Call me cloistered in my NYC bubble but I don't ever hear anyone say "look at Cuba! What a great system they have there!" Or, "wow, Venezuela was really doing something right." Or "Marx really knew what was up!" What I do hear a lot of is people frustrated and angry that .01% of the population control 90% of the economy (or whatever the number is).
As you stated, I think if there were more of an effort on the part of those controlling so much (whether politicians or billionaires) to address the very real issues of affordable healthcare, housing, education etc. there wouldn't be such a backlash toward the idea of "capitalism." But what we see mostly are very bad actors who have taken advantage of a system built by them for them — stretching and breaking the rules with very little pushback or consequences while demanding everyone else play strictly by the rules and quit complaining so much. Trust in the powers that be has eroded so far there may be no coming back.
I think people are searching for a more equitable system — one that allows for innovation, individuality, freedom (of speech, movement, etc) — all the things you hold up as byproducts of "capitalism" — but at the same time recognizes that our country and the "civilized" world has come as far as it has because of strong community — communities that believe that you are "only as strong as your weakest link."
What is sadly on full display is a system governed and run by people who simply don't like people. The resistance you are seeing to "capitalism" is more a resistance to the selfish people in power that are (or at least seem to be) only out to "get theirs." If we had more charitable, honest leaders across the board (government, business, entertainment, etc) we could expect to see not as much resistance to our economic system.
Also, yes, I went to college 20 odd years ago and don't have a great idea of what is happening on campuses now (my son is 10 but my nieces and nephews seem to be enjoying their experiences) but I certainly don't remember my professors demanding I think any one way. There was a ton of open debate amongst students and professors. The goal, it seemed to me, was to get students to break out of their belief systems and to experience and experiment with different ways of thinking — neither right or left or center or whatever. There was no pressure to think one way or another.
Anyhow, as always, thanks for getting the discussions going!
Thoughtful comment here Andrew. And I don’t think the backlash is really against “capitalism” in the pure sense, it’s against a version of it that feels captured, distorted, or unfair. And I think that’s an important distinction. Because the same system that’s produced real inequality is also the one that has driven massive gains in living standards, innovation, and opportunity over time. Both things can be true at once. Still, even on the worst of days it's better than a system where the state has full control over our lives.
To your point on leadership: I think this is actually the crux of it. Bad actors, whether in business or government, erode trust faster than any abstract economic theory ever could. If people feel the rules aren’t applied evenly, or that success is more about access than merit, they’re going to start looking for alternatives, even if those alternatives are poorly defined. I think we need to actually enforce a lot more rules better and have some new ones (IE politicians can't trade stocks etc).
Where I land is: more competition, fewer artificial constraints, better incentives, and for sure higher expectations for the people at the top. A system that rewards value creation and maintains legitimacy.
And on your college experience, a lot of people had that same experience years ago. The concern is that the center of gravity has shifted since then
Agreed all around. I feel like the tycoons of yesteryear were much more civic oriented, albeit ultimately for their own benefit but their own benefit also benefitted the greater good. If we could see more largesse out of our "leaders" I think people would feel much more comfortable with the idea of a system that has enabled these people to live like royalty. Instead we see them launching themselves and their friends into space : \ I'm not saying the ultra wealthy do not give back at all but it certainly would be great to see more parks built, more public schools, more beaches cleaned up, etc. It would go a long way to helping people remember why our economic and governmental system is still one of the best that's ever existed.
And absolutely politicians should not be able to trade stocks!
Good conversation! Many points echo my sentiments. Bad leadership is at the root of it at every level of society. Andrew, your point of giving back was exemplified by Carnegie’s libraries. It’s a gift that keeps giving versus today’s unaccountable philanthropy.
It’s true that the real root of people’s frustration is selfishness, but in my experience that has been conflated with capitalism because our system supposedly “enables and rewards” it. The proposed elixir is usually stronger government. When I try to gently illustrate how the problem is in fact selfish people in business capturing government and using its immense power to entrench their advantages — which has a very different solution set — I get a lot of defensiveness.
Could it be that the 62% of Americans under 30 looking favourably at "socialism" are thinking about countries like Sweden, the UK, Australia, and others in Europe rather than the 'catastrophic' states like the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela? There is a middle ground, working quite well (nothing is ever going to be perfect) in many countries. They have capitalist markets, there is incentive to do well and make money, but a portion of taxes go towards a safety net for those in society that need it, healthcare, public services, the arts etc. Is that such a bad thing?
UK and EU are slowwlllly becoming more socialist than capitalist, so much government control and regulation (lots of it really suicidal). But yes can we please stress the part where we note that capitalism and free markets are what creates any wealth in the first place that might fund social programs. I fear we are not doing a great job of this.
I live in the UK and it is not becoming more socialist at all. I don't know what you are reading, but it is simply not the case. Regulation is there to stop bad actors and protect the public, within the capitalist free market, there can be a balance. It doesn't have to be black or white.
