“The work of freedom is economic now.” The line stood out to me as I was browsing the convenience store of an airport, where I spotted a book called Capitalism for All. The title got my attention. So did the cover credit: Ambassador Andrew Young, foreword author. I briefly met Young earlier this year, after a podcast he recorded with Coleman Hughes in Atlanta. So I picked it up and read his foreword right there in the store.
The book is by John Hope Bryant, the founder of Operation HOPE, with forewords by Young, Delta CEO Ed Bastian, and Michael Milken. Young’s pages sent me back to a phase of my own writing I had not thought about in a while. Years ago I kept a blog called “Capitalism for the Poor,” where I argued that much of the third world had been fighting poverty by trying to give the poor socialism while the poor were asking for capitalism.
As Young put it, “When you give people a chance, not a handout but a chance, they rise.” In fact, the poor of the world do not generally want handouts dressed up in anti-capitalist language. They want a chance. They want the concrete things capitalism makes possible. They want jobs, wages and savings. They want to own houses, motorcycles, cars, refrigerators, and smartphones. They want the ability to travel, to access the internet, to hold bank accounts, to live in safe neighborhoods, to send their children to a better school than the one they attended (or didn’t attend). They want small luxuries, silly luxuries, chosen luxuries.
A Pew survey from 2014, when my blog was active, found that a global median of 66 percent said most people are better off under capitalism, even if some are rich and some are poor, with support especially strong in developing countries. More recent Pew data show a related pattern: across 27 countries in 2018, a median of 85 percent said growing trade and business ties were good for their country. Since then, support for markets in the US has been declining. Gallup found that only 54 percent of Americans now view capitalism positively, down from 60 percent in 2021.
In 2026, Andrew Young seems to be in the minority when he says that “the free enterprise system, when guided by values and inclusiveness, remains the greatest engine for human progress ever devised.” But his words ring true. A market society is, at its core, an order of exchange among strangers, and it only works to the extent that the strangers are recognized as participants rather than as wards. Hayek defended a minimum floor below which no one should fall, and Young almost certainly would too, not as managed dependence but as a means of economic emancipation. Anything else is mercantilism with a PR team.
But that’s what a lot of elite humanitarianism does. It offers managed scarcity with moral branding instead of economic inclusion. State schools, state transport, state housing, state retirement, state food programs, state allocation of opportunity. The control remains with the political elite. They are the subject of the verb and the poor are the object. As if the goal of poverty reduction were to manage dependence with compassionate vocabulary. As if agency were a luxury good to be saved for later.
Emancipatory humanitarianism begins from the opposite assumption. It sees the poor as already subjects. They are already trying. The question is just what removes the friction between their effort and their flourishing. Access to credit and property. Access to the skills demanded by the markets and to the markets themselves, to contracts, to networks, to the dignity of economic choice. The development economist William Easterly draws a similar contrast in The White Man’s Burden between what he calls Planners, who design utopian schemes from above and judge their work by inputs, and Searchers, who work from the ground up, test what works, and judge their work by outcomes.
The Peruvian economist Hernando de Soto spent years documenting just how much wealth the poor of the developing world already hold. In his classic The Mystery of Capital he estimated that, by the beginning of this century, the value of real estate held informally by the poor of the third world and the former Soviet bloc came to around $9.3 trillion, and that the savings of the poor exceeded all the foreign aid sent to developing countries since 1945 by something like a factor of forty. The picture of the poor as passive recipients waiting to be filled with help is not just morally diminishing. It is empirically wrong. They are already saving, building, calculating, hustling. The question is whether the institutions around them recognize what they are doing.
That institutional mission from the third world is echoed by Young’s understanding of America’s poor. “The unfinished work of the civil rights movement,” Young writes, is “to extend the promise of economic freedom to every citizen.” He did not write economic equality or even economic justice, which usually evoke the redistributive and managerial tradition. He wrote economic freedom, which evokes potential and agency. Young plants the economic vocabulary inside the civil rights frame and treats economic emancipation as civic membership. The right to sit at the lunch counter matters. So does the right to own the restaurant, finance the expansion, hire the staff, and build savings from the profits.
We need to teach economics to empower young people and to prevent them from thinking that economic activity is downstream of, or in tension with, the moral project of freedom. Young is saying they are the same project.
And it has been the same project at least since Frederick Douglass. In April of 1865, days before the end of the Civil War, Douglass stood before the Massachusetts Anti-Slavery Society and answered the question, What shall we do with the Negro?
What I ask for the Negro is not benevolence, not pity, not sympathy, but simply justice. The American people have always been anxious to know what they shall do with us. Everybody has asked the question, and they learned to ask it early of the abolitionists, “What shall we do with the Negro?” I have had but one answer from the beginning. Do nothing with us! Your doing with us has already played the mischief with us. Do nothing with us! If the apples will not remain on the tree of their own strength, if they are worm eaten at the core, if they are early ripe and disposed to fall, let them fall! All I ask is, give him a chance to stand on his own legs! Let him alone!
Douglass wanted recognition as a subject rather than administration as an object. Read his lines next to Young’s, and the distance from 1865 to 2026 is short.
There are two ways to want to help the poor. One wants to do things to people. The other wants people to do things. One organizes society around the vulnerability of the poor. The other begins from their agency. The unfinished work of civil rights is indeed economic freedom.
