I think this is a bit of a misdiagnosis of the politics of young people. I agree that the actual spectrum, in practice, extends past socialism and on to communism. I think for younger cohorts, though, it goes past socialism and toward something that looks like anarchism. Socialism, in other words, is the sensible moderate position for anarchists.
Does this make sense? No, not really. But it's tenable if you have an idealistic perspective on human capabilities and motives and don't have to fill in all the details. From that perspective we're not talking so much about a new structure for resource allocation as we are a repudiation of the current allocation of resources: the old are a rival bloc, not the young's future; more intervention by the state is exciting because it signifies a one-time reallocation, not an ongoing system of coercion. There's an assumption that a voluntary communitarian ethos is achievable if the current equilibrium gets a good bop on the noggin.
“There’s a difference between a healthy appreciation for how positive-sum economic exchanges allow us all to benefit from mutual pursuit of self-interest and the notion that we should valorize selfishness.”
Shout it from the rooftops! The reasons Trump is bad are numerous. But one of those reasons is that his brand is valorized selfishness, not positive-sum economic exchanges. He facilitates conflating valorized selfishness with a market economy, which I think has much to do with the perplexing popularity of “socialism” in 2026. Not to mention the fact that he is BY FAR the most socialist President we’ve had since WW2 and possibly ever (Jared Polis made this point effectively the other day).
It's absurd to need a license for cutting hair and immoral to limit the number of doctors who are being trained. Reforms are desperately needed across the board, beginning with letting people build on their own land, and improving the safety net. The exception, of course, are novels and screenplays. Presently, anyone is allowed to write them, and worse, anyone is allowed to publish a novel or have their script made into a movie. The result has been predictably disastrous.
This is an important debate. I'd be interested in reading a stress test on some of the arguments: is inequality bad and if so what can cities do about it and if the DSA does eliminate capitalism, then whats next?
Sorry follow up stand alone post, but something else came to my mind that I can't shake reading this post.
I'm genuinely baffled you can write a post about Democrats turn against capitalism, but especially young Democrats turn against capitalism and not bring up Trump. I think I'm on safe ground in saying that the typical Slow Boring reader and commentator is over 30 years old. I bring up to note that anyone over 30 can likely remember a political world where Trump was at best a joke figure. But if you're under 30, Trump has literally defined everything you know about politics since probably you were even aware of politics in the first place. So is it any surprise that this supposed symbol of American capitalism, this supposed great American entrepreneur, the person's supposed base case as to why he'd be a good President was his previous business acumen and the fact that he's a billionaire capitalist, would end up pushing left of center young voters into becoming pretty anti-capitalism as a concept?
I mean you and I and the Slow Boring commentariat know that what DJT, what tech executives, what various titans of business are doing right now is not capitalism per se, it's kleptocracy. But the heuristics most people have in their heads is GOP=pro capitalism. Not an unreasonable heuristic. So if you're a young person, the only thing you know about how GOP defines capitalism is absolutely cartoonish levels of blatant corruption. Is it any wonder there's been a turn against capitalism as a concept?
I feel like this post in some ways touches upon both "Murc's Law" and "One True Scotsman fallacy" at the same time
So I should say that while I have some quibbles with the post, but in general the thrust of your argument I think is pretty reasonable.
I will say, there's some more to add about why there is I think excessive focus on left wing insurgency campaigns in Democratic parties that you sort of get at but also, think there's more to the story worth conveying. I think its important to note that it's not just giving the audience what they want, but that the audience for publications like the Times has actually materially changed in the last 25 years. Namely, 25 years ago I think the Times could count on a readership that on average leaned left but still had a decent number of right of center leaning readers. Nowadays, I think I'm right in saying the swath of Times readers is basically center left to left. The other factor to consider is that the Times and other left of center outlets are at pains to seem independent on seem like they're carrying water for Democrats and just be some funhouse mirror version of Fox's Pravda like coverage. Now, I think in general I'm glad this is the case. But it does lead to some I think bad incentives. "Both Siderism" being maybe number one. But I think the other is in combination with the change in audience composition it creates a huge incentive to focus stories on Democratic infighting.
It's kind of funny that I usually associated "free enterprise" with the rhetoric of business lobbies and conservative DC think tanks. The fact that it polls better than "capitalism" in this context is depressing.
The continuum framing is fair — most defenders of markets, including this piece, mean "freer" as a direction, not "free" as a realized state. Agreed.
But the direction question then becomes:freer along which axis?
The zoning and licensing examples push against regulatory scope. The Substack example celebrates reduced barrier-to-entry, which relies on legal protection more than deregulation. The activist-investor point defends financial-market concentration mechanisms — a movement toward capital-accumulation intensification, not away from it. The welfare-state-complement point moves in yet another direction.
Each example lives on a different axis of "freer." The piece labels the whole cluster "free market" and treats them as pointing the same way, but they don't.
