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Thread: 3 Reasons Why So Many Millennials Love Socialism - Michael Brown

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    3 Reasons Why So Many Millennials Love Socialism - Michael Brown

    It's true that socialist Bernie Sanders is anything but a millennial. And it's true that socialism was popular long before any millennials were born. But there's no doubt that socialism is becoming increasingly popular among young people today. Why?

    According to the Daily Caller, "Young people view socialism as more attractive than older people. Of people ages 18-29, 55 percent considered socialism favorably compared to other age groups, according to a 2016 Gallup poll. Only 37 percent of people between the ages 30 and 49 viewed socialism as positive. 27% percent of people between 50 and 64 years old thought of socialism positively."

    So, millennials, especially younger millennials, have a very favorable view of socialism. But do they – or most of us – even know what it is?

    Prof. Jay Richards offers this helpful primer.

    "Marx and his disciples claimed that 'capitalism' must give way to 'socialism,' where private property would be abolished and an all-powerful state would own everything on behalf of the people. That's what Marx meant by the word socialism, and that's the main dictionary definition.

    "This was only supposed to be a stage, though, not the end of all our strivings. At some point, under socialism, people would lose their silly fondness for property, family, religion, and other evils. A 'new socialist man' would emerge and then the state would 'wither away.' Everyone would enjoy peace, prosperity, and the brotherhood of man. Marx and his acolytes called that final, stateless paradise 'communism.'"

    And how has that vision worked itself out in history?

    Prof. Richards states: "Here's the point: Those regimes led by mass murderers with their gulags, death camps, man-made famines and killing fields were socialist. That's not slander. It's what these countries called themselves. USSR stood for the 'Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.'

    "You gotta break millions of eggs with socialism to make the communist omelet. Socialism, you might say, was the necessary evil to reach the bliss where no state would be necessary."

    Yet the lure of socialism continues, getting stronger in the last few years, especially among American youth. Why?

    Here are three simple reasons.

    1) Young people want "equality." The word "equality" has become almost sacred to the younger generation, and in many ways, that's a good thing. They want a level playing field. They want everyone treated fairly. They want to leave behind our discriminatory, racist past. All that is positive.

    Unfortunately, there is often a passion for equality that is not based on realism (or function, as in all the talk about "marriage equality," where sex differences are blurred).

    The fact is that life is not always fair. There are winners and losers. And some people work harder than others, because of which they succeed more.

    That success is well-deserved and should be appreciated. But all too often today, success through hard work is scorned.

    Question: "Why should you have more than I do?"

    Answer: "Because I worked hard for it."

    Response: "But that's not fair."

    Socialism, then, is the fix!


    2) Young people today have a deep sense of entitlement. Conservapedia.com defines the entitlement mentality as "a state of mind in which an individual comes to believe that privileges are instead rights, and that they are to be expected as a matter of course."

    I am owed a free lunch, and it's got to be a good lunch too. The lunch of my choosing. I deserve it.

    As explained by Dr. John Townsend in his book The Entitlement Cure, "Entitlement is the belief that I am exempt from responsibility and I am owed special treatment. Entitlement is: The man who thinks he is above all the rules. The woman who feels mistreated and needs others to make it up to her."

    This dangerous attitude is crippling a whole generation. As expressed by Kate S. Rourke in her article, "You Owe Me: Examining a Generation of Entitlement," "Children in the most recent generation of adults born between 1982 and 1995, known as 'Generation Y,' were raised to believe that it is their right to have everything given to them more than any other previous generation."

    Socialism plays right into this mindset, especially the fuzzy, idealized, quite-unrealistic socialism being put forward today: "We all get our free lunch!"

    Unfortunately, that can only happen when the government owns all the lunches. Do young people understand this?

    3) Young socialists haven't done the math. The obvious question is this: "If you're getting a free lunch – no, if we're all getting a free lunch – who's paying for it?"

    The immediate, thoughtless answer is: "The government!"

    And that leads to the real question: "Who's paying the government?"

