The idea that socialism is about “the workers owning the means of production” is one of the most successful lies ever sold. In practice, socialism always means the state owns the means of production, and the workers are just tools of the state. They don’t own. They don’t control. They don’t even get to choose. The state decides what to produce, who gets what, where you work, and how much you deserve. “Worker ownership” becomes a euphemism for bureaucratic control enforced by threat of violence. Socialism doesn’t liberate the worker. It nationalizes them.

Capitalism is the only system that treats people as ends in themselves rather than as tools for someone else’s vision of the “greater good.” It’s rooted in voluntary exchange, the idea that you can only succeed by offering others something they freely choose because it makes their lives better. That’s not cold or ruthless, it’s the deepest form of empathy: to see another person not as a mouth to feed or a burden to carry, but as a thinking, choosing individual whose needs and values matter enough that you work to meet them better than anyone else. In capitalism, the baker rises at dawn not because a bureaucrat orders it, but because he knows the neighborhood wants fresh bread. The doctor sharpens her skills not because the state commands it, but because her patients trust her with their lives. Every act of production is an act of listening to what others want, what they dream of, and what they’re willing to trade for. Contrast that with socialism, communism, or any collectivist scheme. These systems strip away choice and replace it with force. They pretend to care for “the people” while treating individuals as interchangeable cogs. You don’t ask someone what they value, you decide it for them. You don’t earn their trust, you demand their compliance. And when the outcome is disappointment or scarcity, there is no way to walk away or seek better. Empathy is replaced with orders, and compassion is replaced with rationing. Real compassion isn’t giving people what you think they need, it’s creating the conditions where they can choose, thrive, and live for their own sake. Capitalism doesn’t just allow that, it demands it. It’s the marketplace of empathy, where success depends on making someone else’s life better without ever taking away their freedom to decide what “better” means.

Capitalism has been so successful at eradicating poverty, hunger, and hardship that it gave rise to a generation utterly detached from the realities of production, trade, and effort. They’ve grown up in comfort, surrounded by abundance, and instead of gratitude, they respond with resentment, as if wealth is the natural state of things and capitalism is just getting in the way of even more. In any other era, these people would be forced to confront the consequences of their delusions. But capitalism, in its brilliance, has created so much surplus that even the most useless ideologues can eat well, live long, and tweet their hatred for markets from devices built by free enterprise. It’s the spoiled child biting the hand that feeds him, not out of hunger, but because he’s been fed too well for too long. They hate capitalism not because it failed, but because it succeeded so thoroughly that it protected them from ever having to grow up.