One of the great ironies of anti-capitalist resentment is that the envy and contempt fueling opposition to the market does not arise from rigid hierarchies produced by liberty and voluntary exchange, but from a fundamental misunderstanding of the difference between liberty and statism.
What is called “capitalism” by the average human today is not capitalism at all—it is statism; a form of slavery, wrapped in the outer appearance of markets. It is a two-class system: those who control the means of coercion and those who are subject to its commands. A system in which a ruling class writes law and manipulates money, while violently protecting favored rent-seeking ventures within its own circle. Surrounding this core is a peripheral zone of what is typically called “market activity.”
The common man is allowed to trade, but only in marginal sectors. His activity is tolerated so long as it does not threaten entrenched power. The “free market” becomes a stage set, behind which all meaningful sectors are dominated by politically connected elites insulated from loss and competition. This pseudo-capitalist order serves no one but its own administrators. It is collectivist in structure, for it denies the individual’s role as chooser and replaces it with arbitrary planning and favoritism. The exclusion of the common man is not proof of capitalism’s failure, but of its absence.
Capitalism does not exclude, it enfranchises. It does not elevate a class, it dissolves caste. It does not centralize control, it disperses it through the market’s daily plebiscite. There is no such thing as a “mixed economy.” Liberty and coercion cannot coexist in the same sphere without one progressively displacing the other. The “mixed economy” is merely the slow, deceptive transition from one to the other.
The state intervenes just enough to distort prices, credit, and production—then, when disorder follows, it blames the market, never the intervention. Each failure becomes the pretext for more control, and so the spiral continues until it reaches its logical conclusion: the total state. This is not a stable order—it is tyranny, and it invariably ends in poverty, stagnation, and collapse.
Ironically, those who hate capitalism most violently are often its greatest devotees. They demand justice, merit, and reward—and yet, these are capitalist virtues. What they reject is not capitalism, but its impartiality. They long for capitalist outcomes in a system that does not—and cannot—produce them. They fail to see that only capitalism offers a mechanism by which such justice can exist at all: liberty and voluntary exchange, where value is determined not by force or privilege, but by the free judgment of others choosing to buy or abstain.
Their rhetoric invokes “equality,” “fairness,” and “the people,” but beneath that smokescreen lies a deep craving for exactly what capitalism provides: the recognition of effort and individual worth. If they could strip away the haze of resentment and see clearly, they would realize: they do not hate capitalism—they are disappointed lovers of it.
