Despite their love for all things iPhone, Starbucks and Angry Birds, it seems young American millennials – those 18 to 29 – reject capitalism, says a new study.
According to a Harvard University survey (via the Washington Post) released this week, 51 percent of Americans under 29 do not support capitalism. It’s unknown what alternative system millennials endorse, though socialism was the most popular with one-third advocating a transition into one of the most destructive systems to date.
Only 42 percent of the millennial respondents supported capitalism.
This isn’t the first poll to discover such a viewpoint. In 2011, the Pew Research Center found that 47 percent of those 18 to 29 maintained a negative opinion of the free market system. Moreover, in the same survey, 49 percent of those younger individuals had positive opinions regarding socialism.
Simply put: American millennials are upset with today’s system, even though it has metastasized from capitalism into a brand of corporatism and socialism. So perhaps there needs to be an education of what capitalism really is, and that’s something they won’t receive from their gender studies professors.
A true capitalist society gets government out of the way. A capitalist environment contains a few basic principles: private ownership; low taxation and few regulations; the freedom to succeed and fail; sound money; and a state that doesn’t subsidize people or businesses, pick winners and loses and participate in the fraud and theft.
Many of these things are non-existent right now. Private property rights are slowly being eroded; businesses are being bludgeoned to death with regulations; taxes are too high; the government punishes winners and props up losers; fiat money is a failed experiment; and the Federal Reserve is complicit in counterfeit money.
This is not a capitalist system. The one thing that is keeping the U.S. from becoming entirely socialist is a relatively free market without price controls or production quotas seen in the likes of Venezuela.
What happened, though? When did millennials suddenly think that the systems of Mao Tse Tung, Joseph Stalin and Kim Jung-il were superior to that of free market capitalism? Perhaps Michael Snyder of Economic Collapse Blog has the answer:
“Overall, the average American spends about 10 hours a day consuming one form of entertainment or another.
“When you allow that much “programming” into your mind, it is inevitable that it is going to shape your values, and our young people are more “plugged in” than any of the rest of us.
“So yes, I believe that it is exceedingly clear why we should be deeply concerned about the future of America. The values that are being relentlessly pounded into the heads of our young people are directly opposed to the values that this nation was founded upon, and it is these young people that will determine the path that this country ultimately takes.”
It’s a sad state of affairs when the millennials today will eventually run the world. Perhaps they need to go to places where socialism is the dominant system. Venezuela is running out of energy. North Korea executes those who speak out against the government. Scandinavia is gradually becoming poorer and poorer.
Let’s conclude with a superb quote from the great Ludwig von Mises (SEE: 25 quotes from the Ludwig von Mises magnum opus ‘Human Action’):
“All civilizations have up to now been based on private ownership of the means of production. In the past civilization and private property have been linked together … There is no experience to the effect that socialism could provide a standard of living as high as that provided by capitalism.”
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