Capitalism Isn’t Responsible for Society’s Flaws; You Are

If we want a better world, we have to start wanting better.

This essay was originally published at The Libertarian Institute.

“Capitalism is killing the planet—it’s time to stop buying into our own destruction.” — The Guardian

The more disordered modern society becomes the more loudly we hear a common diagnosis: capitalism wanted this.

Blaming capitalism has long been the status quo for the political left, who over the decades have expanded from the Marxist critique of economic inequality to blaming capitalism for eating disorders, serial killers, declining libidos, misogyny, and just about anything else they can come up with. Increasingly, blaming capitalism has gained popularity on the right as well, who credit it with the decline of the nuclear family, community, religion, and all sorts of moral and cultural decay.

“Capitalism wants you to be sick,” “capitalism wants you to hate,” “capitalism wants you to be weak,” “capitalism wants you to hate your body,” “capitalism wants you burned out, silent, and disconnected,” “capitalism wants you to save less and spend more,” “capitalism wants me dead.”

According to its critics, capitalism is the ghost in the machine pulling strings to make our lives worse, all for its own profit. But that’s a philosophical error—a refusal to distinguish between a system and its inputs. Our civilization does have serious problems. The critics are right to say so. But capitalism isn’t responsible for society’s flaws; we are.

The Problems Are Real

Contrary to the Steven Pinker thesis, not everything is getting better.

Critics of capitalism point to skyrocketing mental illness, particularly among youth. It’s true. Rates of adolescent depression have doubled over the last decade, and suicide is now the second leading cause of death for people aged ten to thirty-four in the United States. Critics blame the commodification of attention—especially through social media—and argue that capitalism wants to exploit our mental health for profit.

They argue “capitalism is at war with the family” and other traditional communal institutions. Indeed, Americans’ membership in houses of worship recently dropped below 50% for this first time ever. They blame this for the crisis of meaninglessness that has contributed to increasing depression. Marriage rates are at an all-time low, as are birth rates, and where children are born, single-parent households are increasingly common. “Capitalism wants us to stay single,” they argue, and point to pornography as the symbol of how of capitalism wants to damage our relationships. As of 2025, OnlyFans has gained over 120 million active users and 4.5 million active creators.

They argue capitalism wants us fat to benefit the food and pharmaceutical industries. Over 40% of American adults are now obese, driven in part by ultra-processed foods developed and marketed with precision. Author Michael Moss criticizes food industry capitalists for engineering products precisely for the “bliss point” which maximizes consumption. Industry consultant Howard Moskowitz designed that formula—it’s real.

In general, they argue that capitalism wants what sells rather than what leads to human flourishing. Libertarians do themselves a disservice when they underplay these problems’ severity and suggest markets alone will solve everything. But there is a third option between capitalism wanting our cultural degradation or wanting to be its savior: it’s neither, and it was never supposed to be.

Capitalism is a Mirror

“What Capitalism Wants, Capitalism Gets” proclaimed The Wall Street Journal, but this is an absurdity. Capitalism doesn’t “want” anything. It has no goals, no intentions, no will. Capitalism isn’t a moral actor. It’s a mode of production—a system defined by voluntary exchange and private property, governed by prices and profit-and-loss. Its central function is to allocate resources efficiently by reflecting what people want and rewarding those who best provide it.

As the economist Ludwig von Mises explained:

“The direction of all economic affairs is in the market society a task of the entrepreneurs. Theirs is the control of production. They are at the helm and steer the ship. A superficial observer would believe that they are supreme. But they are not. They are bound to obey unconditionally the captain’s orders. The captain is the consumer. Neither the entrepreneurs nor the farmers nor the capitalists determine what has to be produced. The consumers do that. If a businessman does not strictly obey the orders of the public as they are conveyed to him by the structure of market prices, he suffers losses, he goes bankrupt, and is thus removed from his eminent position at the helm. Other men who did better in satisfying the demand of the consumers replace him.”

In a capitalist system, what gets produced is a direct function of revealed preferences. Capitalism doesn’t care what people say they want, it reacts to what they actually want—demonstrated through behavior. When you start from that premise, the problem becomes obvious.

