Of Dolls and Dogma …

Two events this month—one an ill-advised and off-the-cuff remark by the putative leader of the free world; the other, an event of truly global impact with the election of the first Catholic pope from the United States—should give at least momentary pause to anyone who wonders about the current state of capitalism, both at home and abroad.

And yes, there’s a business consideration with each development.

The first came with President Trump’s observations about the potential impact that his all-over-the-board tariffs policy might have on consumers. For a guy with an MBA from the Wharton School, this seems pretty … mystifying:

“I don’t think that a beautiful baby girl—that’s 11 years old—needs to have 30 dolls,” he told a TV interviewer. “I think they can have three dolls or four dolls, because what we were doing with China was just unbelievable.”

It was a stunning trivialization of what’s at stake with his efforts to balance trade, especially with China. And it overlooks an absolutely ironclad law of economics: the cost curve associated with supply and demand. More dolls competing for consumer dollars means lower prices (absent any game-rigging or price manipulation by dollmakers, that is).

That put Donald Trump squarely in the camp of the proud socialist from Vermont, U.S. Sen. Bernie Sanders. Remember this howler from his days of presidential aspirations, regarding—of all things—personal hygiene? “You don’t necessarily need a choice of 23 underarm spray deodorants,” he said on the campaign trail a decade ago, “or of 18 different pairs of sneakers when children are hungry in this country.” 

Where to start? Whether it’s dolls, deodorants, or Adidas, suggesting that government power determines production goals for consumer products is straight out of the Marxist central-planning playbook. If you think that’s a good idea, please grab a globe and point to the map of the Soviet Union. Maybe I can help you: It ain’t there. 

History shows us that these top-down edicts just don’t work. Let business be business (within ethical/legal constraints) and consumers will usually take care of the rest. 

Which gets us to the Vatican. Chicago native and Villanova-educated Robert Prevost, henceforth Pope Leo XIV, may embrace conservative dogma regarding human sexuality, but the early biographical accounts of his priesthood and leadership as a bishop suggest he’s cut from the same “progressive” economic cloth as his predecessor, Francis, under the guise of “social justice.”

Social justice, for the uninitiated, generally translates into: “You have something. Give it to me.”

Francis came to the papacy from Argentina, a country where, if capitalism was practiced at all during his pre-Vatican days, it wasn’t exactly the free-market stripe. (And Prevost spent much of his priesthood in Peru, another economic basket case.) Accordingly, both harbor some deep convictions that capitalism is the problem that’s keeping the world’s poor … well, poor.

If Trump and Leo XIV really want to lift people out of poverty in America and around the world, they simply need to look at the track record played by abundance. Perhaps nowhere was the pro-abundance argument articulated as clearly as Rich Lowry of National Review did in writing for The New York Post: “Fewer choices at a greater cost—whether of dolls or other goods—simply means a lower standard of living,” Lowry observed.

He cited The Human Progress project at the Cato Institute, which calculated the “time price” of various goods, or how long someone had to work to buy them, from 2000 to 2024. The time price of toys dropped by more than 88 percent in that span, meaning the work that it took to afford to buy one toy a quarter-century ago would buy almost nine toys today. 

But typical human behavior doesn’t suggest parents will fill the toy chest with nine times as many toys. Rather, they’re far more likely to spend the savings on other goods and services Little Cindy might enjoy: pizza nights out, birthday-party pony rentals, trips to theme parks.

When goods and services are plentiful, prices fall, consumers benefit, and more dollars are available to keep the pump of commerce primed. It’s worked that way for hundreds of years, and the successful track record of capitalism relative to any other economic system—any other system—is irrefutable. 

When Robert Prevost was born in 1955 (the height of Soviet power and global influence), the world’s poverty rate was 55 percent. With the fall of communism nearly everywhere and the embrace of free (or freer) markets, it has fallen to 8.7 percent today, says the World Bank.

To believe that capitalism is the problem is to embrace the near-certainty of economic failure at scale. And with societal consequences far worse than too many brands in the personal-hygiene aisle at Walmart.