Why I Have Converted to Democratic Socialism after Defending Capitalism for Years

Jonathan Church

July 22, 2025

In 2019, I defended capitalism in a debate with Sublation contributor and philosophy professor Ben Burgis. It was the first of many salvos against socialism that I launched in the ensuing years, determined to defend the supposedly sound principles of capitalism against the supposedly inevitable failures of socialism. I wrote scathing critiques of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, I explained why I think Karl Marx is wrong (among other articles assailing the ideas of Marx), and I even argued that we should discard the terms “capitalism” and “socialism” altogether as irrelevant to the question of human flourishing. I am now here to say that I was wrong.

The election of Donald Trump as the 47th president of the United States has been something of a culmination for me. In recent years, I have become profoundly disappointed in a society in which Jeff Bezos owns his own spaceship, spends $50 million on a wedding in Venice, and can dictate that the opinion page of the Washington Post will promote free market ideology—which, frankly, has seemingly proved to be nothing more than a license for the rich to steal from the poor—while housing becomes more unaffordable, while kids and adults stricken with cancer are denied insurance claims for anti-nausea medication, while children die of starvation or disease in places like war-torn Sudan after the world’s richest man shut down one of America’s most effective institutional arms of soft power in the world, while Trump and his Congressional cohorts conceived an “epically regressive” budget bill which extends tax breaks for the rich while inking into law significant cuts to Medicaid as well as “the biggest retrenchment of SNAP, also known as food stamps, in its history, and big cuts to loans and Pell grants for nonaffluent college students,” and so on.

In the wake of the Great Financial Crisis, and the subsequent rise in popularity of political figures like Bernie Sanders, Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, and most recently, Zohran Mamdani, I have also become completely disenchanted with globalized capitalism and its abundance of examples of obscene inequality. But it is not only that we live in a world in which “[t]he richest 1% of people on Earth own a staggering 43% of global assets, and their wealth has grown by nearly $34 trillion in the past decade,” or that “the wealth of just 3,000 people could ‘eliminate annual poverty 22 times over’…[while] global goals are increasingly favoring the rich.” The vastly unequal distribution of wealth and income in a world in which luck and contingency are as important as initiative and talent—would Elon Musk be as rich as he is without $38 billion in government funding? Would Lebron James be as rich as he is if he did not live in a country that loves to watch basketball?—is bad enough. Just as destructive and unhealthy is a way of life in which we are compelled by ideology and necessity to live to work rather than to work to live.

By that, I do not mean to imply that laziness is the key to living the good life. Far from it. But there is a big difference between working under conditions of autonomy, with a sense of meaning and purpose, and working in a corporate pressure cooker under conditions of maximum stress imposed by bosses who are tethered to the endless churn of profit maximization demanded by the richest 10% of Americans who own more than 90% of the value of the stock market in the U.S.

This is a world in which only one-third of American employees feel engaged at work. It is a culture of bourgeois careerism in which, in the words of Marcel Proust, people “imagine that the life they are obliged to lead is not that for which they are really fitted, and they bring to their regular occupations either an indifference tinged with fantasy, or a sustained and haughty application, scornful, bitter, and conscientious.” It is a condition of anomie that increasingly strikes me as unavoidable in a philistine capitalist “meritocracy” that glamorizes the prudential advantages of wealth, power, and fame while pretending that working stiffs are grateful when corporate monoliths headed by multimillionaire CEOs spearhead investments that enrich shareholders while creating lots of low-paying jobs, all the time belittling the virtues of a contemplative or aesthetic lifestyle as the domain of eccentric intellectuals and starving artists. It is a society, documented in such books as The Tyranny of Merit and The Meritocracy Trap, that not only deprives the dispossessed of dependable access to affordable and quality housing, health care, and household financial stability, but also deprives the privileged of any relief from the chronic stress of uber-competitive school and workplace environments—which a “meritocratic” capitalist society has deemed necessary to achieve “success”—and that they encounter from childhood to retirement.

In this world where money is the measure of success, two-thirds of people live paycheck to paycheck, while Nvidia employees and Wall Street analysts and other high-income earners—who may also live paycheck to paycheck in order to bankroll their spendthrift habits—“sacrifice their mental and physical health,” as I wrote here, “on the altar of long hours, sleepless nights, tight deadlines, and toxic workplace relations with people who are paid like kings to be ferocious competitors rather than cooperative colleagues.” Capitalism, in short, is anti-freedom. “The autonomous personality,” Herbert Marcuse wrote in Eros and Civilization back in 1955, “in the sense of creative ‘uniqueness’ and fullness of its existence, has always been the privilege of a very few. At the present stage (of history), the personality tends toward a standardized reaction pattern established by the hierarchy of power and functions and by its technical, intellectual, and cultural apparatus.”

