And they are very lucky to be in America.
The only problem is that they don’t seem to appreciate any of it very much. Yes, I know that makes me sound like my grandfather, but it’s true. After all, our kids could easily be living in the Soviet Union of 1990, where, as a Washington Post report put it, “the state-run shops are so barren” that to find a pair of jeans in Moscow a Russian had to resort to bribery or an illegal “black market.”
Or they could be living in Equatorial Guinea, where President Obiang Nguema Mbasogo has ruled since seizing power in a military coup in 1979. There, “the government owned the only national radio and television broadcast system, RTVGE. The president’s eldest son owned the only private broadcast media.” I’m pretty sure our students wouldn’t appreciate having Teen Mom or Jersey Shore replaced with constant reruns of The Thousand Greatest Things About President Mbasogo.
And if you think that would tick them off, imagine how they’d react if they lived in Turkmenistan, where, the State Department reports, the government of President Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov “suspended the operation of the privately owned . . . Mobile TeleSystems (MTS), leaving approximately 2.5 million persons—half of the country’s population and 80 percent of the mobile-phone users—without use of their mobile phones or access to the Internet.”
Of course, all of that pales in comparison to being deprived of pizza, burgers, ice cream, and beer—the essential food groups of college students. But that’s exactly what would happen if they lived in North Korea. Because of the failures of the communist economy, food shortages are so severe in North Korea that several studies have found their citizens to be inches shorter than South Koreans.
All of this raises a profound question: Why is it that Third World dictators always have names like Obiang Nguema Mbasogo or Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov?
No, sorry, I got sidetracked, that’s not the profound question, this is: Given how much America’s style of free-market capitalism has given to America’s youth, why do they resent it so much? It’s incredible that we have done such a poor job in explaining and defending capitalism that we are even in this position, but that’s the reality. Like it or not, progressives are winning the battle for our kids, teaching them that capitalism is outmoded at best, evil at worst. If we don’t reverse the trend quickly there will soon be nothing left of capitalism to defend.
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Kids Say the Darnedest Things
One young man at an Occupy Wall Street event, who introduced himself as a veteran of Tahrir Square, summed up the way many young people seem to feel: “They have their laws, they have their debts,” he said, “and we have our Revolution.”
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THE NAME GAME
First, the good news: we have the winning argument. The data, both anecdotal and real, that proves the triumph of capitalism over all other economic systems is on our side; we’ve just done nothing with it. We’ve taken for granted that the youth would see the amazing life that capitalism has created for them and want it to continue. But we were wrong. So now it’s time to stop being passive and instead get out there and make our case. This can no longer be “the system that brought us to the brink of another Great Depression.” It must instead be “the system that has put that iPhone in your pocket, allowed your parents to buy the home you grew up in, and will one day provide you with a meaningful job.”
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What’s in a Word?
Maybe it’s the actual word capitalism that’s the problem? As you’ve probably heard me say before, “change the language and you change the argument.”
Republican strategist Frank Luntz’s polling firm found that “[t]he public . . . prefers capitalism to socialism, but they think capitalism is immoral. And if we’re seen as defenders of quote, Wall Street, end quote, we’ve got a problem.”
A Gallup poll found that 86 percent of Americans had a positive image of “free enterprise” but only 61 percent had a positive image of “capitalism.” Another survey by the U.S. Chamber of Commerce found that while 65 percent of small business owners had a positive impression of “free enterprise,” only 45 percent think capitalism is a good idea—even though they’re the same thing.
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It’s pretty clear exactly where we need to focus our attention in this sales effort. A recent Pew poll asked adults for their reaction to certain words. Socialism was viewed negatively by 59 percent and positively by 29 percent, while capitalism was viewed positively by 52 percent and negatively by 37 percent.
Advantage: capitalism.
So far, so good, but here’s the catch: among people ages eighteen to twenty-nine, the results changed dramatically: 43 percent were positive toward socialism, and 43 percent were positive toward capitalism. Meanwhile, 49 percent were negative toward socialism and 48 percent negative toward capitalism. It was virtually a dead heat.
If we didn’t already know it intuitively just by looking around, the data proves it conclusively: we are losing the youth. And, once we do, we have lost the essence of America, forever. Remember Reagan’s warning: “Perhaps you and I have lived with this miracle too long to be properly appreciative. Freedom is a fragile thing and is never more than one generation away from extinction. It is not ours by inheritance; it must be fought for and defended constantly by each generation, for it comes only once to a people. Those who have known freedom and then lost it have never known it again.”