Yeah agree on the last part for sure, as long as the policies aren't constricting freedoms and chilling innovation. Anecdotally, heard unrest from several of my UK friends on the rising tax situation which they aren't too pleased with. Also seen some data that suggests less economic freedom (ie https://www.forthcapital.com/us/articles/record-9-500-millionaires-expected-to-leave-the-uk-this-year), and read stories of entrepreneurs expressing frustration. Of course we have that in America, too.
That exchange at the conference when they censured Zimmerman for “circle the wagons” caused me to literally bark with laughter. Oh my god. We’re so cooked.
I teach 8th Grade US History. Sometimes I feel like I’m overdoing it with the anti-communism, like a caricature of Red Forman. Every year I go out of my way to point out that Stalin and Mao each killed more people than Hitler, facts which never fail to astonish students. I explain how central planning played a greater role than malice. I engage them in discussions asking whether they’d like to be told by their government where to live, what job to do, and how to think; if they think the federal government knows better than they do what’s best for their lives and their communities…
I tell them the story of my friend’s old man, who liked to say “You know what would make this day perfect? Some commie killin’ music.” Then I play CCR while they write essays about the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
It’s a lot, admittedly… more than I would do for 8th graders if I taught in a vacuum. But I know what they’re getting virtually everywhere else. I know what they’ll get in college. And I know that at a higher zoom, I’m a most negligible counterweight. If some of them go to college and tell their Marxist professors to stuff it, I will be very proud.
Respectfully, it's very difficult to educate a generation of kids about the "global successes of capitalism" when the wealth gap is as extreme as it is in this country. You're never going to be able to convince people that are already working hard and can't get ahead that if they just work a little harder everything will pan out. I don't disagree with you that socialism isn't the answer but what we have is not a pure capitalist society. Crony capitalism at best. The fact of the matter is we've socialized the losses and privatize the Gains for the beneficiaries of this system so many times while those companies farm out the jobs that used to make it possible to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" that the under 35ish working class is disillusioned. What we're doing is unsustainable and if there are politicians telling them there's a way to survive without working their hands to the bone they're gonna vote for it. That's to say nothing of the non trivial % of gen z that doesn't want to work at all and will vote for it whether it's the best option or not
I understand - thus I mentioned we have to address the problems our politicians created. And we shouldn't be obnoxious to young people like the boomers have been with the various gaslighting commentary, they are partially to blame for why young people want socialism too if we're being honest.
You know what also really helps is having friends who escaped living under a socialist regime, these people make great educators. Even someone not doing as well as they'd like in America is so far better off than anyone under any socialist regime. We can fix our problems you'd never fix anything there without major, violent change. We don't have to do that.
Reading your comment I think we're enough on the same page honestly (that socialism is still a worse option for everyone).
I accidentally posted my response after the first sentence. No amount of history lessons or even first hand accounts from friends is going to make people forget the fact that the system being pitched to them is not working for them.
Yeah makes more sense now I edited to give a better response. Unlike the boomers I am not going to simply brush off what you say. It's valid, and we should work on fixing it. I can do another post on solutions for why young people shouldn't give up. Doomerism isn't good either
I don't disagree. I try to hire as many young people as I can and teach them a trade that they can make a living at. But let me give you an anecdotal example of what I'm talking about. I have a 25 year old kid that's been working for me for 6 years. Extremely gifted carpenter. Made $85k last year. Wife made probably $50k. No kids but want them. Can't buy a house in a neighborhood they'd want to raise a family in and the houses in the shit neighborhoods the mortgage would still be $2500 a month with a big down payment. Granted this is Austin and there are cheaper places to live but the wages are lower. And Austin by no means is the most expensive city in the country either. Now multiply that times millions of other kids his age in cities across the country. It's hard to spin that and not trying to isn't doomerism. It's reality. And as long as we keep widening the gap with this k shaped economy it's going to get worse. I have a feeling we're on the brink of another big print to bail out this private credit fiasco that's going to further devalue the currency and make it that much harder on them. It'll be worse w Gen a.
History shows us that this goes 1 of 2 ways. Either there's a reset that makes it easier for them to work hard and succeed or this ends with violence. As painful as the first might be for those of us that were born in an era that made it possible for us to accumulate wealth I still think the former is preferable.
I think we're in agreement but it's important to recognize the reality these kids are facing even when they are doing the right thing. 1/2 ton pickup trucks cost $70k. That's a years salary for most people. It's just not sustainable.
Once again, you're assuming "socialism" means "communism". Folks more often use "socialism" to refer to the social systems of the EU.
And you're assuming that the root cause of an overall population study is your favorite topic of college campuses despite no evidence that college students are moving the needle of the overall population.
Finally, you present conservative commentary on the education system as unbiased commentary. That's misleading at best.
I think your first sentence is a big part of frustration I have with the socialism branding. Those countries are fundamentally market economies with strong property rights and high levels of economic freedom, with social programs layered on top. That’s a very different system than what socialism has historically meant.
That said, even within modern versions, you can see policy outcomes that are ...really quite odd. For example, energy decisions in parts of Europe like shutting down nuclear under green socialist political pressure have real consequences (it's been a pretty big economic disaster for Germany). You don’t need gulags for bad policy to have serious, long-term effects.
