New York City’s Socialist Progressive-Democratic Mayor Zohran Mamdani defines Socialism this way:
Socialism to me means you’ll have whatever you need to live a dignified life and that it is the government’s job to deliver on that[.]
He’s correct as far as that simple statement goes, but Mamdani cynically uses it to disguise his call for outright socialism. The core tenets of socialism, though, are that Government knows best what’s good for us, Government caps opportunity in an effort to enable the least of us to keep up with the most capable, and Government achieves these by taking the wealth of the successful and redistributing it among the least successful. Socialism achieves equality of poverty in every instance.
Free market capitalism, on the other hand, enables all of us to live dignified lives and to do so with only minimal government intervention. In a capitalist society, government’s (note: small-g government) primary roles are two, and they are critical: one is to minimize crime, and the other is to promulgate rules that protect free markets: sanctity of contracts and honesty in the negotiations that produce those contracts.
Capitalism further allows each of us to prosper as well as we might, beginning from equality of opportunity, given our individual endowments of ability, work ethic, and luck. None of us have our abilities or the outcomes of our abilities truncated artificially by Government.
“Dignified,” too, is more than just being personally comfortable. It’s possible to live a dignified life only if it’s a moral and virtuous life, as Ben Franklin and John Adams had it those ~250 years ago. That means we take care of each other as well as ourselves.
Notice two things about that: we take care of each other; we do not depend on—create ourselves dependent on—Government to do for us. Our individual prosperity flows from, and increases via, free market capitalism, an economic system under which each man [is] guaranteed the opportunity to show the best that there is in him. The other thing, then, is that the personal prosperity that comes from this system vastly potentiates our ability to take care of ourselves and, especially, of each other.
Free market capitalism, in fine, combines the opportunity for individual prosperity with individual dignity as the only truly moral economic system: it’s the only system that leaves each participant in a free and voluntarily done economic exchange better off than he was before the exchange.
Socialism has no capability to achieve any of that.