While Time Remains: A North Korean Defector's Search for Freedom in America

by Yeonmi Park

I remember thinking that every building looked like it was trying to one-up the next, each striving to reach higher than the ones that came before, as if the city was the very physical embodiment of capitalism—an

It was the quintessential American dichotomy, I thought: the limitless grandeur of an empire, the limiting sovereignty of a state.

The document that enshrines this idea—the Declaration of Independence—is written in sublime language to match this utterly sublime idea, and makes me proud not only to be American but to be human.

This is the only contribution of the woke movement to American life: to reduce human beings to the color of their skin and determine whether or not they’re deserving of help, dignity, or physical safety on that basis.

In fact, the absence of capitalism and free markets makes it virtually impossible for societies to change at all, except through brute violence.

But the true aim of anticapitalism is not justice or social betterment—it is to narrow the boundaries within which people are capable of thinking for themselves.

People ideologically aligned with Ocasio-Cortez and others like her often cite the vulnerability of capitalist economic systems to political lobbying, and thus corruption. This is, at best, 99 percent wrong. All economic and political systems are susceptible to corruption—but only capitalist systems are capable of self-correction. The railroad lobby was influential until the invention of the car. The coal lobby was vastly more influential before the invention of hydraulic fracking. The oil and gas lobby will become less effective once we innovate our way to cheap, high-quality green technologies. If you attempt to tamp down innovation and markets, you don’t get less lobbying—you only cement in the advantages of those who got there first, thereby worsening corruption.