On the education point: I’m not saying it’s the only driver, but it’s still hard for me to ignore it as a contributing factor. I’d argue we’d be in a healthier place if more of that sat closer to the ideological middle. If the charts were reversed I'd be writing the same posts just with a different list of concerns.
And zooming out a bit: I do think if we did a better job explaining how markets actually work, and how much prosperity they’ve generated globally, we'd see more balanced views (ie, fewer people thinking capitalism is bad/evil, also reflected in this data). The frustration younger generations feel is real (housing, healthcare, cost of living), but the solutions they’re reaching for are often mislabeled or poorly understood. As an entrepreneur you would be uniquely listened to on this topic btw - if you ever wrote a post I'd look forward to sharing/reading.
I agree that the definitions shift, but you have to focus on what people were answering and not what they might have answered with a different definition.
And the outcomes in the EU are no more odd than the outcomes in the US. The EU does not have school shoot epidemics, they don't have medical bill bankruptcies and they have longer life expectancy (mostly due to lower deaths among young people).
I don't think the problem is that people don't understand markets. I think the problem is that the system is working so badly for a lot of people that they would prefer literally anything else. If you work hard but have no prospect for home ownership or retirement, can't afford to have kids or suffer from food/housing insecurity you are going to reach for anything else. That describes the attitudes much more than education.
Adam Singer wants you to believe two things at once. First, that "socialism" means the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela, full stop, no remainder. Second, that "capitalism" means the sum total of every gain in human welfare since 1800, with none of the ledger's debit column attached. Both moves are necessary for his argument. Neither survives contact with the historical record.
Start with the poverty statistic, since it is the foundation of the whole essay. The claim that capitalism drove extreme poverty from 80 percent of humanity to under 10 percent treats "capitalism" as an undifferentiated global constant, present everywhere the decline occurred. It was not. The single largest contributor to that number by a wide margin is China, and China's poverty reduction was accomplished under a state that collectivized land, ran five-year plans, directed investment through state banks, and only gradually introduced market mechanisms under tight party control. ¹ You can call the Chinese model many things. "Free markets lifted them out of poverty" is not one of the accurate ones. Strip China out of the global poverty numbers, and the "capitalism did this" story gets considerably less impressive and considerably more contested.
Then there is the $1.90-a-day line itself, which measures the threshold of bare subsistence, not the threshold of a decent life. A statistic that counts someone as "not in poverty" the moment they clear two dollars a day is not measuring flourishing. It measures the floor above which starvation becomes merely probable. Singer wants this number to do the work of proving capitalism delivers human dignity. It cannot, because it was never built to measure dignity.
Now the harder problem, the one that actually matters for anyone serious about this argument: the conflation of Stalinism with socialism. Singer needs the USSR, Cuba, and Venezuela to stand in for "socialism" because that equation is the entire rhetorical engine of the piece. But Marx's own criterion for socialism was the self-emancipation of the working class, not the seizure of state power by a bureaucratic apparatus that then rules in the workers' name while excluding them from any real control over production or the state. ² The regimes Singer cites were built by crushing workers' councils, not by realizing them. Kronstadt was not an aberration of the revolution; it was the revolution's bureaucratic strangulation, carried out against sailors and workers who had made the revolution in the first place. ³ Cuba's one-party state and its labor movement subordinated entirely to party discipline are not the dictatorship of the proletariat; they are a dictatorship over the proletariat exercised in its name. This is not a semantic dodge. It is the actual, decades-old internal critique that revolutionary socialists directed at these regimes long before Singer's readers were born, from a position that rejected both Washington's empire and Moscow's or Havana's bureaucracies. ⁴ Singer's essay performs the very one-sidedness it accuses the academy of, just aimed the other direction: it flattens an entire tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism out of existence so that "socialism" can mean only its worst, most degenerated form.
The irony deepens when Singer complains that universities present one side and call it education. His own essay is a masterclass in that exact move. He cites a Cato/YouGov poll, a Buckley Institute survey, and Winston Churchill, a man whose record on famine in Bengal alone should disqualify him as a moral authority on which economic systems produce mass death. ⁵ He does not mention the enclosures that manufactured a landless proletariat with no option but wage labor, the slave trade that financed early industrial capital, or the colonial extraction that built the metropoles he now credits with lifting the world out of poverty.⁶ Capitalism's ledger has a debit column exactly as long as its credit column. Singer shows you only the credits.
On the substance of what young people actually want, Singer and his critics in the comments are both circling something real without naming it. The commenter Andrew Wagner is right that the frustration is with concentrated power, not with markets as an abstraction. But Singer's own answer, that government intervention and "poor policy decisions" cause the affordability crisis, mistakes capital's normal operation for a distortion of it. Financialized housing, monopoly pricing in healthcare, and the commodification of shelter and medicine as vehicles for extracting rent and profit rather than meeting need—this is not capitalism malfunctioning. This is capitalism functioning as designed, because value production under capital treats use-values like housing and health as means to the accumulation of abstract value, not as ends in themselves.⁷ When the two conflict, accumulation wins, because that is what the system is for. No amount of deregulation fixes a crisis produced by the successful operation of the profit motive in precisely the sectors Singer names.