One left-wing professor, writing on the progressive website “Common Dreams,” celebrated the ongoing progressive victory in changing the hearts and minds of our youth. “Young people cannot be characterized as a capitalist generation,” he wrote. “They are half capitalist and half socialist. Since the socialist leaning keeps rising among the young, it suggests—depending on how you interpret ‘socialism’—that we are moving toward an America that is either Center-Left or actually majoritarian socialist.”
If you’re a lover of capitalism like me, that’s hard to hear—but he’s absolutely right, that is the way we are moving. Whether it is the young people at Occupy Wall Street rallies or ones that you know in your own life, there’s plenty of anecdotal evidence for the idea that capitalism has an image problem with younger Americans.
THE ACCIDENT OF HISTORY
Here’s the understatement of the century: World War II was a pretty big deal. Those who lived through it, or bravely fought in it, are likely to never forget that Nazism was short for “National Socialism.” They are also likely to never forget that it was a really, really, horribly bad idea that eventually cost the lives of millions of innocent people.
The Cold War with the Soviet Union and its puppet states in Eastern Europe was a very big deal, too. The generation of Americans who lived through that likely remember that U.S.S.R. was an abbreviation for the “Union of Soviet Socialist Republics.” That generation also likely remembers that the Soviet Union was such a bad idea that they had to build a wall to keep people in and shoot those who tried to escape.
People who are in college now are too young to remember the U.S.S.R. in its evil-empire heyday, and their history teachers have barely taught them about the American Revolution, let alone modern European history. When our kids think about Russia or Eastern Europe today, the words that likely come to mind are “fashion models” or “billionaires in mega-yachts,” not “failed socialist menace” or the “nuclear holocaust.”
It’s counterintuitive, but it’s actually been a disadvantage (at least as far as making this argument is concerned) that no country with a state-run economy has risen to threaten America in recent years the way that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did. There is no “evil empire” anymore that Americans can rally against or compare themselves to. Turkmenistan and Equatorial Guinea aren’t exactly the stuff of front-page headlines. Sure, Iran and North Korea are serious threats in terms of their ability to wreak havoc with a nuclear weapon. And China does challenge America, though its economy has grown stronger largely by adding more capitalism, not le
ss. But none of them, at least for now, is even close to the scale of a Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.
But it’s not merely an accident of history that has strengthened support for socialism among our youth. Another big part of the story is the way these young people are being bombarded with anticapitalist messages in popular culture and in schools.
SOCIAL(ISM) STUDIES
It starts the moment a parent brings their child to a playgroup or to a park with a sandbox. The message to children with toys is “share everything,” as the line of Robert Fulghum’s bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten puts it.
That may make for more peaceful playgrounds and playdates, and kids obviously need to learn how to share, but it’s easy for that message to be taken to extremes. The children’s book The Rainbow Fish tells the story of a fish with special shiny scales who decides to give them away to the other fish. According to the book’s conclusion, “His most prized possessions had been given away, yet he was very happy.” At the end, the rainbow fish is no longer different from the other fishes because he has ripped the scales off his own body to give them to others. One negative (although sadly accurate) review at Amazon.com is titled, “Great for the young communist and socialist.”
Children’s movies haven’t been much better. Disney’s The Muppets, a family-oriented film that came out in December 2011, has a plot that is summarized on the movie’s website thus:
On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter—the world’s biggest Muppet fan—his brother Gary, and Gary’s girlfriend Amy from Smalltown, USA, discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath.
As one critic wondered, why do these movies never seem to be about nefarious plans by evil poor environmentalists to turn the Muppet Theater into a wildlife refuge or wind farm?
After the books and movies a child finally graduates to school, where, as we covered in the previous chapter, any chance they stood of becoming a procapitalist adult quickly vanishes.
One thing that really shocked me as I researched this was the content in the textbooks themselves. It’s one thing to have a liberal teacher tell kids what to think, but it’s another thing to have a textbook—something that should be completely void of political commentary—blatantly argue against capitalism.
Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, looked at high school economics textbooks and found that “errors abound.” But that’s a huge understatement. I think what he found is less about errors and more about very carefully crafted political speech clearly meant to subtly influence our students. For example:
“Despite fears by some Americans that governmental tampering with the free enterprise system would be harmful, most government policies have met with success.”—from David E. O’Connor’s Economics—Free Enterprise in Action
“Under a balanced budget, the government would not be able to do things that many people think it should do, like building roads and providing for the needy.”—Henry Billings, Introduction to Economics
“As societies become more complex, the need for government power tends to increase.”—Sanford Gordon and Alan Stafford’s Applying Economic Principles
These opinions clearly rub off on students. The Higher Education Research Institute surveys tens of thousands of college students from dozens of different institutions each year when they arrive on campus as freshmen, and then again when they leave as seniors. Here are the results of one recent survey:
Change in Life Goals
Percent of students reporting that the following are “essential” or “very important” to them:
At college entry
At end of college
Change
Becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment
19.9
30.2
+10.3
Helping others who are in difficulty
70.0
76.6
+6.6
Becoming successful in a business of my own
36.2
35.2
-1.0
Being very well-off financially
67.2
59.9
-7.3
Change in Political Values
Students’ characterization of their political views:
At college entry
At end of college
Change
Liberal or far left
29.8
39.0
+9.2
Conservative or far right
30.3
23.7
-6.6
In other words, students entered college about evenly split between being liberal and conservative, but after four years of propaganda, the liberals gained a 15-percentage-point advantage. College made the students a lot more likely to want to clean up the environment, but less likely to want to be well-off financially or successful in their own businesses.
The point is that we face an increasingly steep uphill battle. It’s not just books or just movies or just liberal teachers and textbooks—it’s all of it. To fight back we are going to have to do a lot more than just attack the messengers; we’re going to have to attack the message itself.
EARNING IS LEARNING
Most young people have rebellious, anti-authoritarian impulses. They don’t like being told what, when, or how to do something. It’s ironic, then, that many of these same people embrace a system in which there would be far more regulations, many more bureaucrats micromanaging their lives, and far more rules and restrictions on how things can be done.
And that is the beauty of the free-enterprise movement: it has the word free right there in the title. Yet when we think of these “rebellious” youths we don’t think of them joining their “Young Republicans” club at school; we think of them camping overnight at Occupy protests or road-tripping to an Obama event.
Why?
Simple: we’ve done an absolutely terrible job at selling the message. Capitalism isn’t “cool.” It’s not something you fight for or get excited about. But it can be. In fact, it should be; a free market is the very thing that gives every American kid the hope that they’ll achieve their dream. After all, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, very few twelve-year-olds are going to answer “class warrior,” or “environmental activist,” or “welfare recipient.”
But the job of selling this message of freedom of opportunity can’t just happen in the classroom (that battle is lost for the foreseeable future) or in the bookstore or cinema—it must happen at home. Parents have an enormous role to play in this effort, not by mandating that little Johnny become the next Milton Friedman (remember, mandates don’t work) but by showing them what it really means.
I’d love to take my son Raphe out and open up a lemonade stand with him. I’ll show him how to market his stand, how to get people to tell others it’s the best lemonade they’ve ever had, and how to change his prices throughout the day based on the demand. I’ll tell him that he should work as hard as he can because he’ll get to keep every cent he makes; he’ll just have to pay me for the supplies.
The following weekend I’ll take him out again. This time I’ll tell him that, no matter what happens, he’ll get to keep just five dollars at the end of the day. If he makes less than that, I’ll pay him the difference. If he makes more, he’ll give me the excess.
I’m pretty sure this little exercise wouldn’t make me Father of the Year, but hopefully it would give my son something tangible to think about as he grows up. It’s one thing to hear “redistribution of wealth,” and it’s another thing entirely to put in a long hard day of work only to have your money taken away.
Another option for parents is foreign travel. Exposing kids to the “real world” outside of America can have a lot of benefits. Seeing the struggles and the challenges of day-to-day life—the shortages, the corruption—can help to drive home the advantages of free enterprise.
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If Only We All Had Yachts
One highly successful capitalist had a child who went off to England to study after graduating from high school. He came home “immersed in the idea and ideals of socialism,” declaring himself in favor “of all people sharing equally in the world’s wealth.” The child’s mother told him, fine, if that’s what he believed, they’d take away his cherished boat, and he could spend his time just fishing off the pier. The defender of capitalism, in this case, was, of all people, Rose Kennedy, and the young socialist was Joe Kennedy Jr., who didn’t want to give up the boat, and who later died in World War II.
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Admittedly, a trip like that isn’t for everyone; it’s a lot riskier than just reading about the country on the Web. And if you wind up detained by Obiang Nguema Mbasogo or Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, don’t count on me coming to rescue you.
A less aggressive approach is to ensure that our kids spend some time with immigrants who have come to America from countries with much different views on economic freedom. Some of the most enthusiastic defenders of capitalism I’ve ever met, not to mention its most successful practitioners, are those who came here as legal immigrants or refugees fleeing Castro’s Cuba or Communist China or the Soviet Union. They understand firsthand the disadvantages of the system they left behind.