“By ‘capitalism’ I mean the social system in which the means of production — the stuff that makes all our stuff, which includes land, equipment, and also intellectual property, such as patents and the like, and also the stock that gives you a controlling interest in these things — is allowed to belong to individual people, who have a legal right to pass it on to their children, sell it to other individual people, or whatever else they might take a mind to do with it. That’s it. That’s all I mean. It’s not something Christians have to make our peace with because of our fallen nature, any more than feudalism was, or rule by gangsters, or the culling of the left-handed. We can and should severely check it and restrain it, or get rid of it outright. It is the right to property run amuck.” [pages 63-64]

“I am personally a big fan of the idea of private sufficiency and public luxury, to quote a mantra of ecosocialists. A society where nobody has a private swimming pool but there are well-maintained and beautiful public pools every few blocks; few people have cars but public transit is a sci-fi dream; I can’t own the books I covet, but every last little township library has a robust collection and a direct line to the fanciest research libraries in the world.” [pages 66-67]

“One of the most important things about leftism is a rejection of the existing reality in favor of moral values that no society has made concrete yet.”
[pages 162-163]

— Phil Christman, Why Christians Should Be Leftists, 2025