This is a video from CNN about why socialism is on the rise among voters under 30.
I have seen comments on other conservative websites about this and how this shows that the young are not educated about the truth of socialism.
That is absolutely true. Most young people who are socialists or Bernie supporters have no idea what socialism really is like or what it really does to nations. Their Leftists college professors have lied to them. Their understanding of history is wrong.
Also, socialism will absolutely not solve their problems.
Bernie’s Medicare for All and the elimination of private insurance will be a disaster. It will make the VA scandal under Obama, where veterans died waiting in a bureaucratic nightmare for rationed treatment, the national standard for health care.
In Cuba, people have to bring their own blankets and toilet paper to the hospital. In Venezuela, they would have to do the same, except there is no toilet paper and they’ve eaten their blankets. Under Bernie’s plan, your local pharmacy will look like a 1980’s era Soviet grocery store, because he just has to go after those greedy pharmaceutical companies.
The cost of college is the result of government-backed student loans and federal funds that feed a tuition hungry administration monster and their wasteful pet projects. “Free public college” will only feed this monster directly and make it bigger. When the Soviets starved, they didn’t send more people to work on the farms. They brought in more apparatchiks to plan the agricultural economy. The bureaucracy always feeds itself.
Socialism is not a solution.
The point of me posting this, and the piece that is missing from every other conservative site that has, is this:
Listen to what the kids are saying.
They have experienced hardship. I legitimately feel bad for the kid whose dad never had healthcare. I have lived in rust belt cities and feel for the kid from a poor coal-mining town in West Virginia.
The “y’allidarity” kid needs to be a socialist because he looks like he can’t work a Starbucks espresso maker and doesn’t have the upper body strength to swing a hammer if he knows which end of one to hold.
The hardship that they experienced is the gap in the door that socialists professors use to get their toe in. The lie of socialism applies to these kids because they have seen the ugliness of unchecked vulture capitalism.
You can say “but they are Tweeting about socialism from their iPhones.” But that is a stupid argument that doesn’t address the core issue they face. Having an iPhone doesn’t matter when your boss comes to you and makes you train your H1B visa tech worker that is going to replace your job in 30 days. (Yes, that shit happens, I personally know people who it was done to.)
This has to be the new frontier of Conservativism.
Once upon a time, the Republican party was at the forefront of taking on trusts and monopolies. We recognized that those were damaging to the market economy. A monopoly prevented participation in the market and harmed many more people than it made rich. Anti-trust legislation was enacted to prioritize the health of the market economy over the personal fortunes of a few robber barons.
It is on that principle that I see the need for new regulations. Gutting a factory and offshoring manufacturing, relacing workers with low-cost H1B visa workers, leveraged buyouts harm the market economy.
It creates an uneven playing field where a small fraction of people can become insanely wealthy, not by creating something good, but by making American’s miserable. Putting a Midwestern or Appalachian town out of business and onto welfare harms the market economy.
If, as conservatives, we value a healthy market economy that builds wealth for a growing middle class, we must reign in the damaging influences of the vulture capitalists.
I’ve said this before about the rise of white supremacism. Happy, middle-class white people with good jobs, career prospects, and upward mobility do not become white supremacists. White supremacism is what poor, miserable white people glom onto to make them feel better about themselves because they feel like losers and need someone to blame.
The same thing applies to socialism. Happy, middle-class white people with good jobs, career prospects, and upward mobility do not become socialists. Socialism is what they glom onto as a solution to the real problems that they face, and they blame capitalism as a whole for their misery.
If we want fewer socialists, which I do, than we need to relieve these kids’ misery. Not with free stuff, but with opportunities, jobs, and upward mobility. That is where the market economy excels, just as long as we put an end to the reign of the CEO’s that see employees as a cost to be outsourced instead of an asset to be developed because they care more about today’s stock value bonus than the stability of the company over years.
J.Kb, the young don’t understand socialism. The most they understand is that they will be getting something from other people. Somebody else will be paying for their healthcare (Free!), somebody else will be paying for their housing (Free!) Somebody else will be paying for their education (FREE!).
What they do not understand is that the “somebody else” is them.
I don’t remember which of the books I read recently talked about it, but after the soviet revolution, all the land owners had their land taken. They were killed, exiled or forced to start over again with smaller amounts of land. After around 10 years, there were some farmers that thrived and some that failed. And the failures looked at those that had succeeded, in some cases the same people that use to have land, and screamed how unfair it was, and those that had succeeded were punished and had their land taken from them.
Success is punished under socialism.
