Several things have taken place over the past week that shore up the importance of understanding what has truly made the United States of America the most prosperous country in human history.

First, we have the foreigners visiting the U.S. to cheer on their teams in this year’s World Cup soccer championship. As I wrote last week, it’s been heartwarming to see how much these people love America, and how surprised they’ve been to find that Americans are warm, welcoming, generous and kind people.

Another aspect of America that has astonished our guests is the number, size and variety of our businesses: restaurants of every type, small boutiques, “big box” supermarkets and corner grocers, food trucks, outdoor equipment and hunting stores (with their ubiquitous guns and ammo), mom-and-pop shops, little kids’ lemonade stands, delicatessens — you name it. Social media is filled with posts and videos in which visitors express their amazement at the quality of the food (and portion size!), “free” appetizers and soda refills, and the uncountable options and choices among America’s products and services.

That, my friends, is a consequence of America’s culture of entrepreneurship — a fact that some of the foreigners here have recognized and remarked upon with envy. One Canadian described us as “the most opportunity-dense country ever.”

He’s right.

So I was disappointed (though not surprised) when Pope Leo XIV posted on X a few days ago that food, water and health care shouldn’t be “commodities” that are subject to “market considerations.” In his follow-up post, he “appealed to governments” to “increase the resources dedicated to combating hunger and its root causes.”

Seriously? Governments are the chief “root causes” of hunger.

The key to adequate food production is not government but small business. Sorry, Holy Father, but food, water and health care are “commodities,” because their provision, for the most part, depends upon the work of other human beings. I would love to hear the pope praise and promote the market, individual initiative and entrepreneurial capitalism as the tickets to human flourishing that they are, instead of treating them as tawdry institutions to be tolerated at best, while government is hailed as the answer to every human problem.

Entrepreneurship meets human needs far better than governments ever have or ever will. This is true even in the world’s poorest nations. There, like everywhere else, people can start little businesses. But officials, regulations, laws, paperwork, permits, fees and taxes — all of which benefit the rich and promote corruption and fraud — stymie the growth of those businesses. When poor people are permitted to grow their businesses, they don’t stay poor.

That only happens when government gets out of the way.

As an American, Pope Leo should know better. But he apparently has a lot of company, even here in the States. In this week’s Democrat primaries in New York City, not one but three socialist candidates won their races.

Aber Kawas, a Muslim Palestinian activist and member of Democratic Socialists of America who has stated that the U.S. deserved 9/11 because of “white supremacy” and “Islamophobia,” won her primary for a New York state Senate race. Self-professed communist Darializa Chevalier defeated incumbent Adriano Espaillat to win the primary for the congressional seat in New York’s 13th district. Chevalier is a convert to Islam and a founder of Columbia University (why am I not surprised?) Apartheid Divest, which calls for an “international intifada” and the “eradication of western civilization,” the abolition of the police and immediate citizenship for all illegal aliens. And socialist Brad Lander defeated incumbent Dan Goldman for New York’s 10th district congressional seat. Lander, too, wants to abolish immigration enforcement, as well as pack the U.S. Supreme Court and pass $2 trillion in student loan debt onto the American taxpayers.

The DSA claims it’s only targeting “millionaires and billionaires” (and the world’s only trillionaire — at least on paper). If you believe that, your head is firmly wedged in your nethermost orifice. Time to read some real history — not the propaganda Western Leftists can get away with only because private enterprise insulates them and the societies they infect from the worst consequences of their ideologies.

Here’s the truth: Socialists and communists neither know how to make anything nor how to build an organization that provides goods or services people are willing to pay for. (Nope, a campaign isn’t the same thing.)

What they do instead is traffic in grievances for their personal aggrandizement.

They exploit ignorance and foster resentment, telling their followers that the only reason they have less is because others have more, and that it’s been stolen or gotten through greed and exploitation. In that vein, they love to focus on major multinational corporations and their extremely wealthy owners and CEOs, even though the backbone of American business is family-owned and small — the vast majority (80%-plus) of companies with employees have fewer than 20.

They preach that wealth is a zero sum game and a limited pie, and refuse to acknowledge that enterprise creates wealth that didn’t exist before, even though the evidence is everywhere. (Did we have the automotive industry 150 years ago? The personal computer industry 100 years ago? The smartphone industry 50 years ago?)

Socialists promise what they can never deliver: an unlimited supply of high-quality goods and services that are cheap or free. And they drive up costs for producers with restrictive regulations and taxes while demanding that prices cannot rise to keep up with those increasing costs.

The result is that businesses are forced to leave or close. Not the big corporations — at least, not at first — but the small ones that house, feed, employ and create the middle class. Then they raise taxes and costs even higher to make up the difference.

Sometimes they take over the businesses. Or even entire industries. That’s the beginning of a precipitous decline.

They don’t understand production, inventory management or balance sheets. With no competition, there’s no need for quality or customer service. So the production declines, the quality declines, the management declines and the rationing starts.

Complainers are smeared as greedy individualists or capitalist throwbacks who don’t want everyone to be “equal” and don’t understand that sacrifices have to be made for “progress.”

No one should be fooled by the presence of the erudite “intellectuals” leading these movements at the beginning. Those self-loathing, upper-class graduates of the best schools don’t last long, because unhappy masses can’t be kept in line (bread or otherwise) by pious platitudes.

No, that takes force. And that’s when the thugs take over.

This is what’s meant when pundits say, “You can vote yourself into socialism or communism, but you have to shoot your way out.”

The America that our World Cup visitors are marveling at was built by freedom-loving entrepreneurs operating within the reasonable structures of a limited government — people of every background who were willing to sacrifice much to build their American dream. We are all the beneficiaries of their hard work.

But what took 250 years to build can be destroyed by socialists within a very short time.

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