We stopped teaching the story of prosperity

You can’t value what you don’t understand, and we stopped explaining what made modern life possible

“Socialism is a philosophy of failure, the creed of ignorance, and the gospel of envy, its inherent virtue is the equal sharing of misery.”

—Winston Churchill

I saw a fairly alarming stat the other day: 62% of Americans under 30 now express a favorable view of socialism, according to a Cato/YouGov survey. This is not just one survey, the results are similarly mirrored by data from GALLUP, and if you’re observing what’s happening around us (some American politicians explicitly promoting socialist ideas tried and failed in the Soviet Union) it could actually be around this high. Two-thirds of young Americans warming to an economic system with a body count that dwarfs history’s worst catastrophes is …concerning to say the least. Some of you might be sitting here wondering why, although I don’t think it’s particularly mysterious.

At least one main answer is obvious: we’re failing to educate young people about the global successes of capitalism, both in school and in the culture. As a story in the Wall Street Journal by Samuel J. Abrams, a professor at Sarah Lawrence College and senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute recently noted, students are, and I’m quoting from the article: “arriving to campus not only skeptical of free markets, but openly embracing socialist ideas. The problem isn’t that students have rejected capitalism. It’s that many have never been taught how it works or why it matters.” This is a generation that was handed one (continually failed) side of a debate and had it branded education, never having the full story. In just 2 centuries, capitalism has driven extreme poverty down from over 80% of the world to under 10%, doubled global life expectancy and lifted billions out of subsistence, arguably the greatest improvement in human living standards in history. And people think this is evil!

Capitalism is the greatest engine for prosperity and fairness the world has ever known, and it even works fast once implemented

Sober professors across the country are starting to admit the problem. Jonathan Zimmerman, a 30-year Penn faculty veteran, recently wrote in The Chronicle of Higher Education that despite universities' stated commitment to "critical thinking," they "typically present one side of an issue — the left-wing side, almost always — and call it a day." He calls it not just political bias, but "a mark of bad teaching." Predictably (and depressingly) his colleagues responded to his call for self-examination at a conference with silence, followed by a language policing session. An institution that can't handle one dissenting professor in a conference room has no business claiming it's training students to think freely. Just read this passage from the story and see if you can honestly say these people haven’t lost the plot (it’s almost like they’re cult members). It’s perfectly emblematic of the problem, and it’s widespread across our universities and in the broader culture. Yuri Bezmenov tried to warn us.

The faculty lean left, the research biases left, the students are supporting leftist economic systems …commenters here like to debate the reasons why, but these are still the facts

We’ve talked about the academic bias data before, where a peer-reviewed Oxford study of roughly 600,000 social science abstracts found that approximately 90% of politically relevant research leaned left, in every discipline, every year studied. And we shared analysis of Buckley Institute’s undergraduate survey, where 46% of students think nations like Cuba and the Soviet Union offer a better economic model than the United States. Cuba, where the average monthly salary is around $20. Venezuela, which sat on the world’s largest proven oil reserves and still managed to produce mass starvation, empty supermarket shelves, and a refugee crisis of millions. The Soviet Union, which killed tens of millions of its own people through engineered famine, gulags, and political terror before collapsing under the weight of its own inefficiencies. These are the destinations that central planning reliably reaches. This is real socialism, and it’s been tried.

What's particularly striking is that the socialist sympathies don't exist in isolation, they're part of a broader ideological package students absorb on campus (and online, before they graduate high school). As we've covered in the DEI era's postmortem, the dominant campus framework in many universities for the past decade has been fundamentally Marxist in structure: society divided into oppressors and oppressed, America cast as a colonial villain, and Western institutions treated as the root of all suffering rather than the source of most of the world's hard-won freedoms. When that's the water you swim in, rooting for authoritarian socialists is where you can easily end up. A generation trained to see their own civilization as uniquely guilty is naturally more sympathetic to regimes that oppose it, even when those regimes would jail or kill the very students championing them. It’s how you get kids openly rooting for terrorists and sympathetic to regimes that are openly hostile to liberal democratic values.

As commenters here have pointed out before, and I agree with them on, most students thankfully don’t grow up to become political zealots (note how it’s mostly senior citizens who even go to protests, as one example). But it’s naïve to ignore they are at the very least being nudged one particular direction, the data from pretty much every source reads this cleanly. Anyway here’s what normal students actually want, and we should work to deliver on: they want affordability, fairness, and economic security. About three-quarters of Millennials and Gen Z see the costs of healthcare, college, and housing as a serious problem for a stable society, and all of those costs have risen considerably in real terms. The frustration is real and it deserves serious engagement.

But the answer to expensive housing isn’t a system that produces no housing. The answer to unaffordable healthcare isn’t a system that produces no medicine worth having or starts promoting a system like Canada’s MAID program (so incredibly dystopian). The answer to inequality isn’t a model whose primary historical output has been equally distributed misery. Ironically, it’s forms of government intervention of free markets, poor policy decisions and artificial restriction of supply that cause most of our problems. Capitalism is great and what actually works, when our leaders and institutions don’t get in their own way.

The students aren’t the problem. The gap in their education is, as are institutions which continually spread anti-capitalist messaging and mistakenly believe their own country is evil and oppressive. A generation that genuinely understands what markets do (how they allocate resources, generate innovation, lift living standards) and what happens when governments replace them, would not be this confused. The data is in, and it’s been in for decades. Cuba, Venezuela, the Soviet Union ran the experiment at enormous human cost so we wouldn’t have to. The least we can do is teach it, so we are not doomed to suffer through this historic mistake.