内容来源：https://www.geekwire.com/2026/opinion-which-capitalism-are-we-defending/

内容总结：

深度对话：两位西雅图投资大佬激辩“资本主义”真义

近日，西雅图知名创业投资人、亚马逊早期投资者尼克·哈纳尔（Nick Hanauer）发表长文，针锋相对地回应了同城投资人克里斯·德沃尔（Chris DeVore）此前在科技媒体GeekWire上的观点，引发当地商界和政界关注。这场辩论的核心，直指美国当前经济体制的根本矛盾。

“不是要不要资本主义，而是要哪种资本主义”

哈纳尔首先承认，他同意德沃尔对民主党部分政策的批评，特别是华盛顿州近期针对富人的一系列增税措施，正导致大量富裕居民“用脚投票”，纷纷搬离。他认为，将本州总税负推高至其他地区的5到10倍，“不是进步主义，而是愚蠢”。

然而，哈纳尔坚决不同意德沃尔将“资本主义”视为一个铁板一块的体系加以捍卫。他指出，历史上存在过多种资本主义形态——从19世纪80年代充斥童工和血汗工厂的野蛮资本主义，到上世纪50年代美国工会强大、最高边际税率高达91%、中产阶级空前繁荣的资本主义，再到1975年以来盛行于美国的“新自由主义”资本主义。他强调：“问题从来不是‘要不要资本主义’，而是‘哪种资本主义，为谁设计，为谁服务’。”

“德沃尔看不到的危机：79万亿美元大转移”

哈纳尔尖锐地指出，德沃尔长达1500字的文章中，竟从未提及“不平等”“工资”“工人权益”“住房可负担性”等关键词。他认为，这并非疏忽，而是反映了一种将资本利益凌驾于劳动之上的世界观。

哈纳尔用数据反驳：自1975年以来，约79万亿美元从美国底层90%的人口向上转移至最富有的10%。如果1945年至1975年间生产率与工资同步增长的关系能够保持，今天美国家庭的中位年收入本应是12万美元，而非7.5万美元。与此同时，美国人均预期寿命在发达国家中首次出现持续下降，“绝望而死”的人数已超过美国历次战争阵亡人数。医疗账单仍是美国人破产的首要原因。这些现象证明，当前体制并非致力于提供福祉，而是“设计用来榨取租金”。

“打倒偶像：弗里德曼与韦尔奇的神话”

哈纳尔直指问题的核心：上世纪70年代以来，“企业唯一目的是为股东创造最大回报”这一理念主导了美国。他认为，这并非经济学，而是一种“伪装成科学、系统化将财富从工人和社区转移到少数股东和精英手中的意识形态”。正是因为这种扭曲，才出现了公司裁员万人、股价反而飙升的怪象。

“真正的敌人是特朗普式裙带资本主义”

哈纳尔认为，德沃尔在2026年撰写此文批判民主党，却对当今执政者的经济政策“只字不提”。他批评特朗普政府施加了自1930年代以来最高的关税，要求企业以股权换取监管批准，公然拉拢亲信、打击异己。他指出，这种“裙带国家资本主义”根本不是自由市场，正是它正在一步步瓦解美国经济。

“资本主义的出路：要么改革，要么清算”

最后，哈纳尔呼吁道：“目前，正在努力拯救美国资本主义的人，不是那些在现状面前‘躺平’的辩护者，而是那些愿意改变它的人。”他警告，当一个经济体制长期无法为大多数人提供福祉时，大多数人迟早会抛弃它。历史已经证明了这一点。他说：“真正的选择很明确：要么现在改革，要么以后清算。我选择改革。”

中文翻译：

编者按：尼克·哈诺尔是西雅图企业家、风险投资人及Civic Ventures创始人。他是亚马逊的早期投资者，也是第二大道合伙公司的联合创始人。本文是对克里斯·德沃尔《让民主再次资本主义化》一文的回应。

