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A Majority Of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows (washingtonpost.com) 1080

A new poll shows that a majority of young people do not support capitalism. The study was conducted by Harvard University, which polled young adults ages 18-29. It found that 51 percent of those polled rejected capitalism, that is to say, they did not support it. Only 42 percent said they support capitalism -- there was a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. When asked what alternative system they would prefer, there wasn't a clear winner. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism. When talking about politics or economics, it can get complicated and the poll does little to shed light on what parts of capitalism young people dislike or what parts of socialism young people like. It does appear to suggest young people are frustrated with the status quo and are more focused on the flaws of free markets.
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A Majority Of Millennials Now Reject Capitalism, Poll Shows

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  • by bytesex ( 112972 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:07AM (#51994529) Homepage

    All of a sudden, they will 'support capitalism', whatever that even means.

    • by imgod2u ( 812837 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:15AM (#51994557) Homepage

      That's kinda the thing though isn't it. The current economic situation is that a greater number of people can't make "a bit of money". Many have argued the point of "what's wrong with large wealth inequality?" and this is the answer: it turns public opinion against capitalism. And without popular opinion on your side...you get the guillotine.

      • by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:19AM (#51994581) Journal

        That's kinda the thing though isn't it. The current economic situation is that a greater number of people can't make "a bit of money". Many have argued the point of "what's wrong with large wealth inequality?" and this is the answer: it turns public opinion against capitalism. And without popular opinion on your side...you get the guillotine.

        Not to mention that the wealth of a nation lies in the general public. If you want a wealthy nation you need to empower individuals over corporations/oligarchs.

      • by bytesex ( 112972 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:33AM (#51994877) Homepage

        The public is just as guilty. When we shout that everybody should have a mortgage, and everybody should be able to go to college, everybody will be bearing the brunt of the price increase that accompanies all those subsidies and risk-taking. There is no such thing as a free lunch, but try explaining that to people with voting rights.

      • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:42AM (#51994919) Homepage Journal

        This. The Millennials aren't just somehow uneducated or misguided. They have been pissed upon from great height. The capitalists who did the pissing have nobody to blame but themselves.

    • They will wait a long time . . .

      "A Majority Of Capitalists Now Reject Millennials , Poll Shows"

    • by dave420 ( 699308 )

      Nonsense. For you to be correct, there can not be anyone earning money who dislikes capitalism. As that is clearly not the case, you are wrong. Of course it's comforting to you to think that these people are just like you, as that means you can stop taking their criticism seriously and not have to think about it.

  • It's all relative (Score:3, Insightful)

    by peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_+! ( 2743031 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:07AM (#51994531)

    People only see and evaluate their experiences; what they have lived. If you put these same college students into another system for a couple months they might change their tune.

    All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good. But given modern politics we might have to bring the Post-Soviet style problems to America firsthand before they can realize the situation.

    • by peon_a-z,A-Z,0-9$_+! ( 2743031 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:24AM (#51994587)
      My only solace is that America is still immigrating a substantial proportion of their population. The "backhill hillbillys" of America who "love Capitalism" need to realize that their most benevolent Capitalistic friends are immigrants, who fought to get to America over the bullshit from where they came, and these "millennials" (of which I am one? but whatever) are the spoiled idiots who have yet to see what destruction their misinformed "opinions" can bring.
      • by AmiMoJo ( 196126 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @05:24AM (#51995261) Homepage Journal

        Millennials just expected the same thing that their parents and grand-parents and great-grand-parents had. Consider that their parents were probably doing well in the 80s when they were kids. House prices were booming, the move towards taking on massive debts to buy stuff was in full swing and a lot of people did really well for themselves. My own parents bought a house which more than doubled in value in two years.

