Lefties Don’t Understand the Market, And They Never Did

 Last week I had some fun here with the economic nonsense of our DSA kiddies. For instance, DSA Wunderkind Mamdani proposed for New York City:

• Free and fast city buses
• Rent freeze
• Free universal child care
• Public groceries
• Taxing the wealthy

Today I propose that Adam Smith’s notion of the “invisible hand” is the economic equivalent of Albert Einstein’s E = mc2. Because Smith changed our understanding of the world in the same way that Einstein did.

The idea that the point of prices and markets is to transmit information from and to millions of actors in the market economy and coordinate their actions is a mind-blowing human discovery. To understand why, let’s ask Grok to “describe the understanding of markets before adam smith.” Its brief summary is:

Pre-Smithian understanding typically:

• Embedded exchange in moral or political order rather than treating markets as a coordinating mechanism
• Viewed trade as zero-sum (between persons or nations)
• Identified wealth with gold, land, or the prince’s treasure
• Expected the state, church, or custom to set or correct prices
• Distrusted merchants, interest, and unlimited profit-seeking

See, back in the day nobody had Any Idea. Just like our lefty friends today. But today lefties still know that:

• The market should be subject to political control.
• The employer makes his profit at the expense of the worker.
• Wealth is the “accumulation” of riches.
• Government should control rents and wages.
• Businessmen, tech lords, financiers are all “oligarchs”.

What does it take for educated people to hang onto such a magical belief system? Shamans?

It all makes sense when you grasp the fact that our educated class is the class that lives furthest from the market economy. They spend their childhood in government or fancy private schools. They spend their youth in academic cloisters that carefully segregate them from the real world of the market. Then they work in academia, or in government bureaucracy, or in NGO fantasyland. Their only experience of prices is at Trader Joe’s.

The other thing to understand is that ‘twas ever thus. Except for Trader Joe’s.

Every education that ever was is education in the received wisdom, in our society’s creation myth, in the glorious tale of our ruler’s wars and victories.

Today, of course, our kiddies learn the glorious tale of “our democracy,” of the fight for equality against privilege and racism and Nazis and classism and patriarchy. What a glorious tale it is, and don’t you forget it.

But here’s the thing. Suppose you’ve gone through the system, like good little boy Chuck Marx back in the day. What’s next? What are you qualified for? What can you do with your life?

The answer then and now is: nothing.

Why did Heinirch (born Herschel HaLevi) send his kid from Trier, next to Luxembourg, all the way to Berlin -- before railroads -- to go to university? When he could have trained up Karl as a pupil in his own law firm? And what was Karl good for after living it up with all the student swells in Berlin?

After that, young Karl wouldn’t want to get his hands dirty creating a business in the burgeoning Industrial Revolution. After you have been to a prestigious university, you know you are destined for higher things.

Higher things? You mean like politics? The church? Government administration? Hey, I know! How about revolution, baby?

Do you begin to understand our lefty friends now? Fact is, after all their prestigious degrees and qualifications, they are good for nothing.

There’s no excuse for today’s lefties -- if they ever read a book. George Eliot made it all clear, back in Middlemarch in 1871, when she had sensible girl Mary Garth tell empty-headed boyfriend Fred Vincy to forget the church and go get a job. But how was Chuck to know forty years earlier?

Now, there is one thing for which I have to congratulate our lefty friends. Back in Chuck’s day, there was no NGO Industrial Complex to provide jobs for lefties with a yen for activism but without the cojones for straight-up revolution. Yes, the NGO concept is pure genius. Not that NGO Industrial Complex ever really helps anyone or genuinely makes a difference. But it gives educated rich kids with useless degrees a paycheck and makes them feel that they are helping to change the world.

And maybe after a few years fiddling around in an NGO you can run for mayor of Seattle like Katie Wilson.

Two hundred years ago, educated rich kids could get all horrified about the Industrial Revolution and imagine a fate worse than death for the workers unless they embraced socialism.

Today we have educated rich kids getting all horrified about the AI revolution and imagining a fate worse than climate for transgender kids daily threatened with violence by transphobes reading X-posts from JK Rowling.

See, if our rulers are going to be able to draft educated rich kids to the front lines of activism, they need to keep them ignorant of the common-sense knowledge about prices and stuff that has transformed the world for ordinary people in the last two hundred years.

Christopher Chantrill @chrischantrill blogs at The Commoner Manifesto and runs the go-to site on US government finances, usgovernmentspending.com. Also get his American Manifesto and his Road to the Middle Class.

https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/lefties-don-t-understand-the-market-and-they-never-did/