Capitalism is neutral. As the most successful economic system known to man, it produces in such abundance that it amplifies all of our desires. If those desires are disordered—if we want junk, or vice, or meaninglessness—it will produce that.

But we need to be clear about causality.

Capitalism didn’t create those things. We did.

It didn’t choose them. We chose them.

It didn’t promote them. It supplied them in proportion to our demand.

This happens in every direction. Capitalism will just as easily give us porn as it will therapy. As easily TikTok as it will books. It’s not the system making the choice, we are. And often, those wants are virtuous. Only the most extreme anti-capitalists will deny what capitalism has done to decrease poverty, decrease infant mortality, increase life expectancy, and improve literacy rates.

This isn’t to say there aren’t bad actors. Some entrepreneurs exploit vulnerabilities in the system. But this isn’t unique to capitalism. There are exploiters in every system. The key difference is that capitalism requires consent. Coercion must be replaced by persuasion.

Vice Exists Outside Capitalism

To believe that capitalism is responsible for human vice is to believe that vice would vanish in its absence. This mistaken idea was the basis for the New Soviet Man who, it was thought, would emerge in the absence of capitalism. He never did.

In the Soviet Union—where markets were suppressed and morality was enforced top-down—alcoholism was so severe that in the early 1980s, nearly 40,000 people died annually from acute alcohol poisoning. The issue got so bad that in 1985 the Council of Ministers of the USSR passed a law severely restricting alcohol sales, but this had little impact on consumption, it merely redirected it to home distilleries; about 23% of the population engaged in its production. But one doesn’t need to look to the extreme case of the USSR to see that dictating morality by law is doomed to fail; Russia’s story is identical to that of prohibition in the United States.

What communist and other authoritarian regimes uniquely reveal is how vice not only survives the state, but is institutionalized and expanded under state power. Corruption is the famed hallmark of authoritarianism. Despite preaching equality, while regular Soviets stood in breadlines, members of the nomenklatura (Soviet elite) had access to steak, lobster, and caviar. In North Korea, where foreign media is banned for its purportedly immoral influence, police officers are some of the biggest consumers of it, and will allow citizens to watch it in exchange for bribes. In Venezuela, where the Maduro government publicly champions anti-narcotics efforts, high-ranking officials, including Maduro himself, have facilitated massive cocaine shipments using state resources like presidential hangars, with his nephews convicted for attempting to traffic 800 kg of cocaine.

Under statism, vice doesn’t disappear, it just becomes the privilege of the elite. Capitalism, by contrast, subjects its elite to the will of the consumers who gave them their wealth. But it has no control over the nature of that will.

Critics of capitalism often claim that free market capitalism requires a virtuous society, and since we don’t have one, we can’t have it. That isn’t right. All societies will bear the consequences of an immoral population, regardless of how they organize. The inputs come before the outputs.

It’s true that capitalism has made vice more abundant. But that’s because capitalism has made everything more abundant. It doesn’t want vice, we do.

If You Want Better, Capitalism Will Deliver

But just as capitalism amplifies our worst instincts, it also amplifies our best. When consumers want virtue, capitalism responds with innovation and abundance.

For instance, as public awareness of processed foods’ harms has grown, demand for organic alternatives has surged, driving the U.S. organic food market to $71.6 billion in sales in 2024 with double the growth rate of the overall food industry. American adult cigarette smoking rates dropped 17% between 2017 and 2022, enabled in part by the development of healthier alternatives like vapes and nicotine pouches. Looking back since 1965, adult cigarette smoking rates have fallen 73%, proving that even with an addictive product, people are capable of wanting better. Amid rising mental health concerns, the market for mental health apps—offering accessible therapy, meditation, and more—has exploded with an annual growth rate of 17.9% as users vote with their downloads. (Unfortunately, this fact has done little to satisfy many socialists, who literally want people less happy so they’ll be motivated to support revolutionary change.)

Are nicotine pouches and medication apps perfect solutions to our problems? Of course not. But they prove the point: when people actually want better, capitalism doesn’t resist—it adapts.