The strongest version of the argument would name the axis and defend the specific direction. As written, "free markets beat capitalism" reads as a single-vector claim resting on a bundle of vectors that don't align — and some of which point back into capitalism's core mechanisms, not away.
Try it yourself. Copy the article, ask any LLM to reply, see if the output matches the axes I named or looks anything like it. That's a test you can run in one minute.
Second question. When the direction and judgment are mine and the polish is AI, what's the actual problem? Third. If you don't use AI or don't like using it, on what grounds does that extend to others?
[Note, though, that in multilingual Switzerland, literally the exact same political party is called the Parti socialiste in French and the Sozialdemokratische Partei in German.]
Going down as a classic Yglesias set-up and zinger.
Anyway, I'm starting to see the shape of the grand political bargain being proposed. Cut regulations on commerce, and control abuse by giving people generous social safety nets instead. So to propose an idea that actually has some spice and could potentially make people mad, something like this:
Cut some of the more burdensome employment regulation restricting hours and conditions, but then make unemployment/retraining assistance easier to claim. The idea being that employers can pay people to work burdensome hours under unpleasant (even unsafe?!) conditions if they want, but then if those people want to quit because they don't think the employer is making it worth their while, that's as easy and pain-free as possible.
In days of old, the debate about capitalism centered on the system’s tendency toward oligarchy, i.e. what happens when a firm becomes successful. No one seems to have devised a 100% foolproof way of resolving this problem. When the chips are down, we all accept the harsh reality of too big to fail.
What does "free-market" even mean? We have a "regulated" free-market health care system and look how that is going. Free markets are not viable for many entities, including health care, utilities, education, housing and anything that is vital to our existence. The reason being that in today's America, the ruling class runs our government so that everything we do comes with a toll paid to the obscenely wealthy (even Substack subscriptions to multi-millionaires like you might qualify). Truly free markets would guarantee one thing--an exacerbation of wealth inequality to the degree that there is a violent revolt against the ruling class. Which judging from articles like this might be the only viable option....
It seems like an odd choice to put the "regulated" in quotation marks- our health care system is not a free market system under any definition I'm aware of. It's incredibly heavily regulated, composed of a hybrid of public and private options, and is so obtuse that the vast majority of people engaging with it have no idea what any of the prices actually are.
Paying a substack fee is a toll to the obscenely wealthy? Are you saying that if the creator of something is wealthy then people shouldn't have to pay small fees to access the products they derive value from?
I'm also perplexed about the seeming inconsistency in your statements. You claim that the ruling class runs our government and requires tolls paid to the obscenely wealthy. This kind of rent seeking is decidedly not a free market system. You then go on to say that if we became more free market this would make it worse. So is the rent seeking reducing the level of wealth inequality in some fashion?
Your comment strikes me as internally inconsistent and divorced from the realities of our current economic and market structures.
Texas builds more solar, more wind, and more homes than any other state in the union, because they have less tightly regulated land use policy and energy development policy, which makes the markets for energy and housing more free and more accessible to more people.
Of course “less tightly regulated” is not the same thing as “completely unregulated” and they do still have plenty of regulations, including some bad ones like minimum lot sizes. But they are directionally more free with regard to energy and housing, and directionally better at meeting those needs.
And I think it’s also worth noting that there is nothing whatsoever forcing you to pay for MattY’s takes, or any other substacker. That is wholly voluntary, and exit is a click away.
I have thought for a while that it is irrelevant whether or not Greed is Good. Regardless of whether it is good or not, greed is HERE. Any political or economic system which ignores that is fundamentally doomed. Simple fact is people want stuff
(1) Socialism described an economic system where state ownership dominates economic production (USSR, East Germany, pre-Deng PRC, etc). It works very poorly.
(2) "Socialist" was just a political label that dates back a long, long time — to an era when state ownership dominance was thought to be a good idea, even in the West — but in practice became a label mostly used by those who espouse social democracy (not socialism). Sometimes "democratic" is thrown in there to modify "socialist" to signal to voters the party or candidates in question favor free elections.
(3) "Social democracy" describes a society where the private sector, not the state, produces most goods and services, but enough taxes are collected to finance an expansive welfare state. Often accompanied by significant (but not dominant) economic production by the state.
(4) Neoliberalism is social democracy that's gone on a diet. The US was probably getting close to #3 by the late 60s, but is now a #4. France is still a #3.
(5) Communism was what the countries mentioned above (USSR, East Germany, pre-Deng China, etc) were supposedly striving for. It never arrived and never will.
I think this is a bit of a misdiagnosis of the politics of young people. I agree that the actual spectrum, in practice, extends past socialism and on to communism. I think for younger cohorts, though, it goes past socialism and toward something that looks like anarchism. Socialism, in other words, is the sensible moderate position for anarchists.