克里斯·德沃尔和我相识已久。我们同属西雅图的圈子——投资者、创业者、以及毕生押注于企业家的公民领袖。因此，当他上周在GeekWire上发表文章，声称民主党已失去理智并将资本主义视为敌人时，我仔细拜读了全文。克里斯为人深思熟虑，他的论点值得严肃回应。

首先，我承认克里斯对民主党的部分批评确有道理。无论是本州还是全国层面，许多民主党人确实迷失了方向。近期试图将华盛顿州变成全美对富人最不友好之地的努力，正引发富人外逃潮——我认识的所有富豪朋友要么已经离开，要么正在计划离开。这是一场灾难。

最近针对百万美元以上收入征税的法案本身是合理的；但将所有政策叠加在一起，才使本州如此缺乏吸引力。让这里的总税负达到其他地区的5到10倍，这不是进步主义，而是愚蠢之举。

但我不同意克里斯的基本分析。他以错误的论点捍卫某种真实存在的东西，反而模糊了我们面临的实质问题。他之所以看不清这一点，正是我们许多朋友看不清的原因——我们成年后一直生活在一种占据主导地位的范式之中，以至于它就像天气一样理所当然。

“资本主义”并非单一存在

克里斯把资本主义视为一个整体。一种驱动力。一座发电站。要么拥抱，要么妖魔化。

但世上并不存在单一的资本主义。资本主义有无数种形态。19世纪80年代的美国资本主义——童工、企业城、没有周末——是资本主义。1955年的美国资本主义——35%的工会覆盖率、91%的最高边际税率、催生人类历史上最大中产阶级的《军人权利法案》、两倍于今天的GDP增长率——同样也是资本主义。丹麦是资本主义。新加坡是资本主义。而我们美国自1975年左右推行的新自由主义版本——使大多数工人工资停滞长达四十年，同时几乎将所有生产力增长输送给顶层人群——同样是资本主义。

这些体制产生了截然不同的结果——在工资、流动性、预期寿命、公民信任和民主稳定性方面。问题从来不是“要不要资本主义”。唯一真正重要的问题是：哪种资本主义，如何设计，为谁的利益服务？

一旦看透这一点，克里斯的文章就不再是对一项备受围攻原则的辩护，而变成了某种更难维护的东西：对当下我们恰巧拥有的这种特殊新自由主义资本主义形式的辩护。对我们恰巧制定的规则的辩护。对我们恰巧产生的分配结果的辩护。仿佛这个版本就等同于美国事业本身。但它并非如此。这种混淆正是他论点的核心错误。

他的文章看不到什么

细读克里斯那1500字，注意哪些内容缺失了。“不平等”一词从未出现。一次也没有。“工资”没有出现。“工人”出现了一次——只是作为从创业者那里领取薪水的人数统计，从未被视作独立的经济行为主体。垄断权力、企业集中度、中产阶级、住房可负担性、预期寿命——全都没有。

在克里斯的美国图景中，只有创业者、消费者、纳税人和一个要么促进要么没收的国家。角色就这些。

这不是疏忽。这是一种世界观——正是产生克里斯似乎无法察觉的惨状的那种世界观。当一个国家最底层的90%民众花了半个世纪眼睁睁看着生产力翻倍，而他们的工资却停滞不前时，他们注意到这一点并非“民粹主义”。这是算术。

自1975年以来，大约有79万亿美元从底层90%的人群向上转移到了顶层10%的人群——不是通过盗窃，而是通过累积制定的一系列偏向资本而非劳动、股东而非工人、资产而非工资的规则。如果生产力和工资能像1945年至1975年间那样保持联动，今天美国家庭中位数年收入本应是12万美元，而不是7.5万美元。1985年，一个工人需要工作39.7周才能负担中产阶级生活的基本开销；到2022年，这个数字变成了62周。

美国人的预期寿命正在下降——这是一个发达国家一个世纪以来首次持续下降。过去十年中，“绝望之死”夺走的美国人生命超过了我们参与的所有战争中的死亡人数。整整一代年轻人买不起房。

