I believe in capitalism. I’ve built businesses under its banner, benefited from its engine of innovation, and watched it unlock opportunity for thousands. But I also believe that any system—especially one as foundational as capitalism—deserves ongoing examination. We should be able to question its assumptions, its consequences, and its trajectory without being dismissed as anti-growth or anti-freedom. One of those assumptions, the one I find myself returning to over and over, is the idea of abundance.
Capitalism’s defenders often point to the promise of abundance. They argue that the system works because it creates more—more innovation, more wealth, more choices, more opportunity. The rising tide, we’re told, lifts all boats. And to be clear, there’s truth in that. Capitalism has created extraordinary abundance. But what if that abundance isn’t as infinite as we pretend it is? What if the tide doesn’t rise equally—or worse, what if some boats rise by draining the water from others?
We live in a world of finite things. Time. Attention. Natural resources. Labor. Land. Even money—though it can be printed, inflated, digitized—is still tethered to real-world constraints. And if almost everything of value is finite, then allowing any small group of people or institutions to hoard a disproportionate share of those things doesn’t happen without consequence. Someone pays for that abundance. It comes from somewhere.
This is not about vilifying the wealthy. I’m not interested in shouting into the void about billionaires or stoking class warfare. I’m interested in something more fundamental: the idea that extreme wealth and extreme poverty may not be distant, disconnected phenomena, but rather symptoms of the same systemic design. In other words, maybe the modern billionaire doesn’t just coexist with the modern homeless person. Maybe their existence necessitates it.
It’s easy to look at things like homelessness, addiction, or rising depression and treat them as individual failings or social policy gaps. But what if we zoomed out? What if we considered the environment we’ve built—and the values that underwrite it—as the soil from which these issues grow?
Because let’s be honest: the data doesn’t lie. Despite record corporate profits, we have more people living on the streets. Despite an explosion in productivity and GDP, people report feeling more anxious, more isolated, more purposeless than ever. Despite unprecedented access to information and opportunity, addiction and suicide rates are climbing. This isn’t just a crisis of poverty. It’s a crisis of meaning.
Capitalism, at its best, channels ambition into progress. At its worst, it commodifies everything—including people—and rewards extraction over empathy. The result is a culture where success is defined by accumulation, and where the value of a person is too often measured by their output or income. And in that culture, it becomes dangerously easy to normalize both obscene wealth and preventable suffering.
So what if the answer to the emotional and social unraveling we’re witnessing in modern American life isn’t just better programs or bigger safety nets, but a deeper reckoning with the environment itself? What if we stopped asking only how to help the homeless, and started asking what kind of system reliably produces homelessness in the first place? What if we stopped treating depression as an individual disorder, and started seeing it as a predictable response to a society that isolates, commodifies, and relentlessly competes?
This isn’t a call to dismantle capitalism. It’s a call to mature it. To evolve it. To create a version that recognizes the interconnectedness of all things—that understands that one person’s abundance can very much mean another’s absence. That unchecked accumulation can create emotional and economic vacuums. And that the health of a society is not measured by how many billionaires it produces, but by how many people feel seen, safe, and dignified.
Some will call this idealistic. I call it necessary. Because the alternative is to keep doing what we’re doing—treating the symptoms while ignoring the soil. And we’re already seeing where that leads.
I believe in a capitalism that holds compassion as a core value, that sees restraint not as a weakness but as wisdom. One that still rewards innovation, but not at the cost of empathy. One that doesn’t require a permanent underclass to sustain an upper class.
We don't have to choose between abundance and justice. But we do have to be honest about what true abundance looks like. It’s not just the accumulation of wealth by a few—it’s the well-being of the many. And that’s the kind of system worth building.
This conversation isn’t about tearing capitalism down. It’s about growing it up. About making space for empathy, equity, and shared dignity in a system that too often defines worth by what you earn rather than who you are.
Abundance should never require invisibility. And prosperity shouldn’t come at the cost of meaning, connection, or compassion.
If this episode challenged you or sparked something deeper, share it. Talk about it. Let’s make questioning systems an act of patriotism—not division.
Subscribe for more conversations like this, and as always—stay principled, stay engaged, and remember: the real wealth of a society isn’t what it accumulates. It’s who it elevates.
Until next time.
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