None of this requires defending Cuba, Venezuela, or the USSR. It requires refusing the false choice Singer builds his entire essay around either the unregulated market or the bureaucratic dictatorship, either Churchill or the gulag. That choice was manufactured to close off the actual historical alternative, a socialism built from below, through workers' own democratic control of production, that has never been tried at scale precisely because every attempt at it has been crushed by capital on one side and by bureaucratic counterrevolution on the other. Young people reaching for "socialism" in a Cato poll are not asking for the Politburo. They are asking why a society this productive still fails to guarantee them a home, a doctor, and a future that isn't collateral for someone else's portfolio. Singer has no answer to that question. He has only a ledger with half the entries missing.
¹ On the state-directed character of China's development and its outsized share of global poverty reduction statistics, see World Bank poverty data disaggregated by region and critiques of the "capitalism ended poverty" narrative that fail to account for it.
² Marx and Engels, Rules of the International Working Men's Association (1864): "the working classes themselves must conquer their own emancipation."
³ See the anarchist and left-oppositionist historiography of Kronstadt 1921, and Trotskyist self-criticism of the suppression in later decades.
⁴ The third-camp tradition, associated with Max Shachtman and Hal Draper's "socialism from below," explicitly rejected both capitalist imperialism and Stalinist bureaucratic collectivism as class societies to be opposed, not chosen between.
⁵ On the 1943 Bengal famine and Churchill's wartime policy toward India, see Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War (2010).
⁶ On enclosure and primitive accumulation as preconditions for wage labor, see Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Part VIII.
⁷ On the domination of use-value by exchange-value and abstract labor under capital, see the value-form tradition: Backhaus, Reichelt, Postone.
1. Market capitalism *is* the defining feature of the age of prosperity. The only other thing that came close is oil, which never would have been exploited without capitalism.
2. China was mired in poverty until it incorporated market capitalism (“capitalism with Chinese characteristics”)
3. Your utopian vision of communism as a society “owned by workers” is comical. How would hundreds of millions of workers coordinate to run anything? How would they raise capital? It doesn’t happen that way in real life because it can’t. It has never been tried because it is impossible. If you want to own the means of production, capitalism provides a way: buy stocks.
4. All the sectors you claim have been broken by capitalism have been broken more by unlimited money printing and government capture than capitalist markets. Why do you think it is that all the most broken sectors (housing, healthcare, education) are the ones that are the least capitalist, with the most government intervention?
This is not an argument. It is a pile of substitutions.
You substitute “markets” for capitalism, “capitalism” for every social gain since 1800, and “government” for every failure capitalism itself produces through ownership, rent, monopoly, finance, and political capture.
Capitalism did not single-handedly create modern prosperity. Industrialization, fossil energy, science, public health, mass education, colonial extraction, labor struggle, state planning, and technological development all mattered. Capitalism organized much of that development through wage labor and profit—but that does not mean it deserves credit for every gain and no blame for the wreckage.
China is not the clean win for laissez-faire capitalism you think it is. China’s poverty reduction was historically massive — the World Bank says nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty — but it was not achieved by “free markets” alone. The same World Bank account emphasizes broad economic transformation plus targeted state anti-poverty policy. In plain English: markets, yes; but also land reform legacies, state ownership, planning, industrial policy, capital controls, infrastructure, and party-state direction.
“Workers can’t coordinate production” is a strange claim in a world of multinational corporations, supply chains, logistics systems, public utilities, pension funds, and state procurement. Hundreds of millions of workers already coordinate production every day. The question is not whether large-scale coordination is possible. It plainly is. The question is who controls it: workers and the public or owners and investors.
And no, buying a few shares is not “owning the means of production.” That is akin to claiming you control Walmart simply because you discovered a shopping cart in the parking lot.
The “broken sectors are the least capitalist” line is too simplistic. Housing is broken partly because land and shelter are treated as assets first and human needs second. Zoning and regulation matter, but they often defend property values and landlord interests—that is capitalist class power operating through the state, not some alien force from Mars. Research on land-use reform does show supply effects, but that supports a political-economic analysis, not the fantasy that markets are innocent.
Healthcare is even worse for your argument. The United States has enormous private insurance, private hospital, pharmaceutical, and administrative profit layers, and it still spends far more on health than peer countries. Calling that “not capitalist enough” is ideological comedy. OECD data show the U.S. remains the extreme outlier in health spending.
So the issue is not simply favoring markets over socialism. The issue is that capitalism socializes production while privatizing control and profit, and socialism begins from the obvious fact that production is already collective. The task is to make accounts collect well too.
Call me cloistered in my NYC bubble but I don't ever hear anyone say "look at Cuba! What a great system they have there!" Or, "wow, Venezuela was really doing something right." Or "Marx really knew what was up!" What I do hear a lot of is people frustrated and angry that .01% of the population control 90% of the economy (or whatever the number is).