I once had a democrat ask me “Why do you vote against your own best interest?” She was telling me that I would get more with a Democrat than I would voting Republican. She couldn’t understand that I was voting for my country, not myself.
My own self interest is tied up in me succeeding. Not in me getting things for “free”.
Good post Sir! You can sum it up this way- the young have had the victim mentality driven into thier skulls fulla mush…
Right… because being forced to train your H1B visa replacement at half your salary, and hoping to get hired on as a subcontractor with no benefits after your downsize is just a victim mentality.
It’s shit like that that makes people susceptible to the lie of socialism.
The young are unhappy because what they see is some billionaire taking advantage of them. True or not, that is the perception, and perception, as they say, is reality.
Case in point: Several decades ago, I worked the overnight shift for the Walt Disney company, back when Michael Eisner was the CEO. We had a meeting with a company executive one night and we were told that Disney’s goal was to have no permanent, full time employees within ten years. They wanted to replace all of their full time employees with contracted employees through subcontractors. They said that health care costs for employees was costing the company $90 million a year.
One of my coworkers then pointed out a news article where the CEO (Eisner) had received $270 million in pay, company stock, and other benefits the previous year. He then asked if they could pay the CEO only $180 million and let all of the other employees keep their jobs. The meeting was abruptly ended at that point.
I understand that executives should make more. But there is a valid question here: how can one man be worth three times as much as the other 30,000 employees combined. People see that, and they cannot understand it. Heck, I don’t even understand it.
There is some taking advantage, having to train your H1B visa replacement is exactly that. I’m not sure how people did that and did’t just walk out the door dumping gasoline out of can behind them as they did.
But take the Disney thing to the ad absurdum. What happens if every company decides to fire all but their C-suite execs and managers and make all employees contractors and temp workers?
How does that help the economy? How do young people buy houses and cars and start families if they are always going from short term gig to short term gig.
Being an entrepreneur is hard. I’ve been trying to get my consulting company off the ground for a year and I have exactly two clients, which is why I am looking for a day job.
“Oh, I just got downsized, I’m going to create my own startup” is not something you can ask the majority of people to do. Most startups fail. You never hear about those. Which is why many people want the security of employment with a consistent salary over the risk of a startup but with the potential of being a start up millionaire.
I don’t want to tell a CEO “you’ve made too much.” What I do want to say is “at what point is your focus on stock value and C-suite bonuses doing damage to the boarder economy.”
The Russian Revolution happened when society was just wealthy royalty and poor peasants. Socialism was introduced into America when it was Robber Barons and people being paid in script to the company store.
When you have a growing middle class and good job stability, the Socialists were the enemy.
Now that the C-suite can outsource labor to China and hire a few people back as consultants so they can make $100M in bonus, socialism is in vogue again.
I keep saying the way to curb socialism is to go back to responsible capitalism that grows a middle class. If we don’t, we’re going to get more socialism.
Even worse is when those same companies are not being responsibly managed and is on the verge of bankruptcy to the point that they need to be bailed out with taxpayer dollars. That happens, and then the banks pay their executives million dollar bonuses while simultaneously foreclosing on millions of those same taxpayer’s homes.
While people are watching billionaires getting sweetheart deals, it is hard to ask them to refrain from using the law to get what they can.
The problem here is that capitalism is supposed to allow the market to decide who wins and loses. Once government puts its thumb on the scale, it is no longer a free market.
That is among many of the problems. C-suite execs getting $50M bonuses then buying $500K seats at fundraisers is partly the cause of this. The political elite of both parties facilitate this. Every bailed out exec was an Obama bundler.
When the tax incentives make it better to outsource than hire Americans, the tax structure is bad. When nobody enforces H1B visa abuse, that’s bad government action.
I will give Bernie credit that at least he seems independent and not part of the DC Money Making machine (his three houses pale in comparison to the Clinton and Obama money machine). His ideas are terrible and will destroy the economy, but I understand his appeal.
We need a pro-market Bernie. Someone who is interdependent of the DC Money Machine, who wants to regulate the c-suite and deregulate the small business owner, to boost the middle class by making the market work for them.
I believe to my very bones that the goverment should prioritize the health, safety, and well-being of the American middle class through low taxes and minimal business regulations on the middle class, and discouraging outsourcing, leverage buyouts, and other vulture tactics that only benefit the hedge funds while bankrupting middle America. Not free stuff or make work government jobs. A market economy with more equality of opportunity. I’d run on that platform.
Remember Heinlein’s “The Crazy Years”?
Well, we are living in them.
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