I started thinking about all of this after listening to Zohran Mamdani on Theo Von's This Past Weekend podcast, released October 1, 2026.
At one point, Theo asked Mamdani to explain what socialism means to him. Mamdani's answer centered on the idea that people should have what they need to live a dignified life and that government has a responsibility to help deliver those conditions. In the broader conversation, he connected his political philosophy to things like housing, childcare, public transportation, groceries, and affordability.
There is something immediately appealing about that idea.
People should be able to live with dignity. We should care for the disabled, the elderly, veterans who return home injured, families who experience catastrophe, and people who encounter circumstances they genuinely could not have prevented.
But the more I thought about Mamdani's argument, the more I realized that the word dignity may be hiding the most important questions.
What is dignity?
Who determines what material conditions dignity requires?
And perhaps most importantly:
Who is responsible for producing those conditions?
Nothing Appears From Nowhere
Before governments, welfare programs, corporations, grocery stores, or modern financial systems existed, human beings faced a very simple economic reality.
If you wanted to eat, you had to go out into the world and obtain food. That might mean tracking, killing, and preparing an animal yourself. It might mean searching the surrounding land for wild fruits, berries, nuts, roots, or other edible plants.
If you wanted shelter, you had to find it or build it.
If you wanted warmth, somebody had to gather wood or some other source of fuel and then successfully start and maintain a fire.
Nature did not guarantee any of those things simply because human beings needed them.
That distinction matters.
Something can be necessary for human life without being naturally guaranteed to a human being.
Modern civilization has made the production of necessities so efficient that we rarely confront this reality directly. I don't have to hunt and kill an animal when I want meat. I exchange money for a package at a grocery store. I don't have to cut down trees when I need shelter. Thousands of people, machines, companies, builders, engineers, truck drivers, electricians, manufacturers, farmers, miners, and countless others participate in producing a modern home and everything inside it.
That is possible largely because of the specialization of labor.
Instead of every family having to hunt its own food, build its own shelter, make its own clothing, produce its own tools, and gather its own fuel, people specialize. One person becomes extraordinarily good at farming. Another at construction. Another at electrical engineering. Another at transportation. Another at manufacturing.
We trade the products of our specialized labor with one another.
That specialization allows a modern economy to operate at a scale and level of complexity that would be impossible if every person had to produce everything he consumed.
The work hasn't disappeared.
We've abstracted ourselves away from it.
And that abstraction can create a dangerous illusion: because something is necessary, someone else therefore owes it to me.
But declaring food, housing, transportation, healthcare, or anything else a right doesn't eliminate the labor required to produce it. It changes the question to who must perform or finance that labor.
That is where economics enters what initially sounds like a purely moral argument.
The Brick Tower
Another conversation gave me a useful way of thinking about this.
At Vault 26, Patrick Bet-David had a conversation with Steven Bartlett, host of The Diary of a CEO. Unfortunately, the full conversation does not appear to still be publicly available, but one analogy from Bartlett stuck with me.
Imagine I give you a pile of bricks and tell you that you have one minute to build the tallest tower possible.
You would probably turn the bricks upright and stack them vertically as quickly as possible. Your tower might become tall very quickly.
It would also be unstable.
Now imagine I give you the exact same objective, except instead of one minute, you have an entire year.
Your behavior changes completely.
You probably don't begin by stacking bricks upward at all.
You start thinking about the foundation.
You think about structure. You think about stability. You think about what will allow you eventually to build much higher. For some period of time, the person with one minute might appear to be accomplishing far more than you.
But eventually, his tower reaches its limit or falls.
Yours can keep going.
The objective didn't change. The time horizon did. And changing the time horizon changed the strategy.
That metaphor captures something I think we're missing in many economic and political arguments.
We are often optimizing for immediate outcomes instead of durable human capacity.
If someone cannot afford something, the one-minute solution is obvious:
Give it to them.
Sometimes that's exactly what should happen. Someone drowning doesn't need a lecture on swimming technique.
But if the same person is still standing in the same place 10 years later requiring the same intervention, we should at least ask whether we ever solved the underlying problem.
The longer-term question is different:
How do we help human beings become increasingly capable of producing, building, adapting, and providing for themselves and others?
That is a much harder problem.
Work Is Not the Same as Economic Value
This also forces us into an uncomfortable distinction.
Human value and economic value are not the same thing.
As a Christian, I believe human beings are created in the image of God. Human worth isn't determined by income, intelligence, occupation, productivity, or net worth.
A DoorDash driver and the CEO of a Fortune 500 company do not possess different amounts of human dignity.
But it does not follow that their labor has identical economic value.
An hour of labor isn't economically interchangeable with every other hour of labor.
Scarcity of skill matters. Responsibility matters. Risk matters. Expertise matters. The number of people affected by someone's decisions matters. Most importantly, the amount of economic value created by the work matters.
A person can work incredibly hard their entire life and remain relatively poor. That's tragic, but the fact that someone worked hard doesn't necessarily tell us how much economic value their labor produced.
That doesn't excuse exploitation, either.
The recent DoorDash case Mamdani discussed is actually useful here precisely because it separates these questions. On September 22, 2026, New York City announced a $131.5 million settlement with DoorDash over violations of its delivery-worker laws, including underpayment, nonpayment, and late payments affecting more than 260,000 delivery workers. More than $115 million is designated for workers, with the remainder covering civil penalties and costs.
If someone performed work and wasn't properly paid what they were owed under the law or an agreed compensation structure, that is a question of justice and law.