Does this make sense? No, not really. But it's tenable if you have an idealistic perspective on human capabilities and motives and don't have to fill in all the details. From that perspective we're not talking so much about a new structure for resource allocation as we are a repudiation of the current allocation of resources: the old are a rival bloc, not the young's future; more intervention by the state is exciting because it signifies a one-time reallocation, not an ongoing system of coercion. There's an assumption that a voluntary communitarian ethos is achievable if the current equilibrium gets a good bop on the noggin.
“There’s a difference between a healthy appreciation for how positive-sum economic exchanges allow us all to benefit from mutual pursuit of self-interest and the notion that we should valorize selfishness.”
Shout it from the rooftops! The reasons Trump is bad are numerous. But one of those reasons is that his brand is valorized selfishness, not positive-sum economic exchanges. He facilitates conflating valorized selfishness with a market economy, which I think has much to do with the perplexing popularity of “socialism” in 2026. Not to mention the fact that he is BY FAR the most socialist President we’ve had since WW2 and possibly ever (Jared Polis made this point effectively the other day).
It's absurd to need a license for cutting hair and immoral to limit the number of doctors who are being trained. Reforms are desperately needed across the board, beginning with letting people build on their own land, and improving the safety net. The exception, of course, are novels and screenplays. Presently, anyone is allowed to write them, and worse, anyone is allowed to publish a novel or have their script made into a movie. The result has been predictably disastrous.
“avaricious” Luckily, Google can look this up for me from within Substack, alleviating the need for a dictionary while I read my morning Yglesias.
This is an important debate. I'd be interested in reading a stress test on some of the arguments: is inequality bad and if so what can cities do about it and if the DSA does eliminate capitalism, then whats next?
Sorry follow up stand alone post, but something else came to my mind that I can't shake reading this post.
I'm genuinely baffled you can write a post about Democrats turn against capitalism, but especially young Democrats turn against capitalism and not bring up Trump. I think I'm on safe ground in saying that the typical Slow Boring reader and commentator is over 30 years old. I bring up to note that anyone over 30 can likely remember a political world where Trump was at best a joke figure. But if you're under 30, Trump has literally defined everything you know about politics since probably you were even aware of politics in the first place. So is it any surprise that this supposed symbol of American capitalism, this supposed great American entrepreneur, the person's supposed base case as to why he'd be a good President was his previous business acumen and the fact that he's a billionaire capitalist, would end up pushing left of center young voters into becoming pretty anti-capitalism as a concept?
I mean you and I and the Slow Boring commentariat know that what DJT, what tech executives, what various titans of business are doing right now is not capitalism per se, it's kleptocracy. But the heuristics most people have in their heads is GOP=pro capitalism. Not an unreasonable heuristic. So if you're a young person, the only thing you know about how GOP defines capitalism is absolutely cartoonish levels of blatant corruption. Is it any wonder there's been a turn against capitalism as a concept?
I feel like this post in some ways touches upon both "Murc's Law" and "One True Scotsman fallacy" at the same time
Can we drop the term "rent seeking" ? There has to be a better way to describe the behavior of barbers!
So I should say that while I have some quibbles with the post, but in general the thrust of your argument I think is pretty reasonable.
I will say, there's some more to add about why there is I think excessive focus on left wing insurgency campaigns in Democratic parties that you sort of get at but also, think there's more to the story worth conveying. I think its important to note that it's not just giving the audience what they want, but that the audience for publications like the Times has actually materially changed in the last 25 years. Namely, 25 years ago I think the Times could count on a readership that on average leaned left but still had a decent number of right of center leaning readers. Nowadays, I think I'm right in saying the swath of Times readers is basically center left to left. The other factor to consider is that the Times and other left of center outlets are at pains to seem independent on seem like they're carrying water for Democrats and just be some funhouse mirror version of Fox's Pravda like coverage. Now, I think in general I'm glad this is the case. But it does lead to some I think bad incentives. "Both Siderism" being maybe number one. But I think the other is in combination with the change in audience composition it creates a huge incentive to focus stories on Democratic infighting.
It's kind of funny that I usually associated "free enterprise" with the rhetoric of business lobbies and conservative DC think tanks. The fact that it polls better than "capitalism" in this context is depressing.
The continuum framing is fair — most defenders of markets, including this piece, mean "freer" as a direction, not "free" as a realized state. Agreed.
But the direction question then becomes:freer along which axis?
The zoning and licensing examples push against regulatory scope. The Substack example celebrates reduced barrier-to-entry, which relies on legal protection more than deregulation. The activist-investor point defends financial-market concentration mechanisms — a movement toward capital-accumulation intensification, not away from it. The welfare-state-complement point moves in yet another direction.
Each example lives on a different axis of "freer." The piece labels the whole cluster "free market" and treats them as pointing the same way, but they don't.
