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Fewer Than Half of Young Americans Are Positive About Capitalism (cnbc.com)
gollum123 writes: According to a new poll from Gallup, young Americans are souring on capitalism. Less than half, 45 percent, view capitalism positively. "This represents a 12-point decline in young adults' positive views of capitalism in just the past two years and a marked shift since 2010, when 68 percent viewed it positively," notes Gallup, which defines young Americans as those aged 18 to 29. Meanwhile, 51 percent of young people are positive about socialism. This age group's "views of socialism have fluctuated somewhat from year to year," reports Gallup, "but the 51 percent with a positive view today is the same as in 2010."
The boomers pulled the ladder up on them.
As long there is strong regulation behind it keep things honest and upfront.
No-small-print capitalism.
... seeing as how fewer than half of them will ever be able to pay off their college loans. Maybe if we want to prove capitalism can work for everyone we should stop letting rich people write all the laws?
The young always think there is a better way. As they grow up, they realize that the current way works, while most "good ideas" don't. But, enough new ideas do work to keep the system changing.
When you got millionaires and billionaires putthing themselves ahead at the expense of the public, people are not going to have a positive opinion of capitalism.
The people who came before them are rigging the system against them so only they and their kids who made it can benefit. The ladder has been pulled up and these young folks are starting to realize this more and more.
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And only fifty million Chinese had to die miserably for that communist utopia!
Lets not mention that the average standard of living in China only began to improve once they began adopting capitalism or that the communist regime risks being overthrown if they hint at turning back the clock to that utopia.
The system we have now is really corporatism. Very large, essentially immortal, companies that are able to achieve regulatory capture and get laws written for themselves.
Look at the way that the coal companies were able to get an exemption to clean water laws to blow the tops off of mountains and destroy streams and creeks. All so they could reduce labor costs. That's one hell of an externality they got out of.
small "c" capitalism is something a free society has to have, i.e. the ability to buy and sell goods in a relatively unfettered market. No you don't get to sell nuclear weapons, so there has to be some manner of regulation.
corporatism is all about shifting costs to the public and creating a bullshit concept that companies are somehow outside of morality and ethics. They want to be outside of morality and ethics but that doesn't mean we have to let them.
Absolute statements are never true
this again. Socialism =/= Communism.
It's not an A or B choice, though. There's a 2-dimensional spectrum with one dimension being capitalism --- socialism, the other being authoritarianism --- libertarianism. Most younger people want less authoritarianism and more socialism, but it's not a bilateral choice between "Mao" and "the US."
In your version of history did you fail to include all the people that died due to capitalism as well? Also what is your definition of socialism?
Well, there's spam egg sausage and spam, that's not got much spam in it.
This is what happens when post-modernists take over the school systems and Western Values are treated as bad instead of good.
Or young people see the generation before them loaded with debt and unable to afford to purchase a house, see a political ruling class that does not care about them, and see companies making record profits and all the money going to an increasingly smaller percentage of the population and are realizing "yep, the system's broken".
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
You do realize that socialism is mainstream in Europe, right? I'm looking around and I don't see any gulags here.
I believe Bird-Person can arrange that.
It makes sense younger people would be susceptible to bad ideas and in particular people that say everything should be free. Hell I'd take everything free if I believed someone it was possible. Still these people have no experience, things that are too good to be true often are. And hell at that young age people are voting democrat solely because America is a democracy and democrat sounds similar.
It makes sense that older people, who have accumulated wealth and power, continue to try and grow their wealth by simply rigging the game then decry those younger than them as "lazy" or "entitled" when they state that the game has been rigged against them. All the old people care about is "I got mine, go get yours", not realizing that there is nothing left for them to go get. Boomer's don't care that we are gutting the future of Social Security to pay for the military and tax breaks for corporations or the 1%, they have pensions. Meanwhile the rest of us have to worry about retiring to a vastly reduced Social Security benefit while relying on 401ks that are based upon a stock market with values greatly exceeding the actual worth of the companies being traded.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
Once upon a time, most of the value of the American economy was from actual goods and services, and not so intrinsically tied to the stock market. Since about the late 1970s, the American economy has been tied to the stock market, which has engendered dangerous short term thinking.
This, combined with the hollowing out of organized labor and the ever widening wealth disparity in the US has led to inevitable situation.
What would anyone expect? A heart warming embrace of a system geared to enrich and empower those who are already rich and powerful?
