The market isn’t losing voters to smiling socialists. It’s losing voters because it stopped delivering — and the column arguing otherwise inadvertently admits it. Frank Miniter’s Modern capitalism is turning 250, too. We need to remind Americans why it’s important in Fox News Opinion wants Republicans to fight back with heroic stories about Edison and Elon Musk and Palmer Luckey, while the actual voters are deciding elections over whether they can afford the apartment.
I’m not anti-market. I’m anti-extraction. So let me be fair before I’m mean.
Miniter is right that capitalism can’t survive on anti-communism alone. Fear wears out as the only message; voters want a positive reason to vote. He’s right that capitalism-as-practiced has produced more material prosperity than anything ever tried. He’s right that individual achievement deserves celebration. He is not right that this is the moment’s central problem.
Now watch the giveaway. In the very column arguing for better storytelling, Miniter writes that housing and healthcare markets “are heavily regulated and, in many ways, controlled by special interests.” That’s the diagnosis he refuses to follow. He’s conceded the bottleneck — local governments restricting how much can be built, hospital systems and insurers lobbying the rules that govern their own industry — and then pivoted to “heroes trying to reform them,” as if the problem were role models rather than zoning boards, certificate-of-need laws, hospital consolidation, and a labor share of national income that has been falling for forty years.
Here is what voters are actually living. A nurse in Phoenix making $75,000 a year cannot afford a median home in her own city. A family in Cleveland with employer-sponsored insurance still pays thousands out of pocket before the deductible resets. A twenty-eight-year-old barista in Brooklyn hands over half his paycheck to rent a one-bedroom. These are not failures of marketing. They are failures of markets that have been captured, deregulated selectively, and allowed to consolidate until they stopped working for the people who depend on them. You can show every 14-year-old in America a video of Elon Musk landing a rocket, and it will not matter when the landlord raises the rent by hundreds of dollars a month. Stories inspire. Markets deliver.
Mamdani sits in City Hall because a generation of New Yorkers has spent a decade watching rents climb faster than wages and concluded that the market, as actually practiced, was not for them. DSA members are winning council seats in places like Richmond, California for the same reason Anduril’s defense contracts do not pay anyone’s rent. Right now the housing market in particular is delivering very little to a very large number of voters, and no amount of heroic storytelling will fix that.
So build the boring things. Let cities approve more apartments by right, without three-year zoning fights. End the certificate-of-need rules that let existing hospitals block new ones. Block the mergers that have thinned out competition in food, airlines, and healthcare. Let nurse practitioners practice at the top of their training and let pharmacists prescribe routine medications like birth control and travel medicines without an unnecessary physician visit. Tie trade and visa policy to wage growth at home, not just shareholder return. These are pro-market reforms. They make capitalism work. They are also harder than filming a podcast with a billionaire.
Do them for a decade, and the capitalism story tells itself — without requiring a 14-year-old to sit through podcasts about founders he will never meet. Republicans who want to beat socialism in 2026 should worry less about their messaging and more about their housing policy. Build more. Regulate less. Let the supply show up. Then tell the story.