As you stated, I think if there were more of an effort on the part of those controlling so much (whether politicians or billionaires) to address the very real issues of affordable healthcare, housing, education etc. there wouldn't be such a backlash toward the idea of "capitalism." But what we see mostly are very bad actors who have taken advantage of a system built by them for them — stretching and breaking the rules with very little pushback or consequences while demanding everyone else play strictly by the rules and quit complaining so much. Trust in the powers that be has eroded so far there may be no coming back.
I think people are searching for a more equitable system — one that allows for innovation, individuality, freedom (of speech, movement, etc) — all the things you hold up as byproducts of "capitalism" — but at the same time recognizes that our country and the "civilized" world has come as far as it has because of strong community — communities that believe that you are "only as strong as your weakest link."
What is sadly on full display is a system governed and run by people who simply don't like people. The resistance you are seeing to "capitalism" is more a resistance to the selfish people in power that are (or at least seem to be) only out to "get theirs." If we had more charitable, honest leaders across the board (government, business, entertainment, etc) we could expect to see not as much resistance to our economic system.
Also, yes, I went to college 20 odd years ago and don't have a great idea of what is happening on campuses now (my son is 10 but my nieces and nephews seem to be enjoying their experiences) but I certainly don't remember my professors demanding I think any one way. There was a ton of open debate amongst students and professors. The goal, it seemed to me, was to get students to break out of their belief systems and to experience and experiment with different ways of thinking — neither right or left or center or whatever. There was no pressure to think one way or another.
Anyhow, as always, thanks for getting the discussions going!
Thoughtful comment here Andrew. And I don’t think the backlash is really against “capitalism” in the pure sense, it’s against a version of it that feels captured, distorted, or unfair. And I think that’s an important distinction. Because the same system that’s produced real inequality is also the one that has driven massive gains in living standards, innovation, and opportunity over time. Both things can be true at once. Still, even on the worst of days it's better than a system where the state has full control over our lives.
To your point on leadership: I think this is actually the crux of it. Bad actors, whether in business or government, erode trust faster than any abstract economic theory ever could. If people feel the rules aren’t applied evenly, or that success is more about access than merit, they’re going to start looking for alternatives, even if those alternatives are poorly defined. I think we need to actually enforce a lot more rules better and have some new ones (IE politicians can't trade stocks etc).
Where I land is: more competition, fewer artificial constraints, better incentives, and for sure higher expectations for the people at the top. A system that rewards value creation and maintains legitimacy.
And on your college experience, a lot of people had that same experience years ago. The concern is that the center of gravity has shifted since then
Agreed all around. I feel like the tycoons of yesteryear were much more civic oriented, albeit ultimately for their own benefit but their own benefit also benefitted the greater good. If we could see more largesse out of our "leaders" I think people would feel much more comfortable with the idea of a system that has enabled these people to live like royalty. Instead we see them launching themselves and their friends into space : \ I'm not saying the ultra wealthy do not give back at all but it certainly would be great to see more parks built, more public schools, more beaches cleaned up, etc. It would go a long way to helping people remember why our economic and governmental system is still one of the best that's ever existed.
And absolutely politicians should not be able to trade stocks!
Good conversation! Many points echo my sentiments. Bad leadership is at the root of it at every level of society. Andrew, your point of giving back was exemplified by Carnegie’s libraries. It’s a gift that keeps giving versus today’s unaccountable philanthropy.
Your next article could be on how America’s wealth enables the socialist policies of the EU. 😆
It’s true that the real root of people’s frustration is selfishness, but in my experience that has been conflated with capitalism because our system supposedly “enables and rewards” it. The proposed elixir is usually stronger government. When I try to gently illustrate how the problem is in fact selfish people in business capturing government and using its immense power to entrench their advantages — which has a very different solution set — I get a lot of defensiveness.
People don't even get the fundamental principle of capitalism: That every economic transaction is a win-win that creates value for both parties.
Could it be that the 62% of Americans under 30 looking favourably at "socialism" are thinking about countries like Sweden, the UK, Australia, and others in Europe rather than the 'catastrophic' states like the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela? There is a middle ground, working quite well (nothing is ever going to be perfect) in many countries. They have capitalist markets, there is incentive to do well and make money, but a portion of taxes go towards a safety net for those in society that need it, healthcare, public services, the arts etc. Is that such a bad thing?
UK and EU are slowwlllly becoming more socialist than capitalist, so much government control and regulation (lots of it really suicidal). But yes can we please stress the part where we note that capitalism and free markets are what creates any wealth in the first place that might fund social programs. I fear we are not doing a great job of this.
I live in the UK and it is not becoming more socialist at all. I don't know what you are reading, but it is simply not the case. Regulation is there to stop bad actors and protect the public, within the capitalist free market, there can be a balance. It doesn't have to be black or white.
Yeah agree on the last part for sure, as long as the policies aren't constricting freedoms and chilling innovation. Anecdotally, heard unrest from several of my UK friends on the rising tax situation which they aren't too pleased with. Also seen some data that suggests less economic freedom (ie https://www.forthcapital.com/us/articles/record-9-500-millionaires-expected-to-leave-the-uk-this-year), and read stories of entrepreneurs expressing frustration. Of course we have that in America, too.