We play the game with the bravery of being out of range
More accurately stated, young people are not positive about how Capitalism is practiced in America.
You are quick to blame people without closely examining how corrupt and rotten the system become. From debtor's prison of student loans, to bank bailouts, to suppression of tech wages by no-poaching agreements and H1Bs, there is plenty reasons to be skeptical.
As to idealized version of Capitalism, that would be great, but what country has it implemented?
Comment removed based on user account deletion
Also what is your definition of socialism?
That's one part of a two-part problem. The first part is that there is a concerted marketing effort by a large chunk of progressives to redefine "social democrat" to simply "socialist". I think this may be some kind of political Darwinism as people try to emulate the stadium-filling success of Bernie Sanders by cargo-culting his misuse of the word "socialism".
Then on the other side you have people who know that their ideological opponents are misusing the term, but pretend that they are in fact referring to centralized control over production. So the resulting criticism is not about Denmark, but rather Venezuela. I suspect they are doing this because it makes their opponents an easy target.
So here we are with a discussion overwhelmingly dominated by people making dishonest arguments, and apparently we've done such a poor job educating our young people that many of them are oblivious to the total sham of a discussion going on.
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Exactly. It's more a question of redistribution. I don't think many progressives (however that is defined) want a state-run economy, which really is what socialism, at least as it is traditionally defined, is about. It's been useful for conservatives and libertarians to define progressive economic ideas which are fundamentally redistributive as somehow Marxian, but they're really not.
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The system we have isn't Capitalism, it's Cronyism. Brought on because people think that Keynesian economics is somehow a good thing. Sadly this line of thinking is so prevalent on both sides of the isle, that it will never get fixed until the system collapses. Young people today have never seen Capitalism, they have only seen Cronyism and yet everybody calls it Capitalism. It isn't.
You do still see Capitalism at lower levels of society. The farmers markets, the used/antique markets etc. But those in government don't make money on these, they would rather make the big bucks working with large corporations. As a result, the large corporations get the laws passed that they want, usually at the expense of the little guy. Hence Cronyism wins the day.
Now, if we can just get young people to understand the difference...
Some days I get the sinking feeling Orwell was an optimist.
That's because that system has been corrupted and is now pushing people back into poverty.
If you don't fix it, it will be replaced. Act accordingly.
Yeah, now they want another trial at what failed in the Eastern Europe
What failed in Eastern Europe was communism. I'm not a huge fan of socialism but it is far less extreme than communism. Europe and Canada are now somewhere on the spectrum between socialism and capitalism, trying to find a balance between allowing people the freedom to generate wealth while also ensuring that some of that wealth provides a social safety net for those less fortunate.
... 3 hours in.
Take the US for example where capital accumulation continues indefinitely leading to higher and higher concentrations of wealth. One obvious issue here is this then shifts social power to the wealthy through governmental manipulation.
Shifts? This presupposes that social power was ever out of the hands of the wealthy. I'm not entirely sure it was.
From ancient times to medieval times, people in power were rich and rich people were in power. They were practically inextricably linked.
In the Age of Mercantilism, rich people were so powerful they owned private armies. The Dutch West India Company managed to capture the Spanish silver fleet in 1628, stealing their entire cargo. (Among many other similar things of that era.)
In the Gilded Age in North America, a dozen men controlled the industry of the entire continent.
In the 1940s and 50s, television was such a fantastically powerful propaganda tool that Boomers were effectively controlled by a few dozen people.
Today, a handful of major websites are so influential that Congress holds hearings about it.
Control has been getting less overt and somewhat more diffuse, but it still rests with rich people. They're having to work harder to maintain it, but they are maintaining it. Tax law benefits them, not me. The courts benefit them, not me. Congress represents them, not me, except by accident.
When was this mythical time when society was controlled by anything other than rich people?
It's quite obvious people aren't happy with the current social contract because most citizens are falling further and further into losing their half, so to speak. As such, they're rightfully upset.
Rich people back through the Gilded Age knew to allow more than mere crumbs to fall from their table. Modern rich people seem to have forgotten that. They have far more medieval attitudes than we've been accustomed to for the past century and a half.
It's gotten so bad that we're no longer better off than our parents. That's when we really noticed things not going well. I personally am, but my brother isn't. Going down the list of my cousins, only one of them is doing better than his parents, because he married well. The rest are either hanging on, or doing markedly worse than their parents. Looking around my neighborhood, the number of houses with 3 and 4 and 5 cars parked at them is higher than it ever was when I was young, as Millennials either fail to launch and boomerang home, or launch much much later than was previously the norm, because they simply can't afford the real estate to move out. What I see jives with the statistics I hear about.