Moreover, as economist Deirdre McCloskey explains, one of the consequences of capitalism is an improvement in our society’s virtues, in enabling us to want better:

If we had gained a better material world, two cars in the garage and Chicago-style, deep-dish, stuffed-spinach pizza on the table, but had thereby lost our souls, I personally would have no enthusiasm for the achievement. I urge you to adopt the same attitude. A good name is rather to be chosen than great riches. …

But fattening up the people, or providing them with inexpensive silk stockings, I will try to persuade you, is not the only virtue of our bourgeois life. … Capitalism has not corrupted our souls. It has improved them. … The richer, more urban, more bourgeois people, one person averaged with another, I claim, have larger, not smaller, spiritual lives than their impoverished ancestors of the pastoral. … They are better humans—because they in their billions have acquired the scope to become so and because market societies encourage art and science and religion to flourish…

Capitalists ended slavery and emancipated women and founded universities and rebuilt churches, none of these for material profit and none by damaging the rest of the world. Bourgeois virtues led us from terrified hunter bands and violent agricultural villages to peaceful suburbs and lively cities. Enlightened people such as Voltaire, Montesquieu, Adam Smith, and Mary Wollstonecraft believed that work and trade enriched people in more than material things. They believed that a capitalism not yet named broke down privileges that had kept men poor and women and children dependent. And for the soul they believed that labor and trade were on the whole good, not dishonorable.

The Blame-Shifting Impulse

The common thread in anti-capitalist critiques is the belief that capitalism is not simply efficient—it’s seductive, manipulative, even demonic. That it produces what we shouldn’t want.

But capitalism isn’t a deceiver. It’s a revealer. And there’s something deeply revealing about the fact that the very people most critical of capitalism’s moral consequences are often participants in the vices they denounce.

There’s a reason actor Leonardo DiCaprio argued that capitalism had locked the United States “into an addiction to oil” while his private flights alone were responsible for twenty-two times the annual carbon emissions of the average American—including his trip to receive an environmental award—and he dismisses individual action to reduce emissions as “greenwashing.” There’s a reason Senator Bernie Sanders (I-VT) attacks the 1% for owning too many yachts and cars while owning three houses, and a reason the same progressives who decry greed are the least charitable. There’s a reason far-right pundit Nick Fuentes criticizes the “pro-gay” agenda he alleges is “embedded in the fabric of capitalism” while going on a gay date with a “catboy” and watching transgender porn. And there’s a reason the purportedly trad conservative influencer who decries feminism, promotes modesty, and criticizes women who post bikini pictures for clicks does exactly the same thing herself.

Why criticize capitalism for what one has chosen to take part in themselves? It’s a psychological defense mechanism. It’s a hit to your self-image to acknowledge that what you truly want is different than what you want to want.

As Ludwig von Mises explained:

“This search for a scapegoat is an attitude of people living under the social order which treats everybody according to his contribution…The fool releases these feelings in slander and defamation. The more sophisticated do not indulge in personal calumny. They sublimate their hatred into a philosophy, the philosophy of anti-capitalism, in order to render inaudible the inner voice that tells them that their failure is entirely their own fault. Their fanaticism in defending their critique of capitalism is precisely due to the fact that they are fighting their own awareness of its falsity.”

What You Want Is What You Get

I’m not a religious man, but it’s not an accident that religion speaks of both angels and devils, and that the devil is so often depicted sitting on one’s shoulder and whispering into an ear alongside the angel. We know the angel is right, but the devil is seductive. The question isn’t “Why does capitalism produce so much vice?” The question is “Why do people want it, and what can we do about it?”

It’s always easier to call for state power than to do the hard work of building something better. But there’s no shortcut to virtue. To bring about a better society, stop working on changing “the system” and start working on changing yourself and persuading those around you to do the same.

You want a more beautiful culture? Stop funding ugliness.

You want more religious participation? Proselytize better.

You want more dignity? Stop consuming degradation.

When we see our worst desires amplified on a societal scale, rather than viewing capitalism as the source of the problem, we should see it as a mirror that reflects back at us what we don’t like about ourselves. Just like a real mirror, if you look fat, it doesn’t mean you should smash the mirror, it means it’s time to start losing weight.

If we want a better world, we have to start wanting better. And we have to mean it—not just say it. If we do—if we really want it—capitalism will help.