What has capitalism, the free market, actually given the United States?
That's the question the Democratic Socialists of America (DSA) posed last week, as the organization continues to propel itself to the forefront of Democratic politics, even winning several congressional primaries against establishment-backed Democrats. They plan to prey on one thing: the dissatisfaction that many Americans feel with the economy.
Capitalists have plenty to say about what they “think” socialism will look like, but what have they given us? War. No healthcare, crushing debt, homelessness, a federal min wage of $7.25. They’ve left us out to dry. Socialism is the only answer for the better world we deserve.…
— DSA (@DemSocialists) July 2, 2026
"Capitalists have plenty to say about what they 'think' socialism will look like, but what have they given us? War. No healthcare, crushing debt, homelessness, a federal min wage of $7.25," the official DSA account wrote on X. "They’ve left us out to dry. Socialism is the only answer for the better world we deserve."
The answer to that question, as it happens, could not be simpler: free markets have given the United States, and the world, nearly everything.
Begin with the most basic fact of human history: for most of it, nearly everyone was poor. Poverty was, and still is the default condition of mankind, broken only in the last few centuries, and broken entirely by capitalism. It was the free market, not the state, that became the only engine powerful enough to lift the vast share of humanity out of it.
Strip that away, and the world does not become fairer; it becomes agrarian again. Technology slows to a crawl. Progress, the kind that took humanity from candlelight to cures for diseases, stalls out entirely, and the world begins to look a great deal like the one our ancestors were desperate to escape. Even the very grievances the DSA lists, healthcare, credit, housing, the dream of a guaranteed income, are not indictments of capitalism. They are its inheritance. Every one of them exists, in the form we now take for granted, only because a free market made them possible in the first place.
Second, capitalism has given the West something even more fundamental than prosperity: political freedom, a debt that even capitalism's own defenders rarely acknowledge.
The United States prides itself on its separation of powers, its Constitution, its reverence for individual liberty, and rightly so; the system is unique in the world. But what almost no one admits is that these protections are not merely compatible with free markets. They are downstream of them.
Market competition is what prevents any single firm from seizing unchecked power, because rival firms with rival interests are always competing for the same ground, in the economy and, by extension, in politics. And to those who point to monopolies as a counterexample: look closer. Few of today's dominant companies existed twenty years ago, and few will survive the next twenty, unless the federal government intervenes to freeze the market in their favor. That's not an indictment of capitalism. It's an indictment of those who favor command economics and state power.
And finally, the economic freedom that capitalism provides is the last line of defense against government tyranny. The well-being of society is separate from the ills of government, meaning that no matter how poorly the government acts, there is a degree of insulation. Consider how much of the modern left’s agenda amounts to little more than an effort to control the private economy. That instinct exists precisely because the market is the one institution government cannot fully command, and because it is what separates the well-being of ordinary people from the ambitions and failures of whoever happens to hold power.
Look again at the DSA's list: war, healthcare, debt, homelessness, the minimum wage, and a pattern emerges that the DSA itself seems unable to see. Every single one is not a failure of the free market. It is a failure of the government interfering with it.
The DSA did not list an indictment of capitalism. It is indicting the government's fingerprints on capitalism. Every time the state has reached into the market to fix some perceived injustice, it has left behind exactly the kind of dysfunction the DSA now points to as proof that the market failed—a trap that Republicans and Democrats alike now regularly fall for.
The free market didn't fail America. And the moment we hand what remains of it to the government the DSA wants to trust with everything, we won't just repeat these failures. We will make them permanent.