Capitalism is good and the alt fails and entrenches environmental unsustainability, democratic collapse, and decks living standards – laundry list of reasons.

Capitalism doesn’t have a foundational document or a philosophical magnum opus enshrining its confessions of faith. Rather, it’s a set of historically evolved practices including, but not limited to, competition, growth, private initiative, individual choice and property rights.

Abandoning these principles and replacing them with degrowth, the redistribution of diminishing wealth, and comprehensive government control to manage a permanent state of emergency would be guaranteed to make a dire situation worse and undermine civil liberties. Competition would be replaced with unprecedented battles for resource allocation — not to mention, any attempt at implementing such changes by way of democracy would be unlikely to survive electoral challenges, regardless of efforts to celebrate the alleged virtues of enlightened post-materialism

Faced, as we are, with growing anti-capitalist backlash, it is therefore time to put the baby back in with the bathwater. And while the status quo’s shortcomings need not be concealed, the other side of the ubiquitously lamented list of capitalist calamities shouldn’t be neglected either.

It wasn’t feudalism, mercantilism or socialism that facilitated technological progress, raised living standards, liberated women, empowered citizens, cured and alleviated disease, and lifted millions out of poverty. It was the human instinct for capitalist ambition —well-managed and tamed by democratic governance in the most successful cases.

Additionally, any stock-taking of capitalism’s pros and cons, even in its most basic form, would also have to consider that the anti-capitalist dogmas of the 20th century didn’t protect but rather wreaked havoc on the environment. And equality was only furthered insofar as — almost — everyone was relegated to the same level of deprivation.

Are the anti-capitalist activists of our day willing to accept this inconvenient truth?

To ignore these existing lessons of the past’s anti-capitalism isn’t innovative — it’s ignorant. And simply wishing that a rerun of an experiment will miraculously produce different results is hope over experience.

The key to resolving the world’s multi-layered crises won’t emerge from simplistic anti-capitalist tropes and nostalgia for disproven utopian solutions. Neither will it come from equally naive calls for the invisible hand of the market and the false gospel of laissez-faire.

Instead, real solutions will come from green investment, the democratic governance of free markets, technological innovation, and from activating and channeling the powers of capitalism — not from disregarding and delegitimizing them.