Laura Hollis

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. 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.”

The key to adequate food production is not government but small business. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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.