Interesting, that report is from 2024. Don't think many millionaires are heading to Dubai right now 🤣
Tradeoffs rule everything around us!
Yes, exactly.
That exchange at the conference when they censured Zimmerman for “circle the wagons” caused me to literally bark with laughter. Oh my god. We’re so cooked.
I teach 8th Grade US History. Sometimes I feel like I’m overdoing it with the anti-communism, like a caricature of Red Forman. Every year I go out of my way to point out that Stalin and Mao each killed more people than Hitler, facts which never fail to astonish students. I explain how central planning played a greater role than malice. I engage them in discussions asking whether they’d like to be told by their government where to live, what job to do, and how to think; if they think the federal government knows better than they do what’s best for their lives and their communities…
I tell them the story of my friend’s old man, who liked to say “You know what would make this day perfect? Some commie killin’ music.” Then I play CCR while they write essays about the Truman Doctrine and the Marshall Plan.
It’s a lot, admittedly… more than I would do for 8th graders if I taught in a vacuum. But I know what they’re getting virtually everywhere else. I know what they’ll get in college. And I know that at a higher zoom, I’m a most negligible counterweight. If some of them go to college and tell their Marxist professors to stuff it, I will be very proud.
Respectfully, it's very difficult to educate a generation of kids about the "global successes of capitalism" when the wealth gap is as extreme as it is in this country. You're never going to be able to convince people that are already working hard and can't get ahead that if they just work a little harder everything will pan out. I don't disagree with you that socialism isn't the answer but what we have is not a pure capitalist society. Crony capitalism at best. The fact of the matter is we've socialized the losses and privatize the Gains for the beneficiaries of this system so many times while those companies farm out the jobs that used to make it possible to "pull yourself up by the bootstraps" that the under 35ish working class is disillusioned. What we're doing is unsustainable and if there are politicians telling them there's a way to survive without working their hands to the bone they're gonna vote for it. That's to say nothing of the non trivial % of gen z that doesn't want to work at all and will vote for it whether it's the best option or not
I understand - thus I mentioned we have to address the problems our politicians created. And we shouldn't be obnoxious to young people like the boomers have been with the various gaslighting commentary, they are partially to blame for why young people want socialism too if we're being honest.
You know what also really helps is having friends who escaped living under a socialist regime, these people make great educators. Even someone not doing as well as they'd like in America is so far better off than anyone under any socialist regime. We can fix our problems you'd never fix anything there without major, violent change. We don't have to do that.
Reading your comment I think we're enough on the same page honestly (that socialism is still a worse option for everyone).
I accidentally posted my response after the first sentence. No amount of history lessons or even first hand accounts from friends is going to make people forget the fact that the system being pitched to them is not working for them.
Yeah makes more sense now I edited to give a better response. Unlike the boomers I am not going to simply brush off what you say. It's valid, and we should work on fixing it. I can do another post on solutions for why young people shouldn't give up. Doomerism isn't good either
I don't disagree. I try to hire as many young people as I can and teach them a trade that they can make a living at. But let me give you an anecdotal example of what I'm talking about. I have a 25 year old kid that's been working for me for 6 years. Extremely gifted carpenter. Made $85k last year. Wife made probably $50k. No kids but want them. Can't buy a house in a neighborhood they'd want to raise a family in and the houses in the shit neighborhoods the mortgage would still be $2500 a month with a big down payment. Granted this is Austin and there are cheaper places to live but the wages are lower. And Austin by no means is the most expensive city in the country either. Now multiply that times millions of other kids his age in cities across the country. It's hard to spin that and not trying to isn't doomerism. It's reality. And as long as we keep widening the gap with this k shaped economy it's going to get worse. I have a feeling we're on the brink of another big print to bail out this private credit fiasco that's going to further devalue the currency and make it that much harder on them. It'll be worse w Gen a.
History shows us that this goes 1 of 2 ways. Either there's a reset that makes it easier for them to work hard and succeed or this ends with violence. As painful as the first might be for those of us that were born in an era that made it possible for us to accumulate wealth I still think the former is preferable.
I think we're in agreement but it's important to recognize the reality these kids are facing even when they are doing the right thing. 1/2 ton pickup trucks cost $70k. That's a years salary for most people. It's just not sustainable.
Once again, you're assuming "socialism" means "communism". Folks more often use "socialism" to refer to the social systems of the EU.
And you're assuming that the root cause of an overall population study is your favorite topic of college campuses despite no evidence that college students are moving the needle of the overall population.
Finally, you present conservative commentary on the education system as unbiased commentary. That's misleading at best.
I think your first sentence is a big part of frustration I have with the socialism branding. Those countries are fundamentally market economies with strong property rights and high levels of economic freedom, with social programs layered on top. That’s a very different system than what socialism has historically meant.
That said, even within modern versions, you can see policy outcomes that are ...really quite odd. For example, energy decisions in parts of Europe like shutting down nuclear under green socialist political pressure have real consequences (it's been a pretty big economic disaster for Germany). You don’t need gulags for bad policy to have serious, long-term effects.