The Libertarian Lunatic fringe of Slashdot will be quick to point out that young Americans are being heavily propagandized at their universities about socialism and communism, so it's all their fault. I contend that universities have been propagandizing since the Communist Manifesto was published in 1848. It's gaining traction again now because capitalism is failing to make young people's lives better, for the first time in quite a while. If capitalism was working better for the masses, they would go on ignoring university propaganda just as they did for most of the last 170 years.
I'm not so sure that there's a generation of people who don't blindly accept what they're told and question, or apply logic and reason. Reading Youtube comments for an hour is enough to disabuse you of that notion. What I am sure of is there's a generation of people looking up from their empty plates and saying, "I was promised cake. Where's the cake?"
I've got a buddy with Type-I diabetes. The kind your born with and that you die of without insulin. He can't work because the illness kicks the crap out of him for about 2 months every year, and it's a random 2 months. He barely made it through high school. Smart guy, but not Einstein grade smarts so no employer is going to put up with him.
He's pretty right wing. Has a got family who worked in defense. So he gets his political views from there.
When asked about healthcare he understands that he needs socialized medicine or he dies. Again, he's smart. He's figured out that in a pure capitalist economy he couldn't possibly earn the money to pay for his care. You should hear the convoluted mess of a healthcare system he came up with that preserves his ideological system while ensuring he gets care. It was like Obamacare but with much bigger subsidies and more guarantees of care. To his credit when I pointed out that he agreed that he'd basically created a socialized medicine but with a 30% surcharge for private insurance profits.
I'm not saying we can't have a mixed system. I'm in favor of single _payer_, e.g. the gov't pays but otherwise stays out of things. But that's still socialism. At some point I think we have to admit that capitalism as we idolize it just plain doesn't work.
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small "c" capitalism is something a free society has to have, i.e. the ability to buy and sell goods in a relatively unfettered market.
You're confusing a free market with capitalism, which is not the same thing. It's also a very common mistake to make given the propaganda in the US that intentionally wants us to associate "freedom" with capitalism.
Capitalism simply means private ownership and control of resources -- land, natural resources, and modern industrial means of production. Private ownership means generally speaking a person (a dictator or monarch) or a small board of directors (an oligarchy) make all the decisions about the use of resources and production. On the surface, this seems like a very fair thing -- you own it, why shouldn't you get to decide? -- but the problem with this line of thought is the scale we're talking. When a capitalist decides to clear cut a forest, that forest is now gone and even if he sells the land later, no other person gets to use that forest ever again. What if someone else wanted to create a park? Too late, capitalist decided already. What if a majority of people in the area wanted a park instead of a clear cut field? What if that forest and all those tree roots helped soak up water and prevent flooding, but now without it, surrounding neighborhoods easily flood? What if that forest held a rare species of tree or animal that could have lead to a medical discovery? Even if we needed to cut the trees down for firewood or paper or whatever, maybe we would have preferred to the wood go to local community members and not sold in China or wherever? Too late, capitalist already decided.
That's the problem with private ownership of resources and production. Most if not all resource use decisions actually impact all of us, at least community-wide if not planet-wide (as climate change is producing). And yet we are allowing monarchs and oligarchs make those decisions for our communities and nations without any input. Is that fair and just for someone else to decide things that impact your family and community without you having any say in the process whatsoever? I understand you might not always get what you want, but right now you don't even have a vote. A CEO decides and that's it, can legally do what they want (within broad confines of regulation that politicians continually cut and weaken) and completely ignore you and your family and your community. If it makes your house flood more, they don't care. If it causes environmental damage that gives you and your family lung cancer, they don't care. You don't have any say.
Socialism is the idea that resources and production should be publicly-owned and democratically managed. That's really all it is. Because of certain historical events people confuse socialism with authoritarian takeovers of those countries, but again, like the free market and capitalism, they are not the same thing. All we're talking about it more democracy, that you and your family and your community should have a vote and decide how those resources are used and that it should not be left to private decision-making behind closed doors by people who don't necessarily live in your community or even country.
