John Curtis, a Republican, is a U.S. senator from Utah.
Six thousand years ago, one of the primary modes of transportation was the oxcart. By the time of America’s founding, the ride to the market or church wasn’t much different. Ancient Babylonians and early Americans both lit their dark homes with oil lamps. If you were a parent in medieval England, chances are you would bury half of your children before they became adults. In the generation of America’s founders, these grim realities were little changed.
But the quality and duration of human life, especially in the West, have changed more in my lifetime than in the preceding 500 years combined.
In 2000, the United Nations set ambitious goals to alleviate poverty and child mortality worldwide. The hope was to cut the 1990 extreme poverty rate in half by 2015. This happened five years early. Between 1990 and 2015, over 1 billion people were lifted out of poverty. Another goal was to cut child mortality by two-thirds. The milestone hasn’t been reached yet, but progress has been stunning, with child mortality rates falling 60 percent since 1990.
Journalist Matt Ridley wrote that, in the two generations from 1955 to 2005, “the average human being on Planet Earth earned nearly three times as much money (corrected for inflation), ate one-third more calories of food, buried one-third as many of her children and could expect to live one-third longer.”
The United States, in particular, has experienced strong growth. From 1970 to 2024, inflation-adjusted household income has increased from $59,000 to almost $84,000. Lower-income households have seen gains of roughly 35 percent during that same period, and educational opportunities have expanded.
To what do we owe this phenomenal progress? Capitalism. It’s the only system in which individuals have the freedom to own their land, homes and businesses — and to be paid for their talent, labor and innovation. Just one century into America’s experiment in capitalist free enterprise, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels — capitalism’s most prominent critics — could not help but admit that the system had driven more productivity “than have all preceding generations together.”
There is a clear link between economic freedom and standards of living, financial resources and personal health. The Taiwan I first visited as a missionary in 1979 is nothing like the country I returned to this year. I saw firsthand how market-oriented capitalism transformed a poor, agrarian country into an economic powerhouse. That is not an isolated example. None of the most prosperous countries in the world are socialist.
Many are alarmed by the growing popularity of socialism in American politics, especially given recent electoral victories by members of the Democratic Socialists of America. Although the DSA platform is unserious — the group would like to defund law enforcement, abolish the Senate and socialize private industries — the normalization of such ideas could thwart the expansion of economic prosperity, personal responsibility and a fulfilling life for future generations.
But the challenge of today’s leaders is not to launch attacks on those promoting socialism or communism; it is to do a better job of educating the public on why capitalism is history’s greatest engine of technological, economic and medical advancement.
According to a Barna Group survey conducted in 2013, 84 percent of Americans were unaware that worldwide poverty has fallen as dramatically as it has over the past three decades. More than two-thirds actually thought global hunger had gotten worse. How many realize that, according to a U.N. estimate published in 2001, poverty was reduced was reduced more in the previous 50 years than in the prior five centuries?
The author Arthur Brooks wrote, “The ideals of free enterprise and global leadership, central to American conservatism, are responsible for the greatest reduction in human misery since mankind began its long climb from the swamp to the stars. This remarkable progress has been America’s gift to the world.”
He is exactly right. Free enterprise made America a “shining city on a hill” — a heritage the country will surely lose if it abandons its zeal for the only economic system capable of making upward mobility and prosperity possible for all.
The oxcart had a good run. America should not hitch itself back onto it.
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