Did you know America is an absolutely horrible country? That we should all hang our heads in shame for living here? That the whole world has a right to hate us?

“Most of us are sinking, and there’s no bottom. This is the ugly face of capitalism,” writes Maria Svart, national director of the Democratic Socialists of America. (Writing in that capitalist enterprise USA Today.) “A small elite benefits from the status quo. They keep all the rest of us fighting and killing over scraps with talk of racial superiority or bathroom scares, or fear of poor and working people in other countries.”

Really, Maria Svart?

I looked up Maria Svart. She attended one of the elite institutions that, I guess, she now hates: the University of Chicago. She worked for seven years at the Service Employees International Union, probably the most corrupt union in America.

Interestingly, I found this information on LinkedIn.com, whose purpose is to help professional people — white collar workers, that is — network and find jobs. It is interesting that someone as anti-capitalist as Svart presented herself on a service designed to help people move up the free enterprise food chain.

And one that helps disprove her claims. The company was founded by a former executive at Yahoo.com. In her article, Svart says high-tech entrepreneurs like Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos “don’t create good jobs — they pay low wages so they can hoard the wealth their workers create.”

Really? The median wage at Musk’s Tesla Corporation was almost $55,000 in 2017. That doesn’t include health care insurance, retirement set-asides, or other benefits. $55,000 plus benefits? Starvation wages! No wonder I see their skeleton-like bodies dropping in the streets all around us.

I suspect that at the Democratic Socialist headquarters in New York City, they have central heating and air conditioning. And things like indoor plumbing and running hot-and-cold water. Security guards. Elevators. Fire alarm systems. The socialists can take those amenities for granted. Why? The DSA’s HQ is in a building owned by A.M. Property, one of largest private — that is, capitalist — property holders in New York City. 

The Angry Left

Svart and her heroic colleagues have smart phones. Nice clothes. Great New York places to eat. I’m sure they have ready access to medical care covered by their organization’s health insurance policy. I suspect they use Lyft and Uber. We live in what is, by any measure, a miraculous country. From smartphones to somewhere around 280 million cars, we enjoy prosperity unheard of in history, let alone all but a rather thin sliver of the rest of the world.

Why, then, does the angry Left continue to claim that things are so bad? They have an agenda, one driven by several key beliefs: Inequality of outcome means that someone is being swindled; those who have more than others got it unjustly; people are weak, easily exploited and intimidated; and wealthy people are oppressors by definition.

Are they right about this? Well, no. Why do we have all that we have? For lots of reasons. Let me give just one. In America, we have a capacity for risk. Roughly half of all small business fail within five years of starting, according to the U.S. Small Business Administration. In 2017, the average small business owner earned $73,000 a year.

Sometimes, startups succeed spectacularly. “Walton’s Five and Ten” of Bentonville, Arkansas, has done rather well over the past several decades. Bill Boeing began building planes in a red barn originally intended to build boats. Paul Allen and Bill Gates began what became Microsoft in 1972 with a company called “Traf-O-Data,” which sought to derive data from electronic traffic counters.

In other words, small starts have led to great things — and millions of jobs. Like the socialist Maria Svart’s. We might call that the good face of capitalism.