Progressives often describe America’s market economy in the starkest possible terms: a system that enriches the wealthy while leaving everyone else struggling to survive. Without government intervention and redistribution, the argument goes, Americans would be starving in the streets. Sometimes they even say that they already are.
But how well does that picture match reality?
If the claim is that Americans are literally dying of starvation because they cannot afford food, the numbers tell a very different story. In 2024, just 22 Americans reportedly died of starvation. But even that number is an exaggeration, as only two of those cases had no other contributing cause listed.
How many Americans actually just straight-up starve to death? In the latest data, from 2024, there were 22 cases. And not even one of them was about poverty making it unaffordable to obtain food. https://t.co/9Sq1aBgF88
— Crémieux (@cremieuxrecueil) October 22, 2026
According to Crémieux, an X user who regularly analyzes political and economic data, records from the National Center for Health Statistics (NCHS) show that just 22 Americans died from “starvation” in 2024.
Of those, two were young children who died at home because of caregiver failures; both deaths were ruled accidental. Three cases involved dementia, while four involved alcohol dependence or conditions such as cirrhosis, liver failure, and chronic pancreatitis. Two involved swallowing difficulties among very elderly people, eight involved serious illnesses that interfered with eating, and one involved self-neglect. Only two of the starvation deaths had no other contributing conditions listed.
Behold the power of capitalism, which has helped make food so abundant and accessible that starvation has practically disappeared from American life. What was once a persistent threat to human survival is now an extraordinarily uncommon tragedy.
But it also invites a broader question: How did we build a society where the debate so often concerns the price of abundance rather than its absence?
The more common complaint today is not that things are unavailable, but that they are too expensive. And look at what we now expect to be available: miracles of modern medicine, homes filled with engineering marvels, and cell phones that put a world of information in our pockets. Even foreign vacations can sound less like luxuries and more like a basic expectation.
Free markets have helped bring us to a point where the complaint is often not “There isn’t enough,” but “It isn’t cheap enough.” But there is a world of difference between struggling to afford the extraordinary and living in a world where the extraordinary does not exist.
You can laugh at the idea of a cell phone being a basic necessity, but I would rather live in a society where such extraordinary technology has become so useful and accessible that we consider it essential than one where it remains an unimaginable luxury.
Remember what helped create that abundance. It was not a government bureau deciding what everyone should have. It was individuals and businesses competing to produce something people wanted, and hoping to profit by delivering it. We should want those miracles to become cheaper and more accessible. We should also think carefully before undermining the incentives that helped bring them into existence.