克里斯口中那些被“没收性税收”压垮的小企业主——他们实际上不是被税收压垮的，而是被从零售到医疗到农业等各个领域的垄断集中压垮的，是被无力消费的客户基础压垮的。

看看我们“资本主义”的医疗体系——发达国家中市场化程度最高的。我们的人均医疗支出大约是其他所有发达国家的两倍，但几乎所有指标上的结果都更差：寿命更短、母婴死亡率更高、可预防性死亡更多。医疗账单是美国个人破产的首要原因，这种现象在任何同类国家都不存在。如果市场真如克里斯描述的那样是自我调节的奇迹，这根本不可能发生。这是一个旨在榨取租金而非提供照护的体系所能预见的结果。

或者再看看时间本身。美国工人的带薪假期、育儿假和病假比其他任何富裕国家的工人都要少。法国工人平均有30天带薪假期，德国工人28天，美国工人大约10天，还有四分之一的美国人根本没有带薪假期。我们建立了一个这样的经济体：劳动力几乎没有议价能力，而资本几乎拥有全部议价能力。许多人引以为证、认为美国体制运行更佳的人均GDP差异，几乎完全可以被这一点所解释。

这一切绝非偶然。自20世纪70年代起，一种特定观念主导了美国商业和政策：公司的唯一目的是最大化股东回报。米尔顿·弗里德曼将其写进理论。杰克·韦尔奇将其付诸实践。商学院将其教授了50年。

而这是一个骗局——一种伪装成经济科学的意识形态，系统性地将财富从工人、客户和社区转移到狭隘的股东和高管阶层。这就是胰岛素价格翻了三倍的原因，也是公司裁员一万名员工后股价当天就能上涨的原因。这不是资本主义在正常运转。这是对资本主义的一种特定意识形态扭曲，大多数发达国家从未采纳过。

我们已运行了五十年的这种范式的决定性特征，并非其残酷性，而是其盲目性。当一个范式无法看到危机时，它就会指责那些指出危机的人。

复兴的循环是另一种资本主义的论据

克里斯文章中唯一最强有力的数据点——前100强公司中有45家在50年前并不存在——实际上恰恰是他自己论点最有力的反证。亚马逊建立在DARPA资助的互联网基础设施之上。谷歌的搜索算法由NSF资助。iPhone是一系列公共资助研究的集合：GPS、触摸屏、锂离子电池、Siri。Moderna的mRNA疫苗依靠的是NIH数十年的资助。人工智能革命建立在联邦拨款支持的Transformer研究之上。

克里斯所赞颂的活力并非抽象的资本主义。它是一种特定混合经济体的产出——是国家能力与私营企业之间的伙伴关系，我们花了八十年建立，又花了四十年拆解。他的文章，在未完全意识到的情况下，恰恰是在为他想象中正在捍卫的那个体系提供论据。

关于另一个政府

还有一件事值得一提：克里斯这篇写于2026年、针对民主党的为自由市场辩护的文章，只字未提当前执政的政府。

以克里斯自己会认可的任何定义来看，特朗普政府正在运行的是近一代人以来最不自由市场、国家干预程度最高的经济体制。它通过行政命令而非立法手段，征收自20世纪30年代以来从未见过的关税——无论白宫如何坚称，关税就是税收。它以监管批准为条件，要求直接获取私营企业的股权。它公开偏袒，奖励效忠者，并用调查惩罚不受青睐的公司。它用口号和不满而非法治来执政。如果某个民主党政府做了这些事的十分之一，克里斯写出的会是截然不同的评论文章。

然而，科技界的大部分人——我们的圈子——却拥抱了它，创业者们为特朗普的举措欢呼，而这些举措若出自民主党之手，他们本会予以谴责。这种许可结构源于对民主党在税收、监管和文化政治方面的不满。我也有部分同感。

但不满不是原则，而我们的同僚们所支持的这届政府，在任何有意义的意义上都不是资本主义。它是裙带国家资本主义——那种从阿根廷到俄罗斯再到匈牙利，已经掏空了多个经济体的模式，由那些明白最快致富方式就是接近权力的人所运营。在2026年，你不可能写出一篇可信的自由市场辩护，而不点名正在实时摧毁自由市场的政权。

