A 23-year-old with a $20 million net worth has just built the kids’ case against him and is asking them to stop making it. In his WSJ op-ed “The Young MAGA Socialists Are Here”, Emil Barr argues that young Americans are wrong to blame capitalism for their economic struggles. The real villains, he says, are government barriers — zoning, occupational licensing, permitting — that make opportunity harder to reach. His proof is himself: a co-founder with free college on the way up, now telling the rest of his generation to build their way out. The argument is sincere. It is also almost entirely wrong about why.
Zoning restrictions have crushed housing supply for decades. Occupational licensing keeps capable people out of professions they could enter. Permitting timelines turn small projects into yearslong exercises. None of that is fake. He’s right that the diagnosis is sloppy. He’s wrong about what’s actually being diagnosed.
The kid paying more than half his paycheck for a room in someone else’s house is not paying it because of zoning. He’s paying it because the building down the block was bought by a private equity firm that loaded it with debt, and the loan payment eats the cash that used to fix the boiler. The same arithmetic runs through every landlord, big or small, who is servicing someone else’s loan. Barr’s diagnosis locates the disease in government. The kid’s diagnosis locates it in concentrated capital. The kid is looking at the right X-ray.
While you were waiting for your hair-braiding license, Blackstone was buying the entire neighborhood you were trying to work in. The supply side of housing isn’t broken only because government makes it hard to build. It’s also broken because private equity has made housing an asset class, and the price discovery that would normally make a market work has been replaced by something else — a system in which the most expensive thing in your life is also someone’s financial product. That isn’t zoning. That is what extraction looks like when it’s working as designed.
Extraction is the part of the economy where someone else’s profit shows up as your rent, your medical bill, or your student loan — paid to people who didn’t build the thing being charged for. That’s not capitalism. That’s what capitalism looks like when it’s captured.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction, and there’s a Grand Canyon between the two.
The wages young Americans earn at entry level have been stagnant since the late 1970s, while productivity kept climbing. The share of national income going to corporate profits and capital owners has gone up; the share going to workers has gone down. That doesn’t happen because of permitting. It happens because the bargaining position of a single worker against a large employer is structurally weak. We have spent forty years weakening unions, blocking sectoral bargaining, and pretending monopsony in local labor markets doesn’t exist. It isn’t capitalism that’s failing young Americans. It is the specific kind of capitalism we have chosen — shareholder capitalism, rentier capitalism, the version in which a typical American CEO pays himself roughly three hundred times what his lowest-paid worker makes and the rest of us nod along as though the number fell out of the sky. That kind of capitalism is extractive. It deserves to be named.
The poll results Mr. Barr cites are real. Sixty-five percent of Republicans want higher taxes on billionaires. Seventy-seven percent overall do — including 91% of Democrats, 75% of independents, and 65% of Republicans. Sixty-two percent of voters say they’re more likely to back a candidate who supports one. Sixty-one percent of Republicans still view capitalism favorably, but that’s down eleven points in seven years. By every dataset that measures it, the top 1% in America hold more wealth than the entire bottom 50% combined. These are not Karl Marx disciples. They are Americans who have done the arithmetic and concluded that the system as currently arranged is working better for their employers than it is for them. That’s not envy. That’s the math. Barr’s own polling provides the menu.
The piece’s strongest line is also its biggest tell: “We want the Nordic welfare state without the Nordic tax bill.” True. And the obvious answer is that we already have the American welfare state, all the time. We just don’t call it that.
Social Security is welfare, and seventy million people take it and the AARP will fight to the death to keep it. Medicare is welfare, and not one politician who wants to win will touch it. The credit union in your wallet is a co-op, and its member-owners have somehow never once filed into a Politburo meeting. The rural electric co-op that powers 42 million Americans across half the country is a co-op. The public library that raised half this country is the most quietly radical institution in America, and nobody noticed because it’s been sitting there the whole time.
The 2021 expanded Child Tax Credit cut American child poverty by 46% in a single year, and the Census Bureau says the credit alone accounted for lifting 2.1 million children out of poverty, with the broader package lifting 2.9 million. Then it lapsed, and the poverty came back. We ran that experiment on ourselves. It worked.
So build one of those. Or all of them.
Sectoral wage bargaining, the way Germany, Denmark, and Sweden run it, sets wages across whole industries at once — so a single employer cannot gain by going non-union, and so a worker is covered whether or not she personally carries a union card. We don’t have it because American employers spent a century making sure we wouldn’t. Modeled estimates suggest sectoral bargaining could roughly triple the share of U.S. workers covered by collective agreements.
A public option in healthcare, the way every other rich country runs one, insures its citizens so an American who gets laid off by AI doesn’t lose her health insurance along with her paycheck. We pay more and get less.
Public banking, the way North Dakota has run one since 1919 — profitable every year on record, in one of the reddest states in the union, and nobody has ever called Bismarck the Kremlin. America’s been running public banks longer than we’ve had a federal income tax.
And the cooperative alternative, the way Mondragon has run one in the Basque Country since 1956: around eleven billion euros in revenue, a top-to-bottom pay ratio about six to one. A 6-to-1 ratio is a choice. So is 300-to-1. Somebody is making it. It might as well be made on purpose.
What we don’t have yet — a century of union density, organized employers, the social trust that lets a state collect a 25% sales tax without a fight — those are still buildable. Not in one election. In a generation of patient institution-building, the kind that already happened here once, between 1933 and 1965.
The kids Barr is lecturing aren’t wrong about capitalism. They’re just calling the wrong thing by the wrong name. What they’re really angry about is extraction — the part of the system that takes from the many and gives to the few.
Build the credit. Build the bargaining. Build the public option, the public bank, the cooperative. America built Mr. Barr. It can build the rest of you too.