American_Jihad
Flaming Libs/Koranimals
The left and that utopian dream that everyone will be the same will never ever happen...
Two Cheers for Capitalism
The misguided leftist hatred of the free market.
February 24, 2016
Bruce Thornton
If you want a monument to the failure of American schools, just look around a Bernie Sanders rally. It will be full of millennials, the 83 million people born between the early 1980s and 2000s. Most of them have been educated in schools that abandoned basic skills and knowledge, and put in their place curricula designed to “improve” human nature in order to conform to progressive utopian ideals. So instead of informed citizens, we have today’s “tolerant,” “sensitive,” and “diverse” narcissists whose heads are uniformly filled with intolerant leftwing dogma and unexamined political orthodoxy.
Exhibit one is the enthusiasm for socialism on the part of many millennials. This affection for a failed ideology in turn explains their attraction to an antique hippie and self-proclaimed socialist whose only jobs his whole life have been on the public payroll in a state with fewer people than Fresno County. So no surprise that in New Hampshire 83% of the under-30 vote went for Sanders, in Iowa 84%, and in Nevada 82%. That electoral approval, of course, is predicated on massive ignorance of socialism’s historical reality. In a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, only 16% of millennials knew that socialism means some degree of government ownership of the economy. But it’s not just millennials: 43% of Democrats––and 56% of Democratic primary voters–– also view socialism favorably. That’s why Hillary Clinton is furiously tacking left in the primaries.
Nor do millennials know that Bernie’s advice to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” ignores the fact that those countries have long been reforming their welfare states and liberalizing their economies, backing away from the failed dirigiste policies that excite the Berniacs. Denmark does have a generous welfare state, but high taxes on the middle class and a regressive Value Added Tax fund these benefits. This inconvenient truth contradicts Bernie’s claim that all his promised goodies can be paid for by punitively taxing “billionaires,” whose combined total wealth couldn’t pay for one year of the federal budget, let alone the trillions of dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.
But the flip side of this love of socialism is a strange hatred of capitalism, another consequence of the degeneration of our schools, which teach very little about the history and true nature of capitalism. So all that students know are what popular culture, movie actors, and progressives teach them with caricatures of capitalism as silly as Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of currency or pin-striped Mr. Moneybags lounging at Park Place.
Meanwhile these millennial scourges of corporations and the rich can’t figure out that their comfortable, nutritious, gadget-filled lives are subsidized by the surplus wealth created by the capitalist economy. Similarly the like-minded professors and public employee unions cheering along with them have no clue that their Cadillac pensions are funded by investments in those same corporations that they love to hear Bernie and Hillary demonize.
...
But in the end, those are flaws of human nature and human character, not of capitalism. Those attacking capitalism because it gives scope to greed and inequality should remember that throughout history––the same history no longer taught in our failed schools and universities–– revolutions aiming to create virtue and equality through autocratic power over people and economies have left behind gulags and corpses, misery and scarcity. So to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst form of economic system––except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Two Cheers for Capitalism
Two Cheers for Capitalism
The misguided leftist hatred of the free market.
February 24, 2016
Bruce Thornton
If you want a monument to the failure of American schools, just look around a Bernie Sanders rally. It will be full of millennials, the 83 million people born between the early 1980s and 2000s. Most of them have been educated in schools that abandoned basic skills and knowledge, and put in their place curricula designed to “improve” human nature in order to conform to progressive utopian ideals. So instead of informed citizens, we have today’s “tolerant,” “sensitive,” and “diverse” narcissists whose heads are uniformly filled with intolerant leftwing dogma and unexamined political orthodoxy.
Exhibit one is the enthusiasm for socialism on the part of many millennials. This affection for a failed ideology in turn explains their attraction to an antique hippie and self-proclaimed socialist whose only jobs his whole life have been on the public payroll in a state with fewer people than Fresno County. So no surprise that in New Hampshire 83% of the under-30 vote went for Sanders, in Iowa 84%, and in Nevada 82%. That electoral approval, of course, is predicated on massive ignorance of socialism’s historical reality. In a 2010 New York Times/CBS poll, only 16% of millennials knew that socialism means some degree of government ownership of the economy. But it’s not just millennials: 43% of Democrats––and 56% of Democratic primary voters–– also view socialism favorably. That’s why Hillary Clinton is furiously tacking left in the primaries.
Nor do millennials know that Bernie’s advice to “look to countries like Denmark, like Sweden and Norway and learn from what they have accomplished for their working people,” ignores the fact that those countries have long been reforming their welfare states and liberalizing their economies, backing away from the failed dirigiste policies that excite the Berniacs. Denmark does have a generous welfare state, but high taxes on the middle class and a regressive Value Added Tax fund these benefits. This inconvenient truth contradicts Bernie’s claim that all his promised goodies can be paid for by punitively taxing “billionaires,” whose combined total wealth couldn’t pay for one year of the federal budget, let alone the trillions of dollars in unfunded social welfare liabilities.
But the flip side of this love of socialism is a strange hatred of capitalism, another consequence of the degeneration of our schools, which teach very little about the history and true nature of capitalism. So all that students know are what popular culture, movie actors, and progressives teach them with caricatures of capitalism as silly as Scrooge McDuck diving into piles of currency or pin-striped Mr. Moneybags lounging at Park Place.
Meanwhile these millennial scourges of corporations and the rich can’t figure out that their comfortable, nutritious, gadget-filled lives are subsidized by the surplus wealth created by the capitalist economy. Similarly the like-minded professors and public employee unions cheering along with them have no clue that their Cadillac pensions are funded by investments in those same corporations that they love to hear Bernie and Hillary demonize.
...
But in the end, those are flaws of human nature and human character, not of capitalism. Those attacking capitalism because it gives scope to greed and inequality should remember that throughout history––the same history no longer taught in our failed schools and universities–– revolutions aiming to create virtue and equality through autocratic power over people and economies have left behind gulags and corpses, misery and scarcity. So to paraphrase Churchill, capitalism is the worst form of economic system––except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.
Two Cheers for Capitalism