民主问题

克里斯将他的文章命名为《让民主再次资本主义化》。但两者的关系恰恰相反。今天美国民主面临的威胁来自一个运行了五十年的经济体系，这个体系每年让少数人变得更加富有，而大多数美国人却相对更穷、更缺乏安全感、更无望。历史上没有一个民主政体能无限期地维持这种安排。

当经济收益长期压倒性地流向狭窄的精英阶层时，政治体系最终会追随金钱——通过竞选资金、游说、监管俘获、媒体所有权。普通公民眼睁睁看着自己的生活每况愈下，而规则却不断为他人制定。他们丧失了对制度的信心。他们开始寻找强人。

特朗普主义不是我们民主危机的原因。它是经济秩序运行的症候——这个秩序四十年来一直在掏空民主的合法性。我们正在经历的威权转向，是长期推行新自由主义的必然结果。

当克里斯辩称，回归健康民主的道路在于重新承诺资本主义时，他把因果关系颠倒了。我们一直运行的这种资本主义恰恰是摧毁民主的元凶。你不可能同时拥有一个运转正常的民主和一个失控的寡头政治。最终，你必须做出选择。

致克里斯，以及像我们这样的人

当前最努力拯救美国资本主义的人，并非那些为现状辩护的人。而是那些愿意改变它的人。我们选择的那种资本主义版本越是长期辜负大多数同胞，他们就越可能最终决定彻底抛弃资本主义。

这是每个类似历史时刻——19世纪90年代、20世纪30年代、20世纪60年代末——给我们的教训。当一个体系不再为大多数人带来利益时，大多数人就会停止捍卫它。而接下来发生的事情，很少会是当前体系顶层的人们所乐见的。

善意的投资者、创业者、公民领袖、以及真正相信市场和美国的民主党人与共和党人，越早认识到我们所选择的资本主义形式对大多数同胞不起作用，并认真着手改变它，那些同胞就越不可能得出结论认为资本主义本身就是问题所在。

