By Emil Barr
Thursday, September 24, 2026
I grew up with a simple understanding of what America was
supposed to offer: If you worked hard, took risks, and built something people
valued, you could create a life better than the one you started with.
I got that opportunity. I started my first company from
my dorm room, sold it in a multimillion-dollar deal, and by 22 had accumulated
a net worth of more than $25 million. Becoming a
deca-millionaire in your early 20s doesn’t happen in a country where
opportunity has dried up. It does happen in one where it’s still wide open—if
you’re willing to take the risk.
This isn’t unusual. It’s happening more than at any other point in this country’s
history, but we’ve stopped telling the story. Instead, young people today hear
increasingly dangerous rhetoric from both the left and the right, equally
reminiscent of dictatorships throughout history: that the system is rigged and
that someone (the government) should step in to fix things.
That should concern anyone who believes in the American
dream.
I’m 23 years old, and I’m seeing this shift among my own
Gen Z peers, including many who consider themselves conservative: According to
one poll, 27 percent of young voters who backed Trump in 2024 now say
they’d want a democratic socialist president in 2028, and only 39
percent of Americans my age support capitalism, down from 45 percent just
five years ago. When people stop believing that hard work and ownership can
change their circumstances, socialism starts to look less like a radical
alternative and more like an answer.
Zohran Mamdani won 78 percent of voters under 30 in the 2025 New York City
mayoral election, and while I disagree with much of what he proposes, I believe
conservatives should pay attention to why his message resonated so strongly.
Affordability was central to his appeal, and that appeal was a warning about
what happens when an entire generation feels the economic system has stopped
working for them.
Young Americans have real reasons to be frustrated, but
the facts show the American dream is actually easier to achieve than the
political rhetoric suggests.
When a young person looks at the price of a house, the
cost of college, or the difficulty of starting a family and concludes the
system is broken, politicians are happy to provide a quick explanation. The
left increasingly says the problem is capitalism and billionaires, whereas the
new right says the system has been captured by foreign nations or immigrants.
Both begin with something real, then turn it into a
completely made-up conclusion that points to the American economic system
itself as the problem.
I don’t believe that. But I do believe we have a
storytelling problem. We have become extraordinarily good at telling young
Americans what is broken, and remarkably bad at telling them what is possible.
We used to look at someone like Bill Gates in his ultra-rare Porsche 959 and
think: How do I get there? How do I build something like Microsoft? Now
we make a TikTok asking: Who did he exploit to get there?
That change in attitude matters because my generation has
not lost its ambition. Leading online HR platform Gusto found that Gen Z accounted for 9 percent of new business
starts in 2025, compared with 5 percent for baby boomers, the first year Gen Z
has surpassed another generation in new business formation.
QuickBooks found that 43 percent of Gen Z adults are considering
starting a business in 2026, higher than any other generation surveyed. This
isn’t a generation being pushed into business ownership because the job market
failed them: Only 8 percent of Gen Z entrepreneurs started their business
because they or a partner lost a job.
So, this is not a generation that has stopped believing
in work. It’s a generation looking for a way into the American dream and
increasingly finding one through entrepreneurship. A teenager with a laptop can
now reach customers worldwide, hire across continents, and use AI to handle
tasks that once required deeply specialized consultants.
Capitalism has never guaranteed success, and none of this
changes that, but what it offers is something more important: the freedom to
try.
I know what that freedom looks like because I benefited
from it. I did not inherit a company. I built my social media and advertising
marketing agency, Step Up Social, from the ground up, and required little more
than an iPhone and an internet connection. That business went from $0 to $1 million in revenue within six months,
and quickly upgraded from a dorm-room idea to closing million-dollar client
deals left and right. It’s proof that the door is always open to someone who
starts with nothing, not just people who already have money or connections.
That is one of the basic mechanisms of a market economy:
You create something another person values, and you discover whether the market
agrees. There are no guaranteed outcomes, but that’s not the point. Freedom is.
And that is the part of capitalism I worry we are forgetting.
The government has a real job here: Ease the restrictions
that limit more housing, tear out the regulations strangling new businesses,
help workers displaced by AI get skills that actually pay. What it doesn’t get
to do is use every legitimate frustration as an excuse to take over.
Markets give millions of people an incentive to decide
what to build, where to invest, and what consumers actually value, rather than
concentrating those decisions in the hands of a small number of political
officials. That doesn’t mean markets are perfect, but simply that replacing
them with political decision-making creates its own problems.
Socialism can sound appealing when you start with a
genuine problem. Housing is too expensive, so the government should provide it.
Healthcare costs too much, so the government should control it. College is
unaffordable, so the government should pay. The wealthy have more money than I
do, so tax them and redistribute it.
Each proposal can sound compassionate in isolation. The
problem is that none of them answers the harder question: Who creates the
homes, businesses, medicines, technologies, and jobs we ultimately want more
of?
When the state takes over the economy, politics replaces
economics. Millions of people stop deciding what gets built, invested in, and
bought, because a handful of officials do it for them instead. Once politicians
control who gets resources and opportunity, your success stops depending on
what you build and starts depending on who you know in Washington.
The fact that housing is too expensive doesn’t tell us
who should own the housing market, and individuals upset at an unfavorable
outcome do not automatically prove that the government should take control of
the process that produces it.
The problem, whether it comes from the left hating on
billionaires or the right blaming globalization, is that young Americans have
learned to see people who create wealth as thieves. That’s not an accident:
Blame sells better than economics ever will. If we actually want young
Americans to believe in capitalism, telling them socialism is bad isn’t enough.
Instead, show them what capitalism builds: the immigrant
who opens a restaurant, the teenager who builds an app, the family that turns
$100 into something real. We need to tell young people these stories are still
available to them.
My story isn’t proof everyone becomes a multimillionaire,
but a reminder that nobody’s future is locked in by where they started. That’s
the American dream I inherited, and I’m not apologizing for still believing in
it.
A country cannot remain confident in its economic system
when the generation set to inherit it no longer believes it can deliver a
better future. So this is where we start: not by telling young Americans
they’re wrong to be angry, but by refusing to let anger be the only thing we
ever hand them.
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