Note also, as a common misconception, that socialist theory typically distinguishes between "private property", which is private ownership of natural resources and industrial means of production, and "personal property" which is your family home. Socialists don't generally care about your family home or your toothbrush or your clothes or your car, do whatever you want at home when you're not bothering anyone. No one is going to take your house. It's about democratizing economic decisions for the big industrial questions that affect all of us, it's about making sure no one businessperson CEO can force their economic vision on you and the community, you have to all agree together democratically. You get more individual freedoms and more say-so under a democratic system -- both politic
The problem is that everyone wants something for nothing.
No, the problem is people who recite trite phrases instead of actually looking around them.
Instead, they decide what they want the result to be (hence the trite phrase) and only look at the things around them that confirm that result.
For example, those of us who want single-payer medical care don't want "something for nothing". We believe medical care is so important that we all should all get it, and pay for it via taxes. Just like we all pay for the military, firefighters, police, roads and so on. As an added bonus, it costs less money than our current system.
How do you suppose that would translate at the college level if college were determined to be "free"?
We don't need to suppose. California already did it. For about 100 years, University of California and Cal-State schools were free for in-state students. Eventually they added some "fees", but that cost about 1 to 2 months of minimum-wage 40-hours-per-week work.
All it got California was the largest economy in the US, and created Silicon Valley. Not a bad deal.
It ended when Anti-tax Republicanism swept over the state. Now that the Boomers had their degrees, it was terrible that these freeloaders were getting free education. And, far more importantly, they decided that "taxation is theft!!!" was their new motto.
Be smart about it. Use community college (or high school) to get GE requirements done cheaply. Get a job to help offset some of the cost, don't just use the college loans to pay for 100% the cost. Use credit cards wisely and don't spend money you don't have. Don't eat out. Ramen noodles and PB&J are your friends.
And when they do all that and still look to a future of never affording a house or never being able to afford kids? Now what?
Fundamentally, the problem is productivity became decoupled from wages around 1978. Which means real wages have either stayed flat or gone far down for the vast majority of people for a very long time. Which results in "the American Dream" being out of reach of more people every year thanks to inflation. We're approaching a tipping point where something will be done about that.
Option 1, which you appear to support, is to blame the people getting screwed over by this basic economic fact and do nothing. Which will result in more people falling behind, more anger, more resentment, and eventually a violent correction. If you're lucky, you'll be able to push off the violence until after you've died of natural causes.
Option 2, which I support, is to start using the only peaceful tool available to make that correction: the government. Which means using the horrors of socialism to correct the worst problems and work to tip the economic playing field back towards the workers. You'll still be rich, just like people can still be rich in Europe. Just slightly less so. In return, your waitstaff will be able to afford to live on a 40-hour-per-week job instead of breaking out the guillotines.
People could easily look past capitalism's iniquitous allocation of wealth when everyone's standard of living was going up and America was the freest country in the world.
Unfortunately most people's standard of living has been dropping for at least a generation. At the same time the American Gulag has become the largest in the world, filled almost entirely with persons who were coerced into "confessing".
No longer able or willing to provide freedom & prosperity, the capitalist/financialist oligarchy has lost the mandate of heaven. People are beginning to look at it more like criminal gang and less like a legitimate government.
What remains is a plutocratic corporate socialism sold to the masses as free market capitalism. No wonder they don't like it.
We suffer more in our imagination than in reality. - Seneca
The system we have isn't Capitalism, it's Cronyism. Brought on because people think that Keynesian economics is somehow a good thing. Sadly this line of thinking is so prevalent on both sides of the isle, that it will never get fixed until the system collapses. Young people today have never seen Capitalism, they have only seen Cronyism and yet everybody calls it Capitalism. It isn't.
You do still see Capitalism at lower levels of society. The farmers markets, the used/antique markets etc. But those in government don't make money on these, they would rather make the big bucks working with large corporations. As a result, the large corporations get the laws passed that they want, usually at the expense of the little guy. Hence Cronyism wins the day.
Now, if we can just get young people to understand the difference...
Cronyism or crony capitalism is capitalism in a pure form... The farmers markets et al. are examples of small market economies which scale out to be mixed economies.
The problem isn't that young people don't understand the difference, it's that you have made up your own definitions.
Successful economies are always mixed economies, combining parts of capitalism, socialism, free market libertarianism and controlled markets. There's plenty of room to argue which mix is best but pure forms of these ideas are and have always been bound for failure.
Calling someone a "hater" only means you can not rationally rebut their argument.