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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."
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?
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.
Just remember, half the people are stupider than that...
"I say we take off, nuke the site from orbit. It's the only way to be sure."
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.
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
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
.....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.
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?
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.
I think you mean the US lead protection of the legally elected South Korean government from violent socialists of North Korean after North Korea, with support from the socialists of China and the USSR, invaded South Korea on 25 June 1950.
Learn fucking history and stop blaming the U.S. for shit socialists did, asshole.
There is no "-1 offended" or "-1 you don't agree with me" mod options for a reason.
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.
... 3 hours in.
Like roads and bridges ?
Yes. Roads and bridges are capital.
Every country in the world has a mixed economy, with some socialism, and some private production. In America, the government builds roads, bridges, and airports. North Korea has private vegetable markets. Cuba has small private restaurants (which can't hire more than 2 people).
You can go too far in either direction. North Korea and Cuba are 90% socialist, and are impoverished. Somalia has almost no government spending on roads and ports, and is also impoverished.
The "sweet spot" is about 30-40% socialism and 60-70% capitalism. That is enough for infrastructure and a social safety net, but not enough to stifle innovation and economic growth.
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.
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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Taxing and redistributing is not socialism - that is just a safety net, usually called social democracy. Socialism is centralized control of production, and the only places you see this in Europe are in healthcare and, in a few places, petroleum extraction - and that last one is self-limiting when the petroleum runs out. All corporations are created by government through some kind of charter, and some have a public ownership component - occasionally even a controlling interest. But it's still nothing like a philosophy of socialism - the economy is overwhelmingly driven by private sector allocation of capital.
W..w..W - Willy Waterloo washes Warren Wiggins who is washing Waldo Woo.
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.
The system we have isn't Capitalism, it's Cronyism.
So you're saying "that's not REAL capitalism!"? :-) funny that many don't let socialists get away with making that same argument.
Can you point to a time when we *didn't* have cronyism? Because the last time we had such concentrated wealth and lack of regulation and oversight was the Gilded Age, the height of cronyism and poverty. If you're referring to economic prosperity since the world wars, that comes partly from being the major economic power left standing as well as FDR's New Deal and progressive reform that actually took very strong cues from Socialist Party demands (the Socialist Party was actually winning seats in Congress and state legislatures as a third party and that was enough to scare the establishment into giving into some of the demands). So in modern US history we've actually done the best with progressive/socialist reform and the worst under deregulated "free market" capitalism (that quickly becomes cronyism).
So why is it so wrong to point out we've never had real full socialism either and should give it a chance? Socialism is about economic democracy instead of the economic dictatorship of CEOs under capitalism, what's so wrong about democracy?
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.