        Of course it couldn't last. Things started going wrong in the 90s and came to a head in 2008. By then the previous generation had already set themselves up with assets and wealth, and the millennials took the brunt of it. The education that their parents got for free or at low cost is now going to put them in massive, long term debt. Unpaid internships are common, and wages are low. Property prices are insane and now everyone is talking about controls on debt and public spending and polluting because it was always a bad idea, but of course they aren't going to hand back any of the benefits they got out of it during the good times.

        Millennials are the first generation in nearly a century to be economically worse off than their parents. Unlike the great depression that affected most people, this time the boomers have managed to largely protect themselves. It's no wonder there is a feeling of resentment.

        • by Solandri ( 704621 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @10:03AM (#51996949)

          Consider that their parents were probably doing well in the 80s when they were kids. House prices were booming, the move towards taking on massive debts to buy stuff was in full swing

          Holy crap. Were you even around in the 1980s? Interest rates were around 20% [wikimedia.org]. Home prices were stagnant from about 1979 til the late 1990s [cornerston...stment.com]. We took on massive debts to buy stuff because it was the only way you could afford to own a house. Taking out loans to buy a huge house (or second home) to turn it into a giant credit card from appreciating real estate prices didn't become a thing until the 2000s.

          If that's the rose-colored glasses through which Millennials view the past, no wonder they're dissatisfied. They're comparing their current reality to a past nirvana which never existed.

          If you ask me, capitalism works better than any other system I've seen tried, with a few exceptions. One of those exceptions is that certain goods remain scarce regardless of how much demand there is for it. A good example is housing (or at least housing in locations where people want to live). With the shift from single-income households in the 1950s to two-income households in the 1980s, you would've expected a smaller share of total household income to go to housing, with a greater share left over to be spent on quality of life things like entertainment. Instead what happened is that housing in desirable locations remained scarce (there is only so much real estate). So competing dual-income households bid up home prices, and the second income went almost entirely into paying for the higher home price.

          The education that their parents got for free or at low cost is now going to put them in massive, long term debt.

          The cost of higher education has gone through the roof because of a toxic combination of (1) socialists' desire to subsidize it to make it more affordable, and (2) capitalists' desire to leave it regulated by market forces. The compromise they came up with was the subsidized student loan. You still had to pay for the school, but you could do so by borrowing money at below normal interest rates.

          Unfortunately, college tuitions are one of these goods that remained scarce. Lots of people want to send their kids to an Ivy League school, but those schools only admit a certain number of students each year. So supply was more or less fixed. Consequently, allowing kids to shift their future earnings into the present via loans just increased demand (more of them could afford college). And what happened is what naturally happens any time you have fixed supply and increased demand - people bid up the cost of tuition.

          At this point, it's too far gone for a simple fix. But what needs to happen is:

          • Get rid of all student loans. Make it illegal to time-shift money from the future into the present to pay for education. If you can't afford to send your kids to a prestigious private school with the money you have today, tough.
          • Use the subsidy money instead to expand quality public universities. Basically inject the money into the supply side instead of on the demand side like with loans. Cap their tuition at a certain % of the median household income. Prevent them from shifting their cost burden over to the demand side.
          • Continue to allocate a portion of that subsidy money to scholarships for low-income and economically distressed students. No reason to deny a smart kid an education just because his/her parents can't afford it. But don't go crazy with it because this too is equivalent to increasing demand. Most of the money should instead be spent on the previous bullet point, which increases supply - that's what keeps prices low, not subsidies.

          That'l

    • by Firethorn ( 177587 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:49AM (#51994691) Homepage Journal

      All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good. But given modern politics we might have to bring the Post-Soviet style problems to America firsthand before they can realize the situation.

      Okay, so they take a trip to Eastern Europe. On the way they go through Western Europe, and come back convinced even more that they're being fed a rotten load by their predecessors.

      Questions they might have:
      Why are we expected to take on so much debt for college?
      Why am I expected to fund my own retirement when my predecessor got a defined benefits package that I'm paying for?
      Why is healthcare so expensive?
      Why can't companies show a little bit of loyalty to us?
      etc...

