Why do left-leaning intellectuals keep proposing economic policies that ignore how markets actually work? One American Thinker columnist has a theory, and it isn’t flattering to the degreed class. In a piece titled “Lefties Don’t Understand the Market, And They Never Did,β Christopher Chantrill argues that the problem isn’t a simple policy disagreement. It’s that the educated class lives further from the market economy than any other group in society β and always has.
The column opens with a jab at progressive economic proposals coming out of New York City, singling out someone Chantrill calls a “DSA Wunderkind” for floating an idea he treats as self-refuting. To set up his argument, he invokes Adam Smith’s “invisible hand” as the economic equivalent of Einstein’s E = mcΒ² β a discovery that fundamentally changed how we understand the world. The point of prices and markets, in this telling, is to transmit information among millions of actors and coordinate their behavior. Before Smith, Chantrill writes, nobody had any coherent idea of how that worked. Today’s left, he suggests, still doesn’t.
So how do educated people maintain what he calls a “magical belief system”? Chantrill’s answer is socialization, not stupidity. The educated class spends childhood in government or elite private schools, youth in academic settings “carefully segregated” from the market, and adulthood in academia, government bureaucracy, or the nonprofit sector. Their only real experience of prices, he quips, is at Trader Joe’s.
That, he argues, has always been the case. Education, in his framing, transmits received wisdom and creation myths β the glorious tales a society tells about itself. In earlier eras, those tales were of wars and rulers. Today, our children learn the story of “our democracy,” the fight for equality against privilege, racism, and patriarchy. The content changes; the function doesn’t. What matters is that students emerge credentialed but unequipped for commerce.
Chantrill uses Karl Marx as his case study. Why, he asks, did Heinrich Marx send his son from Trier to Berlin β before railroads, no less β for university, when he could have trained Karl in his own law practice? And what, the columnist wants to know, was Karl actually good for after his student years? The answer he offers: after a prestigious education, a young man considers himself destined for higher things than business, especially during the early Industrial Revolution. Politics, the church, government administration β or, in Marx’s case, revolution.
The columnist’s conclusion is blunt: after all their prestigious degrees, today’s leftists are “good for nothing.” He cites George Eliot’s Middlemarch as the corrective β sensible Mary Garth telling the empty-headed Fred Vincy to forget the church and get a job. But, Chantrill concedes, Marx couldn’t have known that in 1848; Eliot wrote decades later. The knowledge was not yet available. Today it is, and that, he argues, removes the excuse.
There is one thing Chantrill credits the left with: the nonprofit-industrial complex. In Marx’s day, he notes, there was no such thing to absorb activists who lacked the stomach for outright revolution. The modern NGO, in his sardonic telling, may not genuinely change the world, but it pays educated rich kids with useless degrees and lets them feel useful. He suggests that after a few years in that world, a person might run for mayor of Seattle β a reference that presumably lands harder for readers who follow Pacific Northwest politics.
The historical parallel, in Chantrill’s telling, is straightforward. Two centuries ago, educated rich kids were horrified by the Industrial Revolution and convinced the workers faced a fate worse than death unless they embraced socialism. Today, he says, educated rich kids are horrified by the AI revolution, and imagine a fate worse than climate change for transgender kids supposedly threatened daily by people reading J.K. Rowling’s posts on X. The panic is the same, he implies; only the cause has been updated.
The closing argument is about incentives. If society’s rulers want educated young people drafted into the front lines of activism, Chantrill writes, they need to keep them ignorant of the common-sense knowledge about prices that has transformed ordinary life over the past two centuries. That ignorance, in his view, isn’t accidental β it’s the point.
Whatever one makes of the column’s politics, its central diagnosis β that credentialed elites are insulated from the economic realities most people navigate daily β is a charge that cuts across ideological lines. Critics on the left would argue that understanding markets isn’t the same as being ruled by them, and that plenty of economists with impeccable market literacy still favor regulation, redistribution, and public investment. They might also note that many of the most prominent critics of unregulated capitalism have spent careers studying it closely.
But Chantrill isn’t really arguing about expertise. He’s arguing about experience β the difference between reading about prices and paying them. His claim is that a class raised in institutions shielded from market feedback will inevitably produce ideas that ignore it. That’s a difficult claim to test, but it’s an old one. From Burke to Hayek to the present, critics of the administrative state have argued that knowledge gained outside markets is partial at best, and dangerous at worst.
What makes the American Thinker piece distinctive is the way it folds the AI debate into the same mold. The columnist clearly sees today’s tech panic as the latest iteration of a familiar pattern: educated people horrified by change they don’t understand, reaching for political solutions to problems they haven’t bothered to study. Whether that parallel holds will likely be judged by how the AI transition actually plays out β and by whether the people writing its rules have ever had to meet a payroll.
Chantrill’s closing reference to the two-hundred-year transformation of ordinary life is the strongest part of his case. Even readers who reject his politics might concede that the gap between those who set policy and those who live under it is a real problem, and that it isn’t going away. His remedy β less enforced ignorance, more exposure to the market β is cheerfully unpersuasive to the people he’s criticizing. But the frustration behind it will sound familiar well outside his usual audience.
Source: www.americanthinker.com β https://www.americanthinker.com/articles/2026/09/lefties-don-t-understand-the-market-and-they-never-did/