这才是真正的选择。不是资本主义与妖魔化之间的选择。而是现在改革，还是日后清算。我宁愿选择改革。我想，如果克里斯认真思考，他也会如此。

英文来源：

Editor’s Note: Nick Hanauer is a Seattle entrepreneur, venture capitalist, and founder of Civic Ventures. He was an early investor in Amazon and is co-founder of Second Avenue Partners. This piece is a reply to Chris DeVore’s “Make Democracy Capitalist Again.”
Chris DeVore and I have been acquainted a long time. We move in the same Seattle circles — investors, founders, civic types who’ve spent careers betting on entrepreneurs. So when he published his GeekWire piece last week arguing that Democrats have lost their minds and declared capitalism the enemy, I read it carefully. Chris is a thoughtful person, and his argument deserves a serious response.
I’ll first acknowledge that I agree with some of Chris’s critiques of the Democratic Party. Many have indeed lost their way, in this state and nationally. Recent efforts to make Washington the least attractive place in the country for wealthy citizens are producing a stampede to other states — virtually every wealthy friend I have has either left or is planning to. It’s a catastrophe.
The most recent legislation to tax income above one million dollars is sensible on its own; it’s the combination of everything piled on top that makes our state so unattractive. Making the total tax burden here 5–10 times the alternatives isn’t progressivism; it’s stupidity.
But I don’t agree with Chris’s basic analysis. He is defending something real, with the wrong argument, in a way that obscures the actual problem we face. The reason he can’t quite see it is the reason many of our friends can’t — we’ve spent our adult lives inside a paradigm so dominant it feels like the weather.
There is no such thing as “capitalism”
Chris treats capitalism as a single thing. A motive force. A powerplant. Something you either embrace or demonize.
But there is no such thing as capitalism in the singular. There are many capitalisms. The capitalism of 1880s America — child labor, company towns, no weekends — was capitalism. The capitalism of 1955 America — 35% union density, 91% top marginal tax rates, the GI Bill building the largest middle class in human history, GDP growth rates double what they are today — was also capitalism. Denmark is capitalist. Singapore is capitalist. The neoliberal version we have run in America since roughly 1975, delivering four decades of stagnant wages for most workers while routing nearly all productivity gains to the top, is also capitalism.
These systems produce radically different outcomes — in wages, mobility, life expectancy, civic trust, democratic stability. The question is never “capitalism, yes or no.” The only question that has ever mattered is: which capitalism, designed how, for whose benefit?
Once you see that, Chris’s piece stops being a defense of an embattled principle and becomes something much harder to defend: a defense of the particular neoliberal form of capitalism we happen to have. The rules we happen to have written. The distribution we happen to be producing. As if this version were synonymous with the American project itself. It isn’t. And the conflation is the central error of his argument.
What his piece can’t see
Read Chris’s 1,500 words and notice what isn’t there. The word “inequality” does not appear. Not once. “Wages” does not appear. “Workers” appears once — as a count of people who receive paychecks from founders, never as economic actors in their own right. Monopoly power, corporate concentration, the middle class, housing affordability, life expectancy — none of it.
In Chris’s America, there are founders, consumers, taxpayers, and a state that either facilitates or confiscates. That’s the whole cast.
This isn’t an oversight. It is a worldview — the one producing the carnage Chris seems unable to perceive. When the bottom 90% of a country spends half a century watching productivity double while their wages stagnate, it is not “populist” for them to notice. It is arithmetic.
Since 1975, roughly $79 trillion has been redistributed upward from the bottom 90% to the top 10% — not through theft, but through the steady accumulation of rules written to favor capital over labor, shareholders over workers, assets over wages. If productivity and wages had stayed linked the way they did from 1945 to 1975, the median American household would be earning $120,000 a year today instead of $75,000. In 1985 it took one worker 39.7 weeks of work to pay for the basics of a middle-class life. By 2022 it took 62 weeks.
American life expectancy is declining — the first sustained decline in a developed nation in a century. Deaths of despair have killed more Americans in the past decade than died in every war we have fought. A generation of young people cannot afford to buy a home.
The small-business owners Chris invokes as victims of “confiscatory taxation” are being crushed — not by taxes, but by monopoly concentration across every sector from retail to healthcare to agriculture, and by a customer base that cannot afford to spend.
Consider our “capitalist” healthcare system — the most market-driven in the developed world. We spend roughly twice as much per person as every other advanced country and get worse outcomes by nearly every measure: shorter lives, higher infant and maternal mortality, more preventable deaths. Medical bills are the leading cause of personal bankruptcy in America, a phenomenon that does not exist in any peer nation. If markets were the self-regulating miracle Chris describes, this would be impossible. It is the predictable result of a system designed to extract rents rather than deliver care.
Or consider time itself. American workers get less paid vacation, parental leave, and sick leave than workers in any other rich country. A French worker averages 30 days of paid vacation, a German 28, an American roughly 10, and a quarter of us get none. We built an economy in which labor has almost no leverage and capital has almost all of it. The differentials in GDP per capita that many point to as proof the American system works better can almost entirely be accounted for by this.