    The answer is as painful as it is obvious: "You are!"


    As one news commentator suggested, there's no reason to wait for the government to become socialist. Just start paying more taxes today and do your part. Right!

    Do you remember the viral video clip where a young Florida woman, Peggy Joseph, was ecstatic after hearing candidate Barack Obama speak in 2008? She said, "I won't have to worry about puttin' gas in my car, I won't have to worry about payin' my mortgage." Obama will take care of it!

    Six years later, working as a nurse and the suburban mom of four kids, she was asked by filmmaker Joel Gilbert, "Did Obama pay for your mortgage and did he pay for your gas?"

    She laughed and replied, "Absolutely not! Mortgage got worse and gas prices got higher ... At that time we needed a change but a change for the better not the worse."

    When I asked my assistant Dylan, himself in his early 30's and the married father of four, why he thought so many young people were into socialism, he answered, "Perhaps because of being so absorbed with social media that they're used to soundbite answers and haven't thought it through."

    Or, as Jay Richards stated, "Too many of us are still clueless about socialism and communism. I blame biased media and fuzzy thinking."

    The bottom line is that most young proponents of socialism simply haven't done the math. Had they done so, they'd start working the capitalist system a little harder. They would find it far more rewarding than socialism.

    https://askdrbrown.org/library/3-rea...love-socialism

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    Senior Member Colonel's Avatar
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    The problem is that most people don't think of Socialism as what Marx etc defined it as but rather as a direction away from market anarchy (the polar opposite). To some Americans, a government imposing slightly more economic control and equality than it does now might be seen as embodying Socialism even though a citizen of a more socialistic country in other parts of the world might see the same government as embodying Capitalism more than anything else. This becomes very relative and this relativism expresses itself in surveys. If people had been presented with a brutal version of the original definition of Socialism then the result of a corresponding survey would be very different.

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    Senior Member Colonel's Avatar
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    To compare the mentioned relativism to something. Our neighboring country Sweden has been receiving something like ten times as many refugees as we do, for some time. They have a right wing party called "the Sweden democrats" that is seen by many as Racist and very anti-immigrant, but they are doing well in polls and elections. What they actually advocate is that Sweden should receive about as many refugees as what Norwegian pro-immigrant parties advocate that Norway should increase its numbers to. But the ideology of the Sweden democrats is arguably very different to the ideology of the Norwegian pro-immigrant parties in question. Even though the results are similar, the directions they advocate relative to the societies they are addressing, are very different. One party is anti-immigrant to Swedes, the others are pro-immigrant to Norwegians.

  5. #4
    This is the same bunch raised in the “everybody gets a trophy” generation. I wonder how they would do if I walked over and swiped their iphone and said “that’s mine”. They would undoubtedly scream, fuss and cry “that’s not fair”. Yup, that’s socialism on the local level. Quite humorously, this all reminds me of the missionary sent to the “socialist” tribe in “The Pineapple Story”.

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  7. #5
    Echoing Colonel, columnist/economist Paul Krugman noted that the term "socialist" has been so watered down from its classical meaning that it's to be expected that many people are happy to call themselves socialist:

    A number of people on the U.S. right, and some self-proclaimed centrists, seem totally taken aback by the rise of politicians who call themselves socialist. But this rise was predictable and predicted.

    Here's what happened: for decades the right has tried to shout down any attempt to sand down some of the rough edges of capitalism, whether through health guarantees, income supports, or anything else, by yelling "socialism." Sooner or later people were bound to say that if any attempt to make our system less harsh is socialism, well, they're socialists.

    The truth is that there are hardly any people in the U.S. who want the government to seize the means of production, or even the economy's commanding heights. What they want is social democracy – the kinds of basic guarantees of health care, protection against poverty, etc., that almost every other advanced country provides.

    --- https://www.nytimes.com/2018/08/05/o...-republic.html

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  9. #6
    Socialism is another kind of stealing. And that is chief reason for the hatred of the Bible.

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