“Let Zohran Mamdani’s victory in last week’s Democratic mayoral primary in New York serve as your periodic reminder that capitalism is in dire need of able defenders.” Matthew Hennessey’s call that “Capitalism Needs Champions” (Wall Street Journal, July 1) would have provoked Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal author Ayn Rand’s trademark reminder to “check your premises.”

According to Hennessey, who uses “capitalism” interchangeably with “free markets” and even plain “markets,” “anticapitalists on both left and right struggle to make a serious case that things are worse now than they were 100 or 150 years ago.” Chris Matthew Sciabarra notes: “For Rand, this ‘unknown ideal’ had been approximated in history but it had never been practiced in its full, unadulterated laissez-faire form. It was largely undercut by state intervention.”

Even while America’s actually existing mixed economy produced the “washing machines [and] chemotherapy” hailed by Hennessey, manufacturing became so intertwined with federal contracts and organizational bureaucracy that Karl Hess could quip in a 1976 Playboy interview that “to find a difference worth dying for in opposing the Soviet Union while supporting General Motors requires a theological position.” Michael Harrington observed in The Next Left that ostensibly private healthcare providers accepted being primarily funded by “socialized insurance premiums” to the point of becoming “the worst of capitalism and the worst of socialism combined,” in which “no one was particularly concerned about controlling the outlays or quality.”

“Free people” do “abominate coercion,” but Hennessey overlooks how capitalists have taken the initiative in burdening their competitors.  Asserting that “the owner-operator of a corner deli is no less a capitalist than Jeff Bezos” ignores how, in the words of Roy Childs, “men in larger businesses supported and even initiated acts of government regulation” (and would obviate the case against antitrust breakups).

Hennessey dismisses “soft-headed notions about inequality,” since “the incredible wealth [markets] generate can be used to fill the gaps.”  Yet the most pro-market mayoral candidate in New York’s history, Henry George, saw how unfree markets aggravated what he called the “Increase of Want with Increase of Wealth.”

Hennessey predicts that Mamdani will require “plans to keep New Yorkers captive,” forgetting his own Journal op-ed page’s survey of socialist mayors who “took an entrepreneurial approach to government, improving systems, cutting waste, and finding creative new sources of income” (Michael Trinklein’s “Sanders Can Learn From ‘Sewer Socialists’,” March 19, 2020).  The New York mayor who hailed “the crumbling bricks of the Berlin wall” yielding to “a world liberated from the crushing weight of fascism and totalitarianism” was card-carrying member of Harrington’s Democratic Socialists of America David Dinkins.

Harrington’s heirs lack the socialist stalwart’s perceptiveness of “the worst of socialism.”  Mamdani’s proposed municipal groceries would have a harder time recreating efficient supply chains geared to local retail needs than dot-com bubble fiascoes like Kozmo or Webvan.  Free buses would at least not jeopardize free markets in a transit economy so subsidized that fares act like a regressive tax. But no free ride would get as far as free trade.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion capitalism”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Mat-Su Valley Frontiersman [Wasilla, Alaska] July 7, 2025
2. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism”
   by Joel Schlosberg, Carolina Panorama [Columbia, South Carolina], July 8, 2025
3. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, PCM Explorer [Prairie City, Iowa], July 10, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]
4. “Champions of freer markets don’t need to champion Capitalism” by Joel Schlosberg, Jasper County Tribune [Colfax, Iowa], July 10, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]

Wall Street Journal editor Matthew Hennessey correctly observes that vice-president JD Vance could stand to brush up on his economic education (“Vance is Wrong: The Market Isn’t a ‘Tool,'” May 27). He may have learned the essentials of exchange at Ohio State and Yale, but “speaks as if he didn’t.”

Yet Vance’s remark that “the market is a tool, but it is not the purpose of American politics” is not so much incorrect as an inadvertent self-indictment. To Hennessey, “laws of economics,” akin to “laws of gravity,” mean that economies “can’t be bullied into compliance with a political agenda.” To the contrary, manipulative politicking all too often pushes the populace to take the fall.

Hennessey sees the mechanical-market metaphor dovetailing with Vance’s advocacy of “a revived industrial economy that is planned and directed by enlightened tinkerers for the common good.” A tall order when the Apollo 13 mission team had its hands full kludging a literal square-peg-in-a-round-hole connector from spacecraft spare parts to get back down to Earth.

Vance maintains his social conservative Catholicism, but is realigning its focus to “launch a missile at the market.”  Yet the tradition of Catholic social criticism includes the subject of John P. McCarthy’s Hilaire Belloc: Edwardian Radical combining a “dislike of capitalism and enthusiasm for property ownership,” and so seeking alternatives to “the usual statist solutions,” as well as John Médaille’s call to push the actually existing market economy Toward a Truly Free Market.

