A consistent theme of Hillsdale College's reports the past two years is
that far-Left Progressive thinking has been embraced by our youth – look @ the height of the blue lines on the above graphic. The blue lines are too high in all 22 categories shown for a country founded on limited government, personal responsibility, & free enterprise capitalism but the graphic specifically shows that more millennials (under 30 category) prefer socialism than capitalism & Democrats are equally divided.
Gallup has just completed an up to the minute study & found that Democrats continue the slide toward socialism & are no longer equally divided but now 57% of Democrats & Democrat leaning Independents have a positive view of socialism to 47% capitalism.
Numbers don't add to 100% because some Democrats have positive views of both capitalism & socialism – the numbers shown on the table below for 2010, 2012, & 2016 essentially match the 50-50 spilt shown on the above graph which was formulated before 2018.
click on table to enlarge Hillsdale also reports that avowed Democrat Socialist Bernie Sanders won the vote of 72% of Democrat presidential primary voters age 17 to 29 which amounted to
over 13 million votes (more than Trump & Hillary combined)
by advocating a tuition-free college education, a $15 federal minimum wage, & a single payer universal government healthcare system currently called Medicare for All. Forty-five percent
of Bernie's voters were college graduates. Also 45% of millennials prefer to live in a socialist country rather than the U.S. – no word on any of these polls regarding when they are moving.
It appears that Bernie is positioning himself for another run for President in 2020 along with his fellow Democrat senators Kamala Harris (CA), Corey Booker (NJ), Kirsten Gillibrand (NY), & Elizabeth Warren (MA) – all of whom have endorsed Bernie's Democrat-Socialist ideas & have thrown in abolishing U.S. Immigration & Customs Enforcement (ICE) to boot. It is hard to take these people seriously but I take them deadly seriously because they are trying to destroy America under the banner of political correctness, welfare systems, weakness, & victimhood. Capitalists mock them @ their own peril.
We all know by now that ten-term Congressman Joe Crowley (also Chair of the House Democrat Caucus, the 4th highest Democrat leadership position) underestimated a Bernie acolyte – 28 year old Democrat-Socialist Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez in the June 26 NY primary. Cortez won receiving 57.1% (15,897 votes) to Crowley's 42.5% (11,761) in the NYC district that includes the eastern Bronx & part of north-central Queens – the turnout was 12.9% meaning that Cortez received 7.4% of the registered vote & won the primary by 1.9% of that vote. Crowley had won the district in 2016 with 83% of the vote in a much bigger turnout.
Cortez graduated cum laude in 2011 with a bachelor's degree in economics & international relations from Boston University (BU) – these are impressive academic credentials but the problem is Cortez does not speak the lingo & never worked in her field of study – she was most recently a bartender before winning the primary. Readers of this blog who are also FairTax supporters are very familiar with the Economics Department @ BU & in particular Professor Lawrence Kotlikoff who has written many papers on the FairTax before he switched to his own creation known as the Purple Tax. Based on Cortez's appearances on TV since winning her primary it is not clear whether or not she took any courses from Professor Kotlikoff before being awarded her degree.
In any event Cortez will be the second Democrat Socialist in Congress, after Bernie, if she wins in November. Her opponent is Anthony Pappas, an Associate Professor of Economics @ St. John's University so the debates, if any, should be fun. Crowley's name remains on a third-party ballot line in November's mid-term election due to an arcane NY state election law.
But Cortez has not been the only Democrat Socialist to run in the primaries. Most notably Cortez campaigned for Abdul El-Sayed who finished second while receiving 340,560 votes (30.0%) in a three way Democrat gubernatorial primary in Michigan on August 7. Although El-Sayed lost the primary, 340,560 votes is way too many to feel complacent.
Also, on another front & affront the Daily Caller reports "Young Democrat Socialists of America (YDSA) says it currently has 57 registered chapters on college campuses . . . up from just 15 in 2016."
Now Democrat Socialists like Bernie Sanders believe in expanded government - Bernie's plan principally calls for Medicare For All, a single payer healthcare plan costing $15 T, Social Security benefit expansion of $1.2 T, an infrastructure plan to rebuild roads, airports, & bridges for $1.0 T, tuition free public colleges & more favorable financing for $750 B, paid family & medical leave for $319 B, bolstering private pension funds for $29 B, & a youth jobs initiative creating 1-million job for disadvantaged youth for $5.5 B. Total additional cost over 10 years is over $18 T, which as a share of the economy represents a bigger increase in government spending than FDR's New Deal or LBJ's Great society. Although @ the time Bernie's campaign had not finalized the details of the programs or any cost estimates Warren Runnels, Bernie's campaign policy director acknowledged "Senator Sanders agenda does cost money. If you look @ the problems out there, it's very reasonable."