On the education point: I’m not saying it’s the only driver, but it’s still hard for me to ignore it as a contributing factor. I’d argue we’d be in a healthier place if more of that sat closer to the ideological middle. If the charts were reversed I'd be writing the same posts just with a different list of concerns.
And zooming out a bit: I do think if we did a better job explaining how markets actually work, and how much prosperity they’ve generated globally, we'd see more balanced views (ie, fewer people thinking capitalism is bad/evil, also reflected in this data). The frustration younger generations feel is real (housing, healthcare, cost of living), but the solutions they’re reaching for are often mislabeled or poorly understood. As an entrepreneur you would be uniquely listened to on this topic btw - if you ever wrote a post I'd look forward to sharing/reading.
I agree that the definitions shift, but you have to focus on what people were answering and not what they might have answered with a different definition.
And the outcomes in the EU are no more odd than the outcomes in the US. The EU does not have school shoot epidemics, they don't have medical bill bankruptcies and they have longer life expectancy (mostly due to lower deaths among young people).
I don't think the problem is that people don't understand markets. I think the problem is that the system is working so badly for a lot of people that they would prefer literally anything else. If you work hard but have no prospect for home ownership or retirement, can't afford to have kids or suffer from food/housing insecurity you are going to reach for anything else. That describes the attitudes much more than education.
The Ledger Singer Won't Show You
Anthony P. Teso
Adam Singer wants you to believe two things at once. First, that "socialism" means the Soviet Union, Cuba, and Venezuela, full stop, no remainder. Second, that "capitalism" means the sum total of every gain in human welfare since 1800, with none of the ledger's debit column attached. Both moves are necessary for his argument. Neither survives contact with the historical record.
Start with the poverty statistic, since it is the foundation of the whole essay. The claim that capitalism drove extreme poverty from 80 percent of humanity to under 10 percent treats "capitalism" as an undifferentiated global constant, present everywhere the decline occurred. It was not. The single largest contributor to that number by a wide margin is China, and China's poverty reduction was accomplished under a state that collectivized land, ran five-year plans, directed investment through state banks, and only gradually introduced market mechanisms under tight party control. ¹ You can call the Chinese model many things. "Free markets lifted them out of poverty" is not one of the accurate ones. Strip China out of the global poverty numbers, and the "capitalism did this" story gets considerably less impressive and considerably more contested.
Then there is the $1.90-a-day line itself, which measures the threshold of bare subsistence, not the threshold of a decent life. A statistic that counts someone as "not in poverty" the moment they clear two dollars a day is not measuring flourishing. It measures the floor above which starvation becomes merely probable. Singer wants this number to do the work of proving capitalism delivers human dignity. It cannot, because it was never built to measure dignity.
Now the harder problem, the one that actually matters for anyone serious about this argument: the conflation of Stalinism with socialism. Singer needs the USSR, Cuba, and Venezuela to stand in for "socialism" because that equation is the entire rhetorical engine of the piece. But Marx's own criterion for socialism was the self-emancipation of the working class, not the seizure of state power by a bureaucratic apparatus that then rules in the workers' name while excluding them from any real control over production or the state. ² The regimes Singer cites were built by crushing workers' councils, not by realizing them. Kronstadt was not an aberration of the revolution; it was the revolution's bureaucratic strangulation, carried out against sailors and workers who had made the revolution in the first place. ³ Cuba's one-party state and its labor movement subordinated entirely to party discipline are not the dictatorship of the proletariat; they are a dictatorship over the proletariat exercised in its name. This is not a semantic dodge. It is the actual, decades-old internal critique that revolutionary socialists directed at these regimes long before Singer's readers were born, from a position that rejected both Washington's empire and Moscow's or Havana's bureaucracies. ⁴ Singer's essay performs the very one-sidedness it accuses the academy of, just aimed the other direction: it flattens an entire tradition of anti-Stalinist Marxism out of existence so that "socialism" can mean only its worst, most degenerated form.
The irony deepens when Singer complains that universities present one side and call it education. His own essay is a masterclass in that exact move. He cites a Cato/YouGov poll, a Buckley Institute survey, and Winston Churchill, a man whose record on famine in Bengal alone should disqualify him as a moral authority on which economic systems produce mass death. ⁵ He does not mention the enclosures that manufactured a landless proletariat with no option but wage labor, the slave trade that financed early industrial capital, or the colonial extraction that built the metropoles he now credits with lifting the world out of poverty.⁶ Capitalism's ledger has a debit column exactly as long as its credit column. Singer shows you only the credits.
On the substance of what young people actually want, Singer and his critics in the comments are both circling something real without naming it. The commenter Andrew Wagner is right that the frustration is with concentrated power, not with markets as an abstraction. But Singer's own answer, that government intervention and "poor policy decisions" cause the affordability crisis, mistakes capital's normal operation for a distortion of it. Financialized housing, monopoly pricing in healthcare, and the commodification of shelter and medicine as vehicles for extracting rent and profit rather than meeting need—this is not capitalism malfunctioning. This is capitalism functioning as designed, because value production under capital treats use-values like housing and health as means to the accumulation of abstract value, not as ends in themselves.⁷ When the two conflict, accumulation wins, because that is what the system is for. No amount of deregulation fixes a crisis produced by the successful operation of the profit motive in precisely the sectors Singer names.