Hennessey claims that “the idea that markets exploit the weak and release corrosive social forces has always been popular on the left.” Less subtly, the online edition’s subtitle calls Vance “as economically illiterate as any leftist Democrat,” forgetting the 2020 Journal op-ed headline recalling the Carter administration: “When Democrats Were Deregulators.”  In 1992, George McGovern had even written for the Journal to chide Bill Clinton’s New Democrats, who aimed to assist “entrepreneurs who will risk their capital” to “create job opportunities,” for failing to “consider whether we are choking off those opportunities.”

If politicians and pundits across the political spectrum increasingly echo Robert Kuttner, quoted by Hennessey decrying “the utopian worship of free markets” in 1998, they should note how the fettered enterprise of the current decade was foreshadowed in 1943 by what Astounding Science Fiction called “a rigidly frozen economy” where interplanetary incomers with innovative “inventions to sell” could be stymied to starvation by “a law against inventions” in Henry and Catherine Moore Kuttner’s “The Iron Standard.” (That early in the twentieth century, the Kuttners could imagine their stagnant “world state” would at least be blessed with “no wars and no tariffs.”)

Hennessey rues Americans receiving “miseducation … from philosophy professors.”  They could learn something from Auburn University philosopher Roderick Long, who emphasizes that “devaluing of compassion” or assuming its incompatibility with laissez-faire liberty stymies efforts “to visualize and formulate the institutions of a free society.” That false dichotomy likewise empties the toolbox necessary for building a fair one — and getting methods that distort supply and demand and inhibit honest cooperation out of the picture.

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

Warren Buffett’s father should have changed Radical Son David Horowitz’s red diapers.

At first glance, Horowitz’s vehement rejection of his card-carrying Communist Party upbringing to become an equally unwavering Grand Old Party loyalist, from voting for Ronald Reagan’s re-election right up until his passing on April 29, would seem the mirror opposite of the path to Buffett’s retirement a week later.  Six decades after inheriting the Berkshire Hathaway he would nurture into a trillion-dollar conglomerate from a Republican congressman deemed “arch‐conservative” in his New York Times obituary, Howard Homan Buffett’s son had become the sort of capitalist who could not only be commended by Times guest essayist Roger Lowenstein for having “long stood out on Wall Street because he eschewed its frequent chicanery, self-dealing and greed” (“Taking the Measure of Warren Buffett,” May 5), but gladly cited as a role model by It’s OK to Be Angry About Capitalism author Bernie Sanders.

Yet the Times acknowledged that the “arch-conservative” had urged “curbs … on the United States military leadership,” anticipating Dwight Eisenhower’s better-remembered caution to “guard against the acquisition of unwarranted influence … by the military-industrial complex.”  E. J. Dionne, Jr. observed in Why Americans Hate Politics that “New Left scholars … took a much more favorable view of the old isolationists such as Robert A. Taft” and Buffett “than liberal scholarship ever had” — and that Students for a Democratic Society president Carl Oglesby had quoted Buffett on how “we cannot practice might and force abroad and retain freedom at home.”

Dionne’s caveat that “the New Left’s attack on large corporations was not a cause to which conservatives repaired” is hard to maintain when a devoted Ayn Rand fan like Roy A. Childs, Jr. could note in the May 1972 issue of Libertarian Forum not only the validity of “students’ reactions to Dow Chemical’s presence on campuses across the U.S., at the time when Dow’s own napalm was being used to zap Vietnamese peasants” but that law-and-order dismissals ignored how “so-called ‘private’ universities … seize land from its rightful owners by aligning with the State’s power of eminent domain.”

One of those “New Left scholars” was none other than David Horowitz.  The back cover of Ronald Radosh’s Prophets on the Right: Profiles of Conservative Critics of American Globalism includes a blurb from the Horowitz who would later coedit The Anti-Chomsky Reader lauding its “understanding of the imperial dynamics of America’s postwar course” underneath Noam Chomsky lamenting “how much has been lost by narrowing the spectrum of debate” when such a “critique of … the centralization of state power was perceptive at the time, and has much to offer to us today.”

New Yorker Joel Schlosberg is a senior news analyst at The William Lloyd Garrison Center for Libertarian Advocacy Journalism.

PUBLICATION/CITATION HISTORY

1. “They Could Have Overruled the Empire as Father and Son” by Joel Schlosberg, CounterPunch, May 9, 2025
2. “Opinion: They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, Newton, Iowa Daily News, May 13, 2025
3. “They could have overruled the empire as father and son” by Joel Schlosberg, PCM Explorer [Prairie City, Iowa], May 15, 2025 [Page 4 of print edition]