Whether delivering food through an app should generate enough income to purchase a large home, nice car, vacations, retirement savings, and every other component of a particular lifestyle is an entirely different question.
We shouldn't confuse the two.
The Missing Question: Then What?
This is where education becomes much more important to me.
And I don't primarily mean degrees.
I mean teaching people how the world actually works.
How does money work?
How do you acquire valuable skills?
Why does one hour of labor command $15 while another commands $150?
How do you delay gratification?
How do you avoid destructive debt?
How do you move from a low-skill position into a higher-skill position?
How do you think in decades instead of weekends?
These are questions of formation, not merely information.
If someone begins driving DoorDash at 20, the important question isn't simply whether that person earns enough this month.
It's also:
Where does this lead at 25? At 35? At 55?
Maybe gig work is the bridge while someone learns a trade. Maybe it's supplemental income while building a business. Maybe circumstances make it the best available long-term option.
But a healthy society should teach people to ask the question.
Because there is a profound difference between creating a floor beneath someone and creating a ceiling above them.
The Problem With Profit, and the Problem Without It
This brings me to capitalism.
Profit is frequently spoken about as though it were evidence that someone else was exploited.
I don't think that makes sense as a general principle.
Profit is an extraordinarily powerful incentive for people to solve problems.
If I discover a way to produce something millions of people voluntarily value, the possibility of becoming wealthy gives me an enormous reason to take risks, organize people, work, experiment, and build it.
Remove every reward for doing that and you shouldn't be surprised if less of it happens.
But capitalism has its own version of the one-minute brick tower.
Short-term profit maximization can destroy long-term value.
A company can increase this quarter's earnings by reducing product quality, underinvesting in employees, eliminating research, cutting customer service, or hollowing out infrastructure.
The numbers can look better while the actual enterprise becomes weaker.
This brings me back to that same Patrick Bet-David and Steven Bartlett conversation from Vault 26.
The idea of long-horizon capitalism stuck with me for essentially the same reason as the brick tower.
Change the time horizon and you change the behavior.
If the objective is maximizing what can be extracted from a company over the next quarter, employees can look like expenses to minimize. Product quality can look like a cost. Research can look like money disappearing without an immediate return. Customer service can look inefficient.
Extend the time horizon to 30, 50, or 100 years and the calculation changes.
Suddenly treating employees exceptionally well might be enormously profitable.
Building exceptional products becomes profitable.
Maintaining customer trust becomes profitable.
Training people becomes profitable.
Building a reputation that takes decades to establish becomes profitable.
Accepting lower margins today to create something extraordinary tomorrow becomes rational.
The objective hasn't necessarily changed.
The time horizon has.
And just like the brick tower, a business that appears to be moving more slowly today may actually be constructing the foundation that allows it to become far greater tomorrow.
Christianity Complicates Both Sides
And then Christianity introduces something neither economic system can fully capture.
Scripture places enormous weight on work, stewardship, responsibility, generosity, justice, care for the poor, care for widows and orphans, and love of neighbor.
That creates tension.
I can't simply say, "You made bad decisions. Deal with it."
But neither do I think biblical compassion requires pretending decisions don't have consequences.
Christianity refuses both extremes.
The productive person cannot say, "Everything I have exists solely because of me, therefore I have no reason to be generous toward anyone."
But neither can the recipient use another person's generosity as an excuse to abandon personal responsibility.
And perhaps most importantly, Christian generosity is concerned with something deeper than material consumption.
It asks:
What actually helps this person flourish?
Sometimes love gives someone food.
Sometimes love gives someone a job.
Sometimes love teaches them a skill.
Sometimes love gives money with no expectation of repayment.
Sometimes love refuses to subsidize destructive behavior.
Wisdom is determining which is required.
Dignity Should Include Agency
This brings me back to Mamdani's word: dignity.
Perhaps dignity is too small if we define it only by what someone receives.
Housing matters. Food matters. Safety matters. Healthcare matters.
But so do competence, responsibility, usefulness, independence, contribution, mastery, and the knowledge that:
I can build something.
There is dignity in receiving help when you need it.
There is also tremendous dignity in becoming someone capable of helping others.
A social system that keeps someone alive but gradually convinces them that their survival depends permanently upon an institution may solve one problem while creating another.
Conversely, a system that celebrates individual responsibility while abandoning people who genuinely cannot help themselves has failed morally in another direction.
So perhaps the question shouldn't simply be:
Capitalism or socialism?
Maybe the more useful question is:
What institutions, incentives, families, communities, churches, businesses, and governments produce capable human beings who can increasingly provide for themselves, create value for others, withstand hardship, and voluntarily care for people who cannot?
That is a much harder question than asking who should receive what.
But it's a longer-horizon question.
Build the Foundation
I keep returning to those bricks.
If all we care about is what the tower looks like after sixty seconds, stacking them vertically might look compassionate, efficient, and successful.
But if we're building something that needs to stand for generations, we have to care about foundations.
That means education.
It means family.
It means responsibility.
It means incentives.
It means productive work.
It means entrepreneurship.
It means community.
It means generosity.
It means safety nets designed to catch people without becoming cages that hold them.
And, from my Christian perspective, it ultimately means recognizing that material prosperity isn't the highest good anyway.
The goal shouldn't simply be to construct a society in which everyone is given enough things to consume.
It should be to cultivate people capable of creating, stewarding, serving, giving, enduring, and building.
Because everything we consume must first be produced by someone.
And perhaps one of the most dignifying things we can do for another human being is not merely ask:
"What can we give you?"
But also:
"What could you become capable of building?"