None of this requires defending Cuba, Venezuela, or the USSR. It requires refusing the false choice Singer builds his entire essay around either the unregulated market or the bureaucratic dictatorship, either Churchill or the gulag. That choice was manufactured to close off the actual historical alternative, a socialism built from below, through workers' own democratic control of production, that has never been tried at scale precisely because every attempt at it has been crushed by capital on one side and by bureaucratic counterrevolution on the other. Young people reaching for "socialism" in a Cato poll are not asking for the Politburo. They are asking why a society this productive still fails to guarantee them a home, a doctor, and a future that isn't collateral for someone else's portfolio. Singer has no answer to that question. He has only a ledger with half the entries missing.
¹ On the state-directed character of China's development and its outsized share of global poverty reduction statistics, see World Bank poverty data disaggregated by region and critiques of the "capitalism ended poverty" narrative that fail to account for it.
² Marx and Engels, Rules of the International Working Men's Association (1864): "the working classes themselves must conquer their own emancipation."
³ See the anarchist and left-oppositionist historiography of Kronstadt 1921, and Trotskyist self-criticism of the suppression in later decades.
⁴ The third-camp tradition, associated with Max Shachtman and Hal Draper's "socialism from below," explicitly rejected both capitalist imperialism and Stalinist bureaucratic collectivism as class societies to be opposed, not chosen between.
⁵ On the 1943 Bengal famine and Churchill's wartime policy toward India, see Madhusree Mukerjee, Churchill's Secret War (2010).
⁶ On enclosure and primitive accumulation as preconditions for wage labor, see Marx, Capital, Vol. 1, Part VIII.
⁷ On the domination of use-value by exchange-value and abstract labor under capital, see the value-form tradition: Backhaus, Reichelt, Postone.
A most embarrassing and freshman retort.
1. Market capitalism *is* the defining feature of the age of prosperity. The only other thing that came close is oil, which never would have been exploited without capitalism.
2. China was mired in poverty until it incorporated market capitalism (“capitalism with Chinese characteristics”)
3. Your utopian vision of communism as a society “owned by workers” is comical. How would hundreds of millions of workers coordinate to run anything? How would they raise capital? It doesn’t happen that way in real life because it can’t. It has never been tried because it is impossible. If you want to own the means of production, capitalism provides a way: buy stocks.
4. All the sectors you claim have been broken by capitalism have been broken more by unlimited money printing and government capture than capitalist markets. Why do you think it is that all the most broken sectors (housing, healthcare, education) are the ones that are the least capitalist, with the most government intervention?
This is not an argument. It is a pile of substitutions.
You substitute “markets” for capitalism, “capitalism” for every social gain since 1800, and “government” for every failure capitalism itself produces through ownership, rent, monopoly, finance, and political capture.
Capitalism did not single-handedly create modern prosperity. Industrialization, fossil energy, science, public health, mass education, colonial extraction, labor struggle, state planning, and technological development all mattered. Capitalism organized much of that development through wage labor and profit—but that does not mean it deserves credit for every gain and no blame for the wreckage.
China is not the clean win for laissez-faire capitalism you think it is. China’s poverty reduction was historically massive — the World Bank says nearly 800 million people were lifted out of extreme poverty — but it was not achieved by “free markets” alone. The same World Bank account emphasizes broad economic transformation plus targeted state anti-poverty policy. In plain English: markets, yes; but also land reform legacies, state ownership, planning, industrial policy, capital controls, infrastructure, and party-state direction.
“Workers can’t coordinate production” is a strange claim in a world of multinational corporations, supply chains, logistics systems, public utilities, pension funds, and state procurement. Hundreds of millions of workers already coordinate production every day. The question is not whether large-scale coordination is possible. It plainly is. The question is who controls it: workers and the public or owners and investors.
And no, buying a few shares is not “owning the means of production.” That is akin to claiming you control Walmart simply because you discovered a shopping cart in the parking lot.
The “broken sectors are the least capitalist” line is too simplistic. Housing is broken partly because land and shelter are treated as assets first and human needs second. Zoning and regulation matter, but they often defend property values and landlord interests—that is capitalist class power operating through the state, not some alien force from Mars. Research on land-use reform does show supply effects, but that supports a political-economic analysis, not the fantasy that markets are innocent.
Healthcare is even worse for your argument. The United States has enormous private insurance, private hospital, pharmaceutical, and administrative profit layers, and it still spends far more on health than peer countries. Calling that “not capitalist enough” is ideological comedy. OECD data show the U.S. remains the extreme outlier in health spending.
So the issue is not simply favoring markets over socialism. The issue is that capitalism socializes production while privatizing control and profit, and socialism begins from the obvious fact that production is already collective. The task is to make accounts collect well too.
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