many as a way to improve education in the city by increasing parental choice and providing more opportunities for disadvantaged students.

Klein strikes

In her book, Klein criticized Milton Friedman's post-Katrina school reforms in New Orleans, arguing that they were a form of disaster capitalism that exploited the crisis to push for privatization and profit-making in the education system.1 However, a new study published in the Journal of Human Resources by two New Orleans economists, Douglas N. Harris, and Matthew F. Larsen, presents empirical data that contradicts Klein's criticisms and shows that the reforms had a positive impact on student achievement and education outcomes.2

Klein fails

One of Klein's main criticisms of Friedman's reforms was that they led to the widespread closure of public schools and the expansion of charter schools, which she argued were motivated by profit rather than the interests of students. However, the study found that the closure of public schools and the growth of charters in New Orleans were actually associated with an improvement in student achievement, as measured by standardized test scores. Furthermore, the data showed that charter schools in New Orleans had higher graduation rates and were more effective at preparing students for college than their traditional public school counterparts.

Klein also claimed that the reforms were implemented without sufficient input from the local community and were imposed top-down without considering the needs of students and parents. However, the study found that this was not the case, and that the reforms were actually the result of a collaborative process that involved extensive consultation with parents, teachers, and other stakeholders. Additionally, the data showed that the reforms were successful in increasing parental choice and improving access to high-quality education for disadvantaged students.

Conclusion

Harris and Larsen’s paper provides empirical evidence that contradicts Klein's criticisms of Friedman's school reforms in New Orleans. While it is important to consider the potential drawbacks of any major policy change, the data suggests that the reforms were effective in improving student achievement and education outcomes in the city. As such, Klein's arguments against the reforms appear to be unfounded and unsupported by the evidence.

One key aspect of hotels as mini private cities is their ability to provide for the security and safety of their guests. Hotels hire security staff and implement safety measures such as fire safety systems and emergency procedures to protect their guests from harm. This allows hotels to provide a level of security that is comparable to that of a city, but without relying on a central government or external authority.

Furthermore, the security provided by hotels is based on voluntary agreements between the hotel and its guests. Guests are free to choose which hotel they stay at and can opt to purchase additional security services, such as room safes or security escorts. This means that the security provided by hotels is tailored to the specific needs and preferences of each individual guest, rather than being imposed by a central authority.

In addition to providing for the security of their guests, hotels are also able to provide a wide range of other goods and services. These include accommodations, food and drink, entertainment, and other amenities. Hotels are able to offer these goods and services without relying on a central government or external authority, and they are able to do so efficiently and effectively thanks to the voluntary agreements they have with their guests.2

Hotels are an example of how cities can be run as networks of voluntary associations. Like mini private cities, hotels are able to provide their guests with a wide range of goods and services, including security, and they are able to do so without relying on a central government or external authority. This allows hotels to operate efficiently and effectively, while also providing their guests with a high degree of freedom and autonomy.

One of the primary ways that the state does this is through its welfare programs. Instead of allowing private organizations, such as churches, to provide for the needs of the poor and vulnerable, the state has increasingly taken over this role. This has led to the creation of a massive welfare bureaucracy that is impersonal and often ineffective at meeting the needs of those it is intended to help.

David Beito, a professor of history at the University of Alabama, has written extensively about this issue. In his book "From Mutual Aid to the Welfare State," Beito argues that private welfare organizations, such as churches, were much more effective at providing for the needs of the poor than the state. These organizations were able to provide support and assistance in a personalized and compassionate manner, whereas the state often treats the poor as mere recipients of government handouts.

Furthermore, the state has also sought to replace the role of the family in our lives. Through its education policies, the state has taken over the responsibility of educating our children. Instead of allowing parents and communities to decide what is best for their children, the state has imposed a one-size-fits-all curriculum that is often at odds with the values and beliefs of many Christian families.

Additionally, the state has also sought to replace the role of God in our lives. Through its laws and policies, the state has increasingly sought to dictate what is right and wrong and has often imposed its own secular morality on the populace. This has led to a situation where the state is attempting to dictate what people can and cannot believe, and is often hostile to religious beliefs and practices.

In contrast to the state's attempts to centralize power and control, anarchism and anti-statism support the idea of natural authority. These ideologies recognize the importance of the church, community, family, and God in providing order and stability in society. They argue that these pre-political ties are essential for maintaining a free and just society and that the state's attempts to undermine them only serve to erode the foundations of our society.

Therefore, it is clear that the state is fundamentally against Christianity and the concept of natural authority. As the state continues to grow in size and power, it is essential that we resist its attempts to replace the roles of the church, community, family, and God in our lives. We must stand up for our religious beliefs and the importance of these pre-political ties, and reject the state's efforts to centralize power and control. Only by doing so can we truly maintain a society that is free and just for all.

During this time, Somalia was effectively a failed state. The central government, which had been weakened by years of civil war, was no longer able to provide its services or “maintain order”. As a result, the country descended into anarchy, with various warlords and militias vying for control of territory and resources.2

Private law

One of the most notable aspects of Somalia’s stateless period was the emergence of a unique form of governance known as the Xeer system. The Xeer, which has its roots in the traditional legal system of Somalia, is a form of private law that is based on a set of rules and principles that are agreed upon by the members of a community. The Xeer places a strong emphasis on the protection of private property rights, and it is often seen as a form of spontaneous order that emerged in the absence of a central government.3

According to economist Peter Leeson, the emergence of the Xeer was one of the key factors that allowed Somalia to continue functioning during its stateless period. Leeson argues that the Xeer provided a framework for the continuation of economic activity and the protection of property rights, even in the absence of a formal government.4

What the evidence says

Furthermore, Leeson’s research suggests that Somalia may have even been better off during its stateless period than it was before or after. For example, Leeson points to data that shows that the rate of violent conflict in Somalia decreased significantly during the stateless period, compared to the years before and after.5 In addition, he notes that life expectancy, infant mortality, maternal mortality, and many other indicators of quality of life improved during this time.6

Similarly, economist Benjamin Powell has also argued that Somalia experienced some positive developments during its stateless period. Powell points to the growth of the informal economy and the emergence of new forms of entrepreneurship as key factors in improving the standard of living for many Somalis.7

Conclusion

In the face of great adversity, the people of Somalia proved their resilience and resourcefulness, creating a society that was not only functional, but also prosperous. The research of economists like Leeson and Powell suggests significant positive development for the country. The emergence of the Xeer system of private law, with its focus on private property rights, was a key factor in this development, providing a framework for the continuation of economic activity and the protection of property rights in the absence of a formal government.