    • by Actually, I do RTFA ( 1058596 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:55AM (#51994717)

      It's always good too look all the current options that currently exist, and never try to invent a better way to do things. That's why I'm telegraphing this over ShinyWires, the best wires we could find when stringing the telegraph. I rode to the office on FastHorse, bred of the finest horses and therefore the best possibel ground transportation

      Look, I think it makes sense to look at exsiting countries... including Scandanavian ones and Portugal. We can learn from everywhere.

      ALso, I went through Eastern Europe. It was awesome, as someone with hard currency to spend!

    • by jandersen ( 462034 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:11AM (#51994793)

      All it takes is a trip to Eastern Europe for any American to realize their world is pretty darn good.

      You mean, like going to Prague and seeing the magnificent architecture and so on? You see only what to see, it seems; I'm sure we can come to the States and find areas marred by the most shameful poverty, rife with drug dealers, prostitutes and gun violence. And then we can go "Look, that's what Capitalism does". Why not try to cultivate an open mind instead? I think that is what young people criticise more than anything else - the closed minds and prejudice of people who just don't give a damn, and prefer to explain problems away.

      When you have to compare yourself to others who don't do very well, it's probably because can't find good arguments for your opinion. And I think you do America an injustice - sure, your society has many faults, but there is also so much good, especially when you look at ordinary people. There is some truth in the cynical, old saying, that it is the scum that rises to the top; it is probably not irrelevant to observe that scum is what you get when a pond is stagnant and polluted - the cure often involves reducing the influx of nutrients and increasing the flow of water through the system. Make of that what you want :-)

      Both capitalism and socialism are important ingredients in a well-functioning society; it is self-evident (I hope) that we have to care for the weakest in some way, we have to provide education, healthcare etc, simply because it is better for society as a whole, as well as for the individual - all of which are arguably "socialist" in nature. And it is just as obvious that we need the be allowed the opportunity to aspire to do better than the average, and wealth is a strong motivator - which is essentially what capitalism is about. What we can't have, if we want society to be basically fair and viable in the long term, is all-out Socialism or Capitalism; when it becomes ideology rather than common sense, that's when it stops working.

    • Re:It's all relative (Score:5, Informative)

      by Brownstar ( 139242 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @07:32AM (#51995771)

      How much experience do you have in Eastern Europe?

      I am an American, slightly older than a millennial, but also not a Gen-Xer, and I went to Eastern Europe, and I've stayed there (going on years 8 now).

      I earn a 1/3 of what I earned in the US for a similar programming job.

      Jobs are plentiful, and there's more demand for developers than there are available people.

      I don't need a car, and unlike the cities in the US where you can get away without a car, I'm not paying a premium to live there.
      When I need to use a taxi, I rarely spend more than $15 and that's for a 30-40 minute ride to the airport.

      If I'm just going around town, it's usually between $2 - $8.

      When I rented I paid about $500 month for an apartment in the city center + about $100 for utilities and internet (120 Mb/s).

      Now that I own my own property with the money I saved on my Eastern European wages, I spend about $200 a month on taxes and utilities.
      My monthly grocery bill for 2 people is between $150 - $200, and we eat well. Because my wife prefers it we get mostly organic veggies and fruits, and high quality cuts of meat. If we wanted to we could cut this bill between 1/4 and 1/2 if we didn't shop at the fancy markets.

      If we go out to a restaurant in the touristy part of town that caters to expats, we're hard pressed to spend more than $20 a person on dinner and drinks.

      My tax rate is about the same as it was in the US (24.5%).

      I have both "free" healthcare and private health insurance (I pay less than $50/month pre-tax for that),

      When I need to go to a doctor, I just show them my ID card, I've never had to pay money for anything, not even a deductible (this includes 1 time that I had to have for surgery). Normally I can see the doctor the next day, at most 3 days (and it's a bit longer for me, as i need an English speaking doctor, as I'm not fluent enough for them to allow me to visit a native speaker, to make sure there are no misunderstandings).

