If you’ve been around a little while, you’ve noticed that capitalism has brought about the greatest reduction of poverty in human history. In 1981, 42 percent of the world lived in extreme poverty. Now, it’s around 10 percent. More than a billion people have been lifted out of poverty.

You’ve noticed that places that instituted market reforms, like South Korea and Deng Xiaoping’s China, tended to get richer and prouder. Places that moved toward socialism — Britain in the 1970s, Venezuela more recently — tended to get poorer and more miserable.

You’ve noticed that the environment is much better in capitalist nations than in planned economies. The American G.D.P. has more than doubled since 1970, but energy consumption has risen only modestly. America’s per-capita carbon emissions hit a 67-year low in 2017. The greatest environmental degradations are committed by planned systems like the old Soviet Union and communist China.

The Fraser Institute is a free-market think tank that ranks nations according to things free-market think tanks like: less regulation, free trade, secure property rights. The freest economies in the world are places like Hong Kong, the U.S., Canada, Ireland, Latvia, Denmark, Mauritius, Malta and Finland. Nations in the top quartile for economic freedom have an average G.D.P. per capita of $36,770. For those in the bottom quartile, it’s $6,140. People in the free economies have a life expectancy of 79.4 years. Those in the planned economies have a life expectancy of 65.2 years.

Over the past century, planned economies have produced an enormous amount of poverty and scarcity. What’s worse is what happens when the political elites learn what you can do with that scarcity. They turn scarcity into corruption. When things are scarce, you have to bribe government officials to get them. Soon, everybody is bribing. Citizens soon realize the whole system is a fraud. Socialism produces economic and political inequality as the rulers turn into gangsters. A system that begins in high idealism ends in corruption, dishonesty, oppression and distrust.

I learned the ills of socialism quickly … and became a Whig slowly.

My first economic hero is Alexander Hamilton. He came to America with almost nothing and found an economy dominated by land-rich oligarchs like Thomas Jefferson. He realized that the solution was to make everyone a capitalist. He created credit markets so that capital would be fluid and more people would have access to investments.

My next hero is Abraham Lincoln. He grew up poor and launched his career as a Whig. He gave more speeches on banking and infrastructure projects than on slavery. That’s because he wanted to spread capital and grease the wheels of commerce so poor boys and girls like him could rise. He helped create the land-grant colleges so that more people would have the training to compete as capitalists.