None of this happened by accident. Starting in the 1970s, a particular idea took over American business and policy: that the sole purpose of a corporation is to maximize returns to shareholders. Milton Friedman wrote it down. Jack Welch operationalized it. Business schools taught it for 50 years.
And it was a scam — a piece of ideology, dressed up as economic science, that licensed the systematic transfer of wealth from workers, customers, and communities to a narrow class of shareholders and executives. It is the reason insulin tripled in price, and the reason a company can lay off ten thousand workers and see its stock rise the same afternoon. It is not capitalism working. It is a specific ideological distortion of capitalism most of the developed world never adopted.
The defining feature of the paradigm we’ve been operating in for fifty years is not that it is cruel. It is that it is blind. When a paradigm cannot see the crisis, it blames the people pointing at it.
The cycle of renewal is the case for a different capitalism
The single strongest data point in Chris’s piece — the 45 of the top 100 companies that didn’t exist 50 years ago — is actually the best evidence against his argument. Amazon was built on internet infrastructure funded by DARPA. Google’s search algorithm was funded by NSF. The iPhone is a stack of publicly-funded research: GPS, touchscreen, lithium-ion batteries, Siri. Moderna’s mRNA vaccine rested on decades of NIH funding. The AI revolution was built on transformer research funded by federal grants.
The dynamism Chris celebrates is not capitalism in the abstract. It is the output of a specific mixed economy — a partnership between state capacity and private enterprise that we spent eighty years building and the last forty dismantling. His piece is, without quite realizing it, an argument for the system he imagines he’s defending against.
And about that other administration
Something else worth naming: Chris’s defense of free markets, written in 2026 and aimed at Democrats, contains not a single mention of the administration currently in power.
By any definition Chris himself would recognize, the Trump administration is running the least free-market, most state-interventionist economic regime in a generation. It imposes tariffs — which are taxes, however much the White House insists otherwise — at levels not seen since the 1930s, by executive fiat rather than legislation. It demands direct equity stakes in private companies as the price of regulatory approval. It plays open favorites, rewarding loyalists and punishing disfavored firms with investigations. It governs by slogan and grievance rather than rule of law. If a Democratic administration were doing a tenth of this, Chris would be writing a very different op-ed.
And yet much of the tech world — our world — has embraced it, with founders cheering moves from Trump they would have denounced from a Democrat. The permission structure is frustration with Democrats over taxes, regulation, and cultural politics. I share some of that frustration.
But frustration is not a principle, and the administration our peers have lined up behind is not capitalist in any meaningful sense. It is crony state capitalism — the kind that has hollowed out economies from Argentina to Russia to Hungary, run by people who have figured out that the fastest way to get rich is to be close to power. You cannot write a credible defense of free markets in 2026 without naming the regime dismantling them in real time.
The democracy problem
Chris titled his piece “Make Democracy Capitalist Again.” But the relationship is exactly backward. The threat to American democracy today comes from fifty years of an economic system that has made a small number of people vastly richer every year while the majority of Americans have grown relatively poorer, less secure, and less hopeful. No democracy in history has survived that arrangement indefinitely.
When economic gains flow overwhelmingly to a narrow elite for long enough, the political system eventually follows the money — through campaign finance, lobbying, regulatory capture, media ownership. Ordinary citizens watch their lives deteriorate while the rules keep getting written for someone else. They lose faith in institutions. They look for a strongman.
Trumpism is not the cause of our democratic crisis. It is the symptom of an economic order that has been hollowing out democratic legitimacy for forty years. The authoritarian turn we are living through is what happens when you run neoliberalism long enough.
When Chris argues that the path back to a healthy democracy runs through recommitting to capitalism, he has the causation inverted. The capitalism we have been running is what broke the democracy. You cannot have a functioning democracy and a runaway oligarchy at the same time. Eventually, you have to choose.
To Chris, and to people like us
The people working hardest to save American capitalism right now are not the ones defending it as-is. They are the ones willing to change it. The longer the version of capitalism we have chosen keeps failing the majority of our fellow citizens, the more likely it becomes that they will eventually decide to throw capitalism out altogether.
That is the lesson of every historical moment like ours — the 1890s, the 1930s, the late 1960s. When a system stops delivering for most people, most people stop defending it. And what comes next is rarely anything the people at the top of the current system would prefer.
The quicker people of good faith — investors, founders, civic leaders, Democrats and Republicans who genuinely believe in markets and in America — recognize that the form of capitalism we’ve chosen isn’t working for the majority of our fellow citizens and get serious about changing it, the less likely it becomes that those citizens will conclude capitalism itself is the problem.
That is the actual choice. Not capitalism versus demonization. Reform now, or reckoning later. I’d rather do the reform. I think, if he thinks about it, Chris would too.