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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."
.....or maybe there's a generation of people who don't blindly accept what they're told and question things, apply logic/reason, and think objectively.
It's quite obvious that most core ideas underlying (free market) capitalism also fail, just like socialism has in the past. That's why over the years, governments and their people stepped in to make modifications (e.g., welfare capitalism). Many existing models have pretty huge flaws. 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.
While it's true most modern day capitalistic economics work better than other models we've seen in the past, that doesn't mean it will continue indefinitely and it certainly doesn't mean we have the "be-all-end-all-model." Thinking we do is both ignorant and arrogant.
We also need to revisit the social contract as to what a society expects by agreeing to fall into a governmental system. 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. Now, we can both agree socialism isn't the answer but our current frame of capitalism isn't the answer either and it needs some changes to give people what they rightfully deserve.
That's an oversimplified description. Socialism isn't just that the government owns the means of production, but also that it is responsible for the distribution of the produced goods and services. Since that's also the much larger and more difficult part of the philosophy, it's also the part that should be discussed most thoroughly.
In essence, any government that collects taxes already has a government-owned means of production. The government produces tax income. How it then uses those taxes is the subject of endless debate, and those of us who want a bit more socialism want to see distributions that focus on the socialist philosophies. We want to see less focus on propping up private industry, and more focus on community projects. We want less subsidies for corporate expansion, and more grants for anyone to claim.
In short, the socialist influence the young people look for is for government to aim to improve life outside of work, rather than dumping resources into privately-managed companies that have primarily just increased inequality over the past few decades.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
Don't forget they protect that debt so that not even bankruptcy can discharge it.
They saw a problem (cost to do college was getting a bit too high and becoming too needed) and inadvertently poured gasoline on the problem by triggering a huge escalation of cost through trying to provide relief while compromising with the private sector (you can spend government money and the debts *will* be repaid, but the government will not step in to negotiate terms because *that* would just not be capitalist enough).
The state of college funding represents the worst blend of capitalism and government intervention. More government control over pricing or less government meddling in the loans would likely work better.
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
And yet, if you ask young people about this, they see that Denmark and similar countries have high living standards and rank at the top for happiness. Meanwhile in the US they see poverty, a massive gap between rich and poor, unaffordable education, unaffordable housing, unaffordable health care, and so forth. So is it any surprise that when given the poll that young people think about these issues?
Taxes are a matter of perspective. We tend to hate our relatively low taxes in the US because we see so littlle in return for our money, whereas in many high tax countries thre is a visible return of services back to the tax payers.
And also there are extremes. Denmark isn't engaged in autocratic centralized control of all facets of the economy. Yet some people spit at the word "socialism" as if it were equivalent to Stalinism or Maoism. We also don't have an extremist model of capitalism in the US either. Most modern countries are indeed a mix of some capitalist ideas and some socialist ideas. Denmark is clearly a capitalist state but it also has had social-democrat governments with strong social welfare programs - it's not 100% one way or the other.
Another problem is that "socialism" is being used by the right as an insult to apply to anything they don't like, exactly the same as the left using "fascism" to apply to anything they disagree with.
There's a hugely bizarre attitude toward "socialized medicine." In a capitalist country, one can argue having the LARGEST number of people healthy and able to work is best for the economy, so EVERYONE should have access to healthcare. Not unreasonable. One of the problems we have with medicine is that it's outrageously expensive for no reason why anyone can, or will, tell. Why? Why should a 2 day hospital stay where the only thing you get is 6 IVs of (not expensive) drugs over that time cost almost 20K? Why? When the room isn't clean, and you question whether the staff have adequately washed hands before coming in, etc. Capitalism should encourage efficiency and all I see in healthcare is...the opposite.