Socialism is having a moment.
I'm not just referring to Bernie
Sanders' surprisingly strong showing in the Democratic primaries. Various polls
show that millennials have a more favorable view of socialism than of
capitalism. And millennials generally are the only age group that views
socialism more favorably than unfavorably.
Some conservatives aren't surprised.
Schools have been force-feeding left-wing propaganda to kids like it was feed
for geese at a foie gras factory.
On the other hand, what are we to
make of the fact that only a fraction of the young people who say they like
socialism can explain what it is? If left-wing indoctrination is so effective
at getting kids to like socialism, you'd think it would have more success at
getting kids to at least parrot back a serviceable definition.
Regardless, this is a familiar tale.
Young people have a well-documented tendency of skipping facts and arguments
and going straight to conclusions.
Writing in The Federalist, Emily
Ekins and Joy Pullmann note that many of these young people think socialism is
federally mandated niceness. A 2014 Reason-Rupe survey asked millennials to
define socialism. They had in mind a more generous safety net, more kindness
and, as one put it, more "being together."
But when asked if they agreed with a
more technically accurate definition of socialism -- government control of the
economy -- support dropped considerably (though not nearly enough). Given a
choice between a government-managed economy and a free-market economy,
millennials overwhelmingly chose the latter. It seems young people realize that
putting bureaucrats in charge of Uber wouldn't work too well.
Still, it boggles the mind that
anyone can see the folly of having the government take-over Amazon or Facebook
but be blind to the problems of having the government run health care.
More intriguing to me is the fact
that kids who don't know what textbook socialism is actually have a better
understanding of what drives socialism in the first place.
Karl Marx was one of the worst
things to ever happen to socialism, and not just because he set the world on a
path to the murder, oppression and enslavement of millions upon millions of
people. It was Marx and his confreres who convinced the intellectual classes
that socialism was a strictly "scientific" doctrine. For generations,
economists -- real and so-called -- worked on the assumption that the economy
could be run like a machine. Just as engineers had mastered the steam engine
and the transistor, they could do likewise with supply and demand.
For generations, intellectuals --
real and so-called -- argued that economics was best left to
"planners." Time and again, reality -- specifically, the reality
dictated by human desires -- refused to be bent to neatly arrayed columns of
numbers and well-stacked slips of paper. The philosopher-economist Friedrich
Hayek long ago explained that planners suffer from what he called "the
knowledge problem." Even the best bureaucrat couldn't know what customers,
suppliers and managers on the ground wanted or needed.
And each time the planners insisted
that if they just had a little bit more power, a bit more data, a few more
resources, they could make planning work. When all you have is a hammer, you're
inclined to believe that there's no problem a few more nails won't fix.
The Soviet Union and its various
cousins did much to discredit "scientific socialism," what with all
the killing and totalitarianism. The fact that it didn't seem to make people
richer also undermined its appeal. "Scientifically," people didn't
want to be bullied, oppressed or impoverished.
The unrealism of socialism spelled
its undoing -- for a time. The dilemma is that there is a
reality underneath the fraud of scientific socialism. The first socialists were
not economists or technocrats. They were romantics and nostalgists. They
loathed the relentless logic of the market and its reward of merit and
efficiency as judged by the marketplace.
They wanted to return to the
imagined Eden of the noble savage and the state of nature. They wanted to live
in a world of tribal brotherhood and mutual love. Long before the math of
"scientific socialism" there were the emotions of socialism, both
light and dark: egalitarianism and envy.
Young people understandably are
drawn by the promise of "being together." But they think the federal
government can make it happen. If government planners can't even provide goods
and services efficiently, how will they ever provide togetherness?
http://townhall.com/columnists/jonahgoldberg/2016/05/13/millennials-embrace-socialism-but-do-they-know-what-it-is-n2162215
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