LilBaP
After the USA mid-terms, Ron DeSantis said the quiet bit out loud. Many young people like socialism more than capitalism.
Part of the issue he noted was certain universities. Teaching has been taken over by people who have never lived under socialism but are happy to pin every perceived problem on capitalism.
In short, capitalists organise the making of things consumers want, by introducing capital, buying labour and other inputs and carrying the risk, while demand, costs or labour conditions can change. That is the risk-reward scenario.
Socialism in its basic form treats labour as the only source of value. The worker produces the product, so the rewards should be shared with them – while forgetting that the worker is already paid wages and that the owner who put in the capital, organised production and carried the risk is then forced to share any upside with people who did not. No mention of the extra funds that get poured in when times are tight, or the house that can be on the line.
So what began as a nudge to the left decades ago has gained momentum, even here in New Zealand.
People have been sold the nice version of socialism and then compare that to the version of capitalism they hear about each day – politicians squabbling and governments looking after corporates and lobbyists.
Younger voters are getting indoctrinated by academics, lefty journalists and others who have never lived under authoritarian regimes but want to champion the ideology.
The media plays a huge part in this framing/gas-lighting, especially with click-bait methods. A ‘betrayal’ is a kind word that comes to my mind.
Newer voters have grown up in an economy that already redistributes a lot, regulates a lot, runs public services and has extensive welfare compared to many countries.
They have never waited in queues outside a supermarket or watched their family struggle after their business was confiscated. They have never dealt with a police state.
They are spoilt by freedoms and choices the socialist countries never get, then decide the system that produced those choices is the problem.
Many see high house prices, rentals, student debt that doesn’t seem to deliver the job they were promised and a media-academic class that treats inequality as the country’s original sin.
Home ownership rates have fallen from the early-1990s peak of around 74 per cent down to the mid-60s and younger age groups have dropped further relative to their parents at the same stage. That is real but in New Zealand it’s still an option for anyone willing to get off their butt and budget.
Plenty of young people still buy anyway: some with family help, some with flatmates and some just by getting on with it. First-home buyers have recently taken a record share of purchases. They are not the ones moaning about capitalism – they’re too busy working.
The crowd from the lecture room are busy telling them and everyone else what’s wrong, then recommend we instigate policies of socialism where you’re not allowed such levels of privilege.
Idealists are dangerous precisely because they never have to face the consequences of their own ideas.
There is a lot of nudging going on. Take the name New Zealand being nudged toward a Māori alternative. Many of the younger generation have been conditioned to a new name. The universities hand them the language – that’s not by accident. Compulsory courses at Auckland and elsewhere make first-year students sit through particular takes on te Tiriti.
David Seymour and others have said it seems more like political formation rather than open learning. They get bombarded by the structural injustice talk and hear almost nothing about what a capitalist economy has actually delivered.
Another example is the Greens’ business policy. It starts with Honour te Tiriti and wants the Treaty and He Whakaputanga to shape what businesses make, how they operate and how they use resources. Shared benefits so the gains aren’t concentrated. ‘Appropriate’ decision-making in workplaces. Appropriate by whose standard?
Opportunity does a version of the same thing. Land-value tax, Citizen’s Income, compulsory KiwiSaver rising and Citizens’ Assemblies that government has to answer. It looks like an activist wish-list, but, again, it may appeal to the naïve.
Younger voters who haven’t lived through what that package would actually cost, will never consider the downside risk.
If you don’t see this gaining further momentum, just keep in mind the Green Party and Opportunity combined achieved about 20 per cent of the vote on 7 November – that’s more than a nudge left.
Voting statistics from polling at university campuses show the Green Party is by far the most popular party. If those votes alone decided the result, left-wing parties would easily form a large coalition.
When questioned about inflation, students said it hits them hard – they spend their whole budget on rent, groceries and utilities, with nothing left. No thought that the same goes for people in the workforce feeding their families.
The word ‘free’ pops up: free this and free that. For all their studies they haven’t yet cottoned on to the fact nothing is free – someone is paying.
Polls keep showing majorities, including younger ones, saying the system isn’t set up for housing, healthcare or climate and that the wealthy should pay more.
The left-leaners run straight at that and the mainstream media does the same most days. Billionaire this, billionaire that…They must be the problem, what else could it be?
New Zealand has 26 billionaires. They’re business owners who built something. They employ and pay taxes. We could celebrate that, but instead they want someone to blame and the wealthy capitalist is the easy target.
So any comparison starts off jilted and never gets finished. Young voters aren’t comparing the living standards, mobility and innovation that capitalist systems have actually delivered against what socialist regimes have produced – they are cherry picking. They’re stacking the imperfect mixed economy in front of them – housing problems, regulation, the odd bit of cronyism – against a dreamed-up model.
The uninformed or naïve don’t notice that authoritarian regimes have their own lobbyists and oligarchs, who are often more devious than the ones they’re told to hate.
None of this is a conspiracy. It just needs a steady supply of one-sided misleading stories and no truthful, real lived, counter-examples. It is simple gas-lighting to an audience that is vulnerable to anything that sounds different.
A generation that has never queued for food at a supermarket or watched private enterprise get nationalised and collapse can treat ‘more state direction and redistribution’ as low-risk.
DeSantis’s point was that yelling ‘socialism’ doesn’t work when the alternative looks like cronyism.
Here, it’s the same problem from the other side. Defending the status quo doesn’t work when a lot of younger voters have been taught that it is the very problem and are being handed polished versions of an alternative by the people teaching them.
History is being rewritten in the universities and the mainstream media. Until that stops and comparisons include the full record and the actual constraints, the ideology keeps winning.
I’m sure plenty of us outside the lecture theatres would just say: if the socialist society is so damn good, go and live there. Please.