I have explored these themes in several essays published in the past year on the end of capitalism, the paradox of capitalism, the discontents of capitalism, and the unrest of capitalism. The upshot is that, as I increasingly observe that what happens in a capitalist society invariably reflects the vested interests of moneyed power rather than the considerations of fairness, efficiency, or virtue, I have finally given way to an adamant embrace of democratic socialism, however wary I may be of adopting the label of a socialist in a society that fetishizes money and power.

We can dispense with the lectures about how socialists do not know a whit about economics. As for me, I have a B.A. and M.A. in economics, respectively, from the University of Pennsylvania and Cornell University. At UPenn, I won the Lawrence Klein Prize for Undergraduate Research (“best thesis” award named after a Nobel Prize winner) as a student in economics. In 2014, I passed the third and final exam necessary to earn the CFA charter, the gold standard of certifications in finance. I have worked as an economist my entire professional career, in both the private sector and the public sector. I am certainly not among the most brilliant economists, but I do have a competent understanding of the foundations of neoclassical economics. And none of it now disabuses me of a belief that socialism can be superior to capitalism.

I believe that there is an informative debate to be had about what, in fact, constitutes the nature of “capitalism” and “socialism.” But for purposes of this article, I will cite my opening statement in my debate with Ben, in which I defined capitalism as “a system which organizes the interaction between supply and demand primarily by de-centralized decision-making in response to market incentives.” I still appreciate and respect the general efficiencies that come with market economies, in large part because the most fundamental lesson that I have learned from my study of economics over the course of almost three decades is that value creation is all about opportunity costs. It is about understanding the incremental value that comes with making one choice rather than another.

Markets have the advantage of providing vital signals about where incremental value lies in the form of prices. Consumers provide information about what they want to buy at prevailing prices, while producers provide information about what they are able to supply at these prices given their costs. In this sense, markets localize decisions about resource allocation at the level of buyers and sellers who are often best equipped to assess the relative costs and benefits of the choices they face. As a result, market economies undoubtedly have yielded great benefits to humanity.

But despite Adam Smith’s handy metaphor, there is no “invisible hand” guiding a well-functioning market. As we have learned from generations of economists—but especially economists like Douglass North and Oliver Williamson of the New Institutional Economics—it is all about market design. Free markets can fail in all sorts of ways that you can learn about in economics 101. What matters is whether a market—auction markets, financial markets, electricity markets, etc.—is designed well enough to protect competition, reveal all available and relevant information, anticipate shortages, and motivate firms to internalize all costs to their decisions, among many other considerations. Without full information, properly-aligned incentives (yes, property rights are still important), and reasonable regulation, markets easily go awry, no matter how much hardcore libertarians, armed with their unrealistic thought experiments, try to convince us otherwise. It happens all the time. Just ask any antitrust economist. Or any energy economist who knows a thing or two about Enron. Or anyone with a background in finance who remembers the disaster of subprime mortgage markets. Example after example shows why we should never underestimate the risk that profit-seeking can corrupt the system.

What about socialism? Unfortunately, “socialism” has become a slanderous word that many people now reflexively associate with the failures of the Soviet Union and Maoist China, and assume that modern socialists obtusely believe we can implement the same centralized bureaucracies of those failed regimes and somehow get a different result, like the definition of insanity as doing the same thing over and over and expecting a different result. But I do not know any socialist who wants another Soviet Union or Maoist China. Socialism comes in different forms and flavors. For example, modern socialists are keen to talk about “democratic” socialism (alternatively, social democracy).

This, too, can come in different forms. Worker co-operatives. Stronger unions. Robust safety nets. Universal, quality health care. Progressive taxation. And so on. It is the use of state policy, democratically rather than autocratically, to advance the interests of the multitude over the concentrated moneyed interests of the rich and powerful. And according to two fundamental pillars of neoclassical economic theory, this approach does not have to undermine the efficiencies of markets.

The first welfare theorem says that competitive markets are efficient, meaning that markets can clear in a way that makes people better off without making other people worse off. The second welfare theorem says that you can get the same result even after redistributing wealth, income, or other resources. There are, of course, certain assumptions that have to be met, but they are not unreasonable. For example, it is assumed that people like to buy a mix of goods and services rather than one big thing, and that firms can operate efficiently under increasing or decreasing returns to scale.

Never mind the proofs. The upshot is that, according to neoclassical economic theory—the handmaiden of modern capitalism—market design is more critical to economic prosperity than unfettered free markets, and redistribution can be done efficiently. There can be a significant role for the state to play in the marshaling of resources to achieve material well-being. Democratic socialism implies that these decisions are made democratically rather than autocratically. We can respect and accommodate the efficiencies of market economies while also making choices about the kind of life we want to encourage as a society—one that rejects plutocracy and oligarchy, espouses democratic decision-making, supports a sizable safety net, invests in public infrastructure, and cultivates the conditions for autonomy, meaning, and purpose that transcend a myopic, and ultimately unhealthy, enslavement to the bottom line of profit-seeking and capital accumulation.

This is what democratic socialism has come to mean for me, and I have willingly signed up.