The strongest version of the argument would name the axis and defend the specific direction. As written, "free markets beat capitalism" reads as a single-vector claim resting on a bundle of vectors that don't align — and some of which point back into capitalism's core mechanisms, not away.
Slow Boring should employ Pangram or something similar, along with careful human monitoring, to detect and quarantine AI slop. This isn’t LinkedIn.
Try it yourself. Copy the article, ask any LLM to reply, see if the output matches the axes I named or looks anything like it. That's a test you can run in one minute.
Second question. When the direction and judgment are mine and the polish is AI, what's the actual problem? Third. If you don't use AI or don't like using it, on what grounds does that extend to others?
[Note, though, that in multilingual Switzerland, literally the exact same political party is called the Parti socialiste in French and the Sozialdemokratische Partei in German.]
Going down as a classic Yglesias set-up and zinger.
Anyway, I'm starting to see the shape of the grand political bargain being proposed. Cut regulations on commerce, and control abuse by giving people generous social safety nets instead. So to propose an idea that actually has some spice and could potentially make people mad, something like this:
Cut some of the more burdensome employment regulation restricting hours and conditions, but then make unemployment/retraining assistance easier to claim. The idea being that employers can pay people to work burdensome hours under unpleasant (even unsafe?!) conditions if they want, but then if those people want to quit because they don't think the employer is making it worth their while, that's as easy and pain-free as possible.
Something like that?
In days of old, the debate about capitalism centered on the system’s tendency toward oligarchy, i.e. what happens when a firm becomes successful. No one seems to have devised a 100% foolproof way of resolving this problem. When the chips are down, we all accept the harsh reality of too big to fail.
What does "free-market" even mean? We have a "regulated" free-market health care system and look how that is going. Free markets are not viable for many entities, including health care, utilities, education, housing and anything that is vital to our existence. The reason being that in today's America, the ruling class runs our government so that everything we do comes with a toll paid to the obscenely wealthy (even Substack subscriptions to multi-millionaires like you might qualify). Truly free markets would guarantee one thing--an exacerbation of wealth inequality to the degree that there is a violent revolt against the ruling class. Which judging from articles like this might be the only viable option....
Sir, this is an Aby’s.
(Also, not a real doctor.)
It seems like an odd choice to put the "regulated" in quotation marks- our health care system is not a free market system under any definition I'm aware of. It's incredibly heavily regulated, composed of a hybrid of public and private options, and is so obtuse that the vast majority of people engaging with it have no idea what any of the prices actually are.
Paying a substack fee is a toll to the obscenely wealthy? Are you saying that if the creator of something is wealthy then people shouldn't have to pay small fees to access the products they derive value from?
I'm also perplexed about the seeming inconsistency in your statements. You claim that the ruling class runs our government and requires tolls paid to the obscenely wealthy. This kind of rent seeking is decidedly not a free market system. You then go on to say that if we became more free market this would make it worse. So is the rent seeking reducing the level of wealth inequality in some fashion?
Your comment strikes me as internally inconsistent and divorced from the realities of our current economic and market structures.
Texas builds more solar, more wind, and more homes than any other state in the union, because they have less tightly regulated land use policy and energy development policy, which makes the markets for energy and housing more free and more accessible to more people.
Of course “less tightly regulated” is not the same thing as “completely unregulated” and they do still have plenty of regulations, including some bad ones like minimum lot sizes. But they are directionally more free with regard to energy and housing, and directionally better at meeting those needs.
And I think it’s also worth noting that there is nothing whatsoever forcing you to pay for MattY’s takes, or any other substacker. That is wholly voluntary, and exit is a click away.
I have thought for a while that it is irrelevant whether or not Greed is Good. Regardless of whether it is good or not, greed is HERE. Any political or economic system which ignores that is fundamentally doomed. Simple fact is people want stuff
Capitalism is good.
COMMUNISM IS EVIL!
I always thought:
(1) Socialism described an economic system where state ownership dominates economic production (USSR, East Germany, pre-Deng PRC, etc). It works very poorly.
(2) "Socialist" was just a political label that dates back a long, long time — to an era when state ownership dominance was thought to be a good idea, even in the West — but in practice became a label mostly used by those who espouse social democracy (not socialism). Sometimes "democratic" is thrown in there to modify "socialist" to signal to voters the party or candidates in question favor free elections.
(3) "Social democracy" describes a society where the private sector, not the state, produces most goods and services, but enough taxes are collected to finance an expansive welfare state. Often accompanied by significant (but not dominant) economic production by the state.
(4) Neoliberalism is social democracy that's gone on a diet. The US was probably getting close to #3 by the late 60s, but is now a #4. France is still a #3.
(5) Communism was what the countries mentioned above (USSR, East Germany, pre-Deng China, etc) were supposedly striving for. It never arrived and never will.