CAPITALISM, THE UNKNOWN IDEAL: Capitalism Gets a Bum Rap.
Capitalism has been getting a bad rap. According to one 2025 Gallup poll, only 54% of Americans have a positive view of capitalism. More Democrats think highly of socialism than capitalism. Another survey, from 2019, found that younger Americans were the least likely to have positive feelings about capitalism.
Why is this happening? One underrated factor may be that many Americans don’t have a strictly economic definition of capitalism. When I hear “capitalism,” I think of an economic system where goods are distributed by markets rather than governments. That, I’ve now realized when talking about economics online and in person, is an unusual perspective.
As Matthew Yglesias argued recently, when many people say “capitalism,” they mean “the status quo,” even if that status quo involves a lot of problems caused not by free markets, but by government regulation and cronyist intervention. The housing market, he notes, is the most obvious example of this: “Younger people’s lived experience of ‘capitalism’ is of central planning and massive shortages of the single most important item they consume.”
The result is that anything that seems to be going wrong in American life, no matter how large or small, no matter how unrelated to free markets, will pretty reliably be blamed on capitalism.
“Which brings me to a vintage refrigerator:”
So so so well done. https://t.co/IzBuHv8R2t
— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) July 13, 2026
As James Lileks asked in 2023: What Are We Nostalgic For? “There’s a lot that’s grand about our current age. People will, one day, have nostalgia for 2023. The reasons may vary. I hope it’s because the seeds of a better world—more or less, overall, all things considered—are growing today, and we don’t notice them for all the brambles and thistles. I fear the nostalgia may be due to how free and prosperous our era seems in retrospect. They might wonder if we knew how good we had it. Ice machines, gas stoves, private cars, home ownership, no social credit, hot showers without timers, actual hamburgers made from meat instead of crickets…A golden age!”