Capitalism lifts people out of poverty. And that’s the only thing it does.
But that’s the only thing that really matters.
Imagine 100 kids who have to cross France to visit their sick grandmother. In 1800, they’re all on foot. Equal. Except half will never make it. Disease, exhaustion, accident. The others will take 3 weeks.
That’s the “equality” we miss.
Then capitalism arrives. The smartest ones build carts. Then trains. Then cars. Then planes. Then Elon Musk launches SpaceX and works on rockets that will do Paris-Tokyo in 40 minutes.
At every step, the gap widens between the one who can pay the most and the one who takes the cheapest option. Always.
And at every step, today’s cheapest is better than yesterday’s most expensive.
A minimum-wage worker in 2026 takes a Ryanair flight from Paris to Marseille for 30 bucks. Louis XIV, the most powerful man in France, took 5 days by carriage for the same trip, risking death from an infection upon arrival.
Today’s poor travels better than yesterday’s king.
Today’s poor eats better than yesterday’s king (scurvy was common at Versailles).
Today’s poor has access to more information in 10 seconds on his phone than all of Europe’s royal libraries combined in 1700.
And here comes the socialist. He looks at Elon Musk in his rocket and says: “That’s outrageous. We need to tax it.”
He doesn’t look at the minimum-wage worker on his Ryanair. He doesn’t look at the kid from Bangladesh escaping extreme poverty because he works in a textile factory exporting to Europe. He looks at the top. And he calls that “fighting inequality.”
That’s the intellectual scam.
Because what he calls “reducing inequalities” is really preventing the boat from rising while pretending to lower the yacht.
The numbers are there, indisputable. In 1800, 90% of humanity lived in extreme poverty. Today, less than 8%. That drop is the greatest moral victory in human history. It wasn’t produced by a revolution. Not by a government program. Not by a manifesto.
It was produced by people who had the right to create, sell, keep what they earned, and reinvest.
And that’s precisely the engine that socialist bureaucracy has captured in France.
The mechanism is simple. Capitalism produces wealth. Then the state arrives, takes 57% of GDP, redistributes a portion, and tells you: “See, without me you’d have nothing.” As if the baker should thank the guy who steals half his batch every morning.
Worse: it gradually forbids people from creating that wealth. It smothers startups under regulations, payroll taxes, permits, lifetime contracts, 50-employee thresholds. Then it wonders why growth is zero. And concludes that it needs to tax even more.
That’s exactly what Hayek described in 1944. A country that confuses “equality of outcome” with “justice” always ends up poorer and less free. France is the textbook case.
Meanwhile, in Poland, Estonia, Ireland, Singapore, they did the opposite. Low taxes, strong property rights, light state. Result: they catch up to us or surpass us in living standards in 30 years.
Capitalism isn’t a system that creates the rich. It’s a system that destroys poverty.
And the only reason we still doubt it in France is that we’ve handed economic discourse over to people whose job is to live off other people’s money.
Brivael Le Pogam @brivael
Posted on X May 13, 2026
The original post was in French and was automatically translated to English thanks to the fruits of capitalism. But the really important point is far, far more important.
Worldwide, free markets have essentially eliminated hunger. What would have been regarded as an unimaginable food supply 80 years ago is now taken for granted. When I was growing up it was common to have a parent in the U.S. tell their child, “Finish the food on your plate, children are starving in India.” * That doesn’t happen anymore. India now exports food. Look at the pictures of people in poverty around the globe from 100 years ago. They have shrunken faces, ribs resembling a skeleton, and children have bloated stomachs. Today, the poor in the U.S. are frequently obese from recreational food consumption.
If someone whines about the gap between the rich and the poor, they need to be told something. Tell them that gap, as seen in today’s capitalist society, is not just an indicator, but a blaring locomotive whistle of a signal. That signal is that the “poor” have wealth beyond the dreams of nearly all kings who have ever walked the earth.
* Sure, that doesn’t make any sense. What difference does it make to children thousands of miles away whether I finished the string beans on my plate or not? But they did say that. Perhaps it was to indicate we should be thankful for our situation rather than complain about the taste/texture/etc. of our bountiful food.
