The Founders Were More Socialist Than You Think
The US Constitution may be printed in law books, but it was never just a legal document. It was a moral contract a radical declaration that some truths are too sacred to be sold. When it was written, these rights weren’t just enforced by courts or constitutions they were upheld by a shared belief in something higher than law: a sense of collective duty. At the beginning, you didn’t need a judge to speak your mind or a lawyer to gather peacefully. You didn’t need permission to worship freely or stay silent when accused. These freedoms existed because society agreed they should because they were considered self-evident, inalienable, and above price.
But that was then.
Today, as America grows more capitalistic in practice, those same rights are becoming less sacred and more subject to the marketplace. What was once protected by principle is now shaped by profit. The freedoms that once bound us together are now quietly being filtered, managed, or monetized. This isn’t how the founders imagined it. And it’s certainly not what the Bill of Rights was meant to become. If America had been a fully capitalist nation from the start, these rights would’ve come with a price tag. Free speech would belong to the loudest buyer. Due process would be a subscription service. Liberty would depend on liquidity. But that’s not the foundation we were built on and that’s the point.
Capitalism prices everything. It thrives on private ownership, competition, and the pursuit of profit. It rewards innovation but often concentrates power in the hands of those with capital. Socialism, in contrast, asks what we owe each other. It’s rooted in equality, collective responsibility, and the belief that some things like dignity, like justice, should be distributed not by wealth, but by worth.
Now read the Bill of Rights through this lens. It doesn’t reflect capitalist logic, it reads like a deeply socialist framework. It guarantees speech to everyone, not just those who can afford a microphone. Additionally, it ensures due process and a fair trial for all, not just those with legal teams. It protects people from unchecked power: military, corporate, or governmental.
Thomas Jefferson once wrote, “The care of human life and happiness… is the only legitimate object of good government.” That’s not a capitalist talking point, it’s a collectivist ideal. Even Thomas Paine, often celebrated as a founding radical, proposed what we’d now recognize as an early form of Social Security. In Agrarian Justice, he argued that citizens over 50 should receive regular payments from the state not as charity, but as a right owed by society. His vision wasn’t capitalist; it was redistributive.
Fast forward to Karl Marx, who said, “From each according to his ability, to each according to his needs” and you start to see an unexpected alignment with the moral undertones of the American founding. Meanwhile, Adam Smith, the father of capitalism, warned that “no society can surely be flourishing and happy… in which the far greater part of the members are poor and miserable.” Even the architects of capitalism understood that without a moral floor, the system collapses into cruelty a truth the Founders seemed to recognize, even if imperfectly, when they drafted a set of rights meant to protect people, not profit.
So the idea that America was built purely on capitalist ideals is a modern distortion. At its origin, it was rooted in a shared belief that everyone mattered that some things should be free, sacred, and beyond the reach of market forces.
Of course, any honest reading of the founding documents must reckon with who was excluded. Women, Indigenous people, and enslaved Africans were not granted the protections of the Bill of Rights. These rights were declared universal, but applied selectively. Yet this exclusion wasn’t born out of capitalism it wasn’t the result of a free market deciding their value. It was the product of deeply rooted social and economic hierarchies of the time systems of patriarchy, colonialism, and white supremacy. The ideals were there, but the society had not yet caught up.
In a strange way, this only strengthens the argument: these rights were considered so sacred, so self-evident, that generations fought to expand their reach. The Civil Rights Movement, women’s suffrage, LGBTQ+ equality these were not capitalist revolutions. They were collective demands for inclusion under a moral code America had already written but failed to fully honor. The promise was always social the failure was in its execution.
Capitalism Creeps
But over time, as market logic gained ground in every corner of life, the sacred began to shift. What was once shared became purchasable. What was once protected became conditional. Slowly, quietly, and often without resistance, the moral foundation of our democracy has been eaten away by economic logic.
Take the First Amendment once a guarantee of universal free speech. In the age of digital platforms, that right is now effectively owned. When Elon Musk purchased Twitter, he didn’t just buy a company he acquired the modern public square. What was once a shared space for expression became a privately controlled platform where the reach of your voice is dictated by algorithms, influence, and advertising dollars.
But the threat didn’t begin with Musk. As revealed in the Twitter Files by journalist Matt Taibbi, federal agencies were already working behind the scenes nudging platforms to suppress certain stories, flag dissent, and shape narratives. What’s striking is that the government didn’t censor directly it outsourced its influence to private corporations. It used a capitalistic arm to exert control over its own citizens, bypassing legal limits by leaning on the market instead of the law.
In both cases whether through ownership or quiet coordination free speech has become a managed asset, not a protected right. Platforms now act as filters, where speech is not measured by truth or urgency, but by what aligns with power and profitability. Or consider the Second Amendment, the right to bear arms. In theory, it’s universal. But in practice, access to this right is increasingly determined by your ability to pay for permits, background checks, safety training, insurance, and the cost of the weapon itself. In some cities, it can take months and thousands of dollars to legally carry a firearm. We’ve turned a constitutional right into a tiered access system and the marketplace determines who gets in.
The Fourth and Eighth Amendments, which promise protection against unreasonable searches and cruel or unusual punishment, are under quiet assault in the era of big data. Corporations track your movements, analyze your behaviors, and sell your identity in real time. Surveillance is no longer the exclusive domain of authoritarian governments it’s a business model.
And punishment? The cash bail system disproportionately affects the poor, turning pre-trial freedom into a privilege you can purchase. Even the right to not be punished unjustly has been absorbed by economic stratification.
Justice itself guaranteed under the Fifth and Sixth Amendments now feels transactional. The wealthy lawyer up, the poor plead out. Court outcomes reflect socioeconomic status more often than they reflect facts. Legal protections may exist on paper, but in practice, they have a price. This isn’t a conspiracy. It’s a consequence. A slow, inevitable drift. As capitalist logic expands into every facet of life into health, education, communication, privacy, safety even our most sacred rights begin to morph from promises into products.
The Bill of Rights was born out of a belief that some things must be untouchable above markets, beyond profit, immune to price. But if we’re not careful, we’ll keep selling them off speech by speech, trial by trial, right by right until we no longer remember what it felt like to be free just because we were human.
So Where Do We Go From Here?
This post might come off as anti-capitalist or overtly pro-socialism but that’s not the point. In fact, I’ve always leaned pro-capitalism. I believe in innovation, ownership, and ambition. But running this thought experiment following the Bill of Rights from its moral, almost socialist origins to its slow commodification made me realize something deeper.
The real strength of America has never been pure capitalism, and it’s never been pure socialism either. It’s been the tension between the two the push and pull, the checks and balances. Capitalism drives innovation and progress. Socialism grounds us in the power of the collective and shared dignity. When that balance holds, America thrives.
But when it tips in either direction we run into trouble.
When capitalism dominates, we risk turning rights into commodities, people into products, and democracy into a pay-to-play system. But when socialism goes too far, we risk stifling innovation, crushing personal ambition, and replacing individual liberty with state control. History shows us both extremes collapse under their own weight. One corrodes equality, the other freedom. The brilliance of America is not that we chose one or the other but that we’ve always lived in the creative friction between the two. And when we lose that balance, when one system begins to swallow the other whole, that’s when the foundation cracks.
The Constitution was never meant to be bought or sold. Its survival depends on whether we still have the courage to treat freedom as priceless.
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