In Defense of Business

Look around your room. The chair you’re sitting on, the mug in your hand, the screen in front of you—none of it came from thin air. (Almost) Every object in the built world is the result of someone’s decision to start a business. At some point, a person imagined a better way to sit, sip, or type, then took the leap of turning that idea into a product and offering it to strangers. And yet, many people rail against “business” and capitalism while literally surrounded by its fruits. It’s an ironic paradox: critics of capitalism often critique it using tools and comforts that capitalism made. Consider the smartphone or computer on which heated anti-market tweets are written—as one economist noted, there’s a certain absurdity in using the fruits of capitalism to slag off the system itself iea.org.uk. Why do we so often distrust the very system that put a roof over our heads, medicine in our cabinets, and a phone in our pockets?

This tension is worth exploring. The goal here isn’t to claim that business and markets are perfect or beyond critique. Rather, it’s to shed light on the often invisible role of entrepreneurship in our everyday lives, and to defend business as a human engine of creation and progress. We will start with the paradox of anti-capitalist sentiment in a capitalist-built world, then zoom out to see how business drives most man-made advancements. We’ll look at entrepreneurship not as an abstract “greed machine,” but as a deeply human act of creation, problem-solving, and risk-taking. Along the way, we’ll address common objections—“but what about inequality, exploitation, monopolies?”—with nuance, showing that while flaws exist, they don’t negate the system’s creative power. In the end, you might just reconsider your relationship with business: not as something sinister or distant, but as the often invisible architecture shaping almost everything you touch.