We speak of democracy as an ideal. Benjamin Franklin so astutely and enduringly admonished us that our system of self-rule would not self-maintain. It was an ideal, and it was up to us to continuously strive to “keep it.” That admonishment took root. Democracy, even when its practice falls short, we don’t discard the ideal as flawed just because politicians fail or when systems break down— we demand better – better pursuit of the ideal. We fight for what it’s supposed to be. But capitalism – capitalism also is an ideal that must have our defense and maintenance.
True capitalism—the kind envisioned by Adam Smith and baked into America’s founding ideals— is not greed, exploitation, or monopolies—it’s a system of free, informed, voluntary exchange where both sides benefit. It’s not a zero-sum struggle to take, but a framework for fair and beneficial exchange, creating mutual prosperity with every transaction. When practiced with transparency, competition, and ethical grounding, it has lifted billions out of poverty and sparked innovation the world over. It’s about millions working together, coordinated through an “invisible hand” of individuals seeking their own best options from myriad choices, to solve problems, create value, and build better lives—not through force, but through the framework of seeking and optimizing mutual benefit.
That is the whole point of capitalism and Adam Smith’s work – The Wealth of Nations. It was all about how systems that required free, informed, voluntary transactions required creating wealth and prosperity with every transaction. This is done by shunning corrupt or exploitive transactions that would merely TRANSFER it. Smith’s work documented how requiring all transactions create wealth and prosperity in this way was the best way to maximize the creation of it. Capitalism tells us that the key to widespread prosperity is nothing other than freedom, knowledge, honesty, and effort.
But somewhere along the way, the term “capitalism” was hijacked. Actually the word "capitalism" was never used by Adam Smith; it was coined by critics decades later. Karl Marx, and other 19th-century socialists, used the term to criticize the highly flawed implementations that allowed capital owners to exploit and abuse the working class in their day. In more recently living memory, the term has come to be maligned as laissez-faire, completely unregulated free markets, denying the very spirit and ideal of the word “competition” crucial to the idea of Smith’s competitive markets. Today it’s further maligned to mean everything from rigged systems, to government favoritism, to corporate feudalism.
None of these things are capitalism. They are all betrayals of it. The corruption of capitalism is not capitalism, any more than corruption of democracy is democracy. And corruption of these systems is what we ought to be committing ourselves to fighting. That we should instead just reject and “walk away” from these systems, the systems that institutionalize freedom and made our nation a shining beacon of hope, is the great disinformation war being waged against the free world today.
It’s time we reclaim the word capitalism. Just as we fight for better democracy, we must fight for better capitalism—not by abandoning it, but by returning to its core promise: freedom, fairness, and shared and bountiful choices and opportunity.
Capitalism, like democracy, is an ideal worth fighting for. Not because its implementations are perfect—but because it’s the system based on truth – that forced, coerced, exploitive transactions as a rule do not created prosperity. They don’t even try. It’s freedom, truth, and equality that do. When everyone is free to enter only into transactions that offer benefits for them, exploitation and zero-sum-game transfers are rejected and eliminated. The economic engine of capitalism relies and runs on transactions creating mutual benefit for both sides. It’s a system that empowers people. It turns effort and ingenuity into prosperity. It rewards merit and contributions, and it leaves no place for parasites except to hide under rocks.
Today the world’s parasites walk proudly among us under a veil of lies as they label their deceptive and abusive tactics as “capitalism.” The truth is they don’t want free and fair markets. They don’t want honest and meaningful competition. They don’t want an informed society of counter-parties with a wealth of information and options. They want most people desperate and deprived of these things. They are without question, enemies of true capitalism as they work to corrupt it into a system that secures for them elevated positions of power so they may suck greater and greater benefits from others.
If we let bad actors obliterate our understanding of capitalism and instead define it by its worst abuses, we lose our economic north star and the practical key to freedom, fairness, equality, and widespread prosperity. We need to reclaim the word and defend the ideal once again. America can only really stand when we hold up the ideals it is based upon. And capitalism is absolutely one of those ideals.
