"The young Americans drawn to socialism are not our opponents; they are our neighbors, and the best answer to their very real anxieties is not to dismiss them, but to make the case, with clarity and conviction, that economic freedom has done more to solve the problems they care about than any government program ever has or will."
"Socialism doesn’t just fail economies; it fails people, creating victims of the very people it promises to help. It separates effort from reward, replaces personal responsibility with political dependence, and displaces our rich civil society motivated by neighborliness and a commitment to the common good with an ever-expanding state. Yet the polling suggests that 62 percent of Americans ages 18 to 29 now view socialism favorably. It is important to understand this trend, but equally important to understand what it does to them and to us when we let it take root.Young Americans are increasingly enamored with socialism and even communism. Yet this is at odds with a more recent Gallup survey suggesting that, while positive views of capitalism have fallen from 61 percent in 2010 to 54 percent in 2025, 95 percent of Americans viewed small businesses positively, and 81 percent viewed free enterprise positively. The disconnect is that you cannot have one without the other. The only type of entrepreneurship — a hallmark of an unfettered economy — you get in socialism is political entrepreneurship fueled by envy, which is institutionalized by policies executed with a patina of equity but that result in class divides and zero-sum games.
"It may be easier to understand why older generations do not have the same affinities for central economic planning. They saw the threat of the Soviet Empire as it marched across Europe and of Mao’s takeover of China, resulting in the largest manmade famine in history. Perhaps for those generations, it is easier to connect socialism’s outcomes to its promises. But thankfully, the Soviet threat is gone, and China’s brief embrace of market reforms under Deng Xiaoping in the 1980s produced the largest poverty reduction in a single country in history, proof that even a little capitalism saves lives. That China is now retreating from those reforms should serve as its own warning.
"No serious economist, political theorist, or public intellectual is arguing that we should return to the good old days of Vladimir Lenin, characterized by random executions, show trials, and labor camps. Still, it’s not 1989 anymore. There is no wall to tear down, and the creeping threat of socialism comes from the well-educated young generation of homegrown champagne socialists. Our flirtation with socialism is dangerous and internal. They decry capitalism as they rage-tweet from laptops while sipping on fair-trade lavender-infused matcha lattes.
"Nobel laureate F. A. Hayek won the intellectual debate on the impossibility of socialism, and dedicated his 1944 book The Road to Serfdom to “the socialists of all parties.” This is not only a problem of the progressive left. The progressive right is alive and well, seeking equity stakes in American companies like Intel in the name of national security and Spirit Airlines in the name of jobs. Political entrepreneurship pays big dividends on both sides of the aisle, and the instinct to use government power to pick winners and losers is the same impulse regardless of party." . . . More...
Anne Bradley is vice president of academic affairs at the Fund for American Studies and a professor of economics at the Institute for World Politics.
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