Well, the programs did become better defined – in 2017 Bernie introduced the Medicare for All Act & he has 16 co-sponsors. In July, 70 House members started the Medicare for All Caucus – this caucus is twice the size of Congressman Jim Jordan's Freedom Caucus. Accordingly, the cost estimates increased dramatically from what is indicated above.
Dr. Charles Blahous, public trustee for Social Security & Medicare from 2010 to 2015, has calculated that Medicare for All, as envisioned, would increase federal spending by $32.6 trillion in the first decade of the program – this assumes the implementation of the program would successfully cut all healthcare provider payments down to Medicare reimbursement rates, which are more than 40% lower than private insurer rates & even below provider's costs in many cases. Without such cuts in provider reimbursement rates the increase in federal spending for Medicare for All would be $38 trillion during the programs first ten years according to Dr. Blahous.
Similar calculations regarding the enormity of the Medicare for All costs have been made by the Urban Institute, the Center for Health & Economy, & Emory scholar Kenneth Thorpe.
Now we can get a good idea in microcosm of where the above problems will lead us when we look @ the current unsustainable retirement promises made to millions of public sector workers over the years; e.g., NJ's pension program is so underfunded it could run out of money in twelve years – source, Pew Charitable Trust Study.
The graphic below shows that from 2001 to 2016 employer's contributions to state & local pensions increased four fold while for the same period the funding ratio dropped from fully funded to below three quarters funded meaning that accrued liabilities increased faster than the growth of the economies in many states including NJ, IL, CT, NH, & KY. These states, & many others, would have to raise billions of dollars more to even have a chance to adequately fund the promised pension benefits.
click on graphic to enlarge
So how did America go from originally being a country of pioneers who came to a desolate wilderness & in less than one century built not only the most prosperous country in the 6,000 years of human history but in fact the whole modern world, to one where the majority of both its youth & Democrats plus far too many in every demographic prefer a planned socialist economy that wastes time, human energy, & human life – a country where schools create oversensitive students & young adults because the schools spend far too much time comforting & coddling them instead of teaching that living is not easy or as I am wont to say "It is hell making a living in the world."
First we all have to face heat, cold, storms, floods, & drought – all of which are deadly enemies of every human being – think Houston hurricane Harvey in 2017. We also have to prepare ourselves to compete against every human being on the planet to earn a living. Free enterprise capitalism best equips man to both overcome these natural obstacles & satisfy human needs to live in prosperity.
Our American ancestors looked @ man as a heroic being who lives by his own effort, achievement, & reasoning ability & accordingly does not give or receive the undeserved, who honors accomplishment, & rejects envy. This view is being replaced by a desire for free college for all, Medicare for All, & a guaranteed living wage where a handful of elites think they know better what is good for people than those very people do for themselves.
Our forefathers either suspected, believed, or knew that the indispensible foundation of a free society is individual rights & that free enterprise capitalism is the only system that can uphold & protect individual rights. Our forefathers were certain that men are inherently free by nature of their God-given humanity & that it was this freedom in America that created the condition in which human beings used their natural freedom to produce the energy that resulted in the highest living standard ever known on earth. On the contrary, throughout 6,000 years of human Old World history socialism was always part of the pagan god view of man that all individuals by their nature are controlled outside themselves by some Authority of a few men & according to the plans of these men (i.e., government) – it is this belief in a false Authority over man that restricted & held mankind back for 60 centuries until the American Republic was founded.
Free enterprise capitalism is the natural use of man's energy to get from this earth the necessities for maintaining human life via the most productive means possible – private ownership of businesses run for profit. Socialism restricts this natural use of human energy so that people no longer create any new wealth & finally starve to death – think Venezuela. A socialist planned economy, one in which the government owns or regulates the means of production, distribution, & exchange, ultimately destroys its own government because when men use force to try to control or regulate productive energies, they have no means of knowing real costs, & these costs automatically increase @ an increasing rate until the people can no longer pay them – think the U.S.S.R.
America got into this capitalism–socialism predicament because of the simple reason Professor Friedman noted @ the very top of this post – government schools, i.e., socialist institutions, do not teach free enterprise capitalism, they teach the lie of the reputed benefits of socialism without ever presenting any of the reasons socialism has never worked or lasted in any country on earth. Government schools teach socialism as a utopia fully knowing that it isn't so without ever explaining that Karl Marx regarded socialism as a transition state between the overthrow of capitalism & the realization of communism. The entrenchment of these socialist teachings is why Neal Boortz said that the teachers' unions & government schools are more dangerous to America's future than al Qaeda.
So never being taught, or realizing, the principles of free enterprise capitalism the majority of millennials are unaware of what they are throwing away – what they are letting slip through their fingers. But even worse - click here to find out that they don't even know what they are getting in socialism.
Reference book: The Discovery Of Freedom, Rose Wilder Lane