      The time I needed surgery it took 3 weeks total to arrange.

      When my kids are ready for university, it'll be free.

      My wife decided to change careers and went back for another Master's degree at the best university in the country for free, Actually better than that, since she was doing very well, she earned a stipend after her first year, and we also received a number of discounts on things for her being a student.

      After all of my bills are paid, my left over is 2 - 4 times as much as I was able to save in the US, despite making a lot more money.

      So I'm not sure if a visit to Eastern Europe will have quite the impact on their thoughts about how things in the US are going as you think it will.

  • by GoodNewsJimDotCom ( 2244874 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:09AM (#51994537)
    The ability to invest in yourself so you can produce more is good. I like the free spirit of working in what business you want. Capitalism doesn't have as much waste as another system where everyone gets rationing they may or may not want. Where Capitalism falls short is if you can't get a job at all or can't start your own business. There is no sympathy for those who can't do well. There is no cushion for rock bottom other than hopefully a supportive family. Fix that while also having people still want to work dirty jobs, and you're on to something.
    • by ThorGod ( 456163 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:25AM (#51994593) Journal

      Where Capitalism falls short is if you can't get a job at all or can't start your own business. There is no sympathy for those who can't do well. There is no cushion for rock bottom other than hopefully a supportive family. Fix that while also having people still want to work dirty jobs, and you're on to something.

      Sure, that's called socialism.

      Ultimately, I think capitalism needs to pragmatically move above its limitations. It generates monopolies -> put pressures into the economy to fight back against them. It devalues people below their basic, human worth -> provide either a basic income or otherwise establish resource allocation outside the capital market. It leaves people unable to afford basic health care -> identify this as a failed market and employ a different allocation system for just basic health care.

      • Socialism looks good on paper. All men are equals working together except a few men who lead them and distribute the goods. But in practice, the leader people start power tripping wanting more and more power. And then they become afraid of the people rallying against them, so they crack down on political dissenters at first sight. Then by doing this, they become a more hated villian, and feel the need to oppress their people more. Socialism on paper looks good, but in history, it hasn't panned out wel
        • Socialism looks good on paper. All men are equals working together except a few men who lead them and distribute the goods. But in practice, the leader people start power tripping wanting more and more power. And then they become afraid of the people rallying against them, so they crack down on political dissenters at first sight. Then by doing this, they become a more hated villian, and feel the need to oppress their people more. Socialism on paper looks good, but in history, it hasn't panned out well.

          OK, this is the first post I've read today that is close to both theory and practice. But keeping this in mind, how on earth can some idiots use the "socialism"-label as the bogey-man in any political debate but AT THE SAME TIME slap it on run of the mill democratic countries as Norway and Germany? If Sweden was socialist, why should anyone be afraid of it? Make up your minds, please.

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:13AM (#51994549)

    Where than can take it in turns to act as a sort of executive officer for the week.

    But all the decision of that officer have to be ratified at a special biweekly meeting.

    By a simple majority in the case of purely internal affairs,-- but by a two-thirds majority in the case of more--

  • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:16AM (#51994563)

    At a guess I would imagine the part where they don't get a job, can never buy a house, have a huge student debt loaded on them before they start their careers, and if they say anything bad about their situation, get called greedy and lazy by the people who have rigged the system to ensure they and their privaledged offspring own everything.

    • by Anonymous Coward on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:47AM (#51994939)

      Indeed, playing the victim is the millenial signature move.

      I'm an engineering manager and interview fresh graduates from the best schools in this country. I have a shocking recruitment budget so I can hire the best. And the best are generally not American.

      For the most part, the Americans are technically unremarkable, complain too much, have poor work ethic and can't put down their phone while I'm talking to them.

      The Americans are mostly middle class kids who had school programs, facilities, scholarships and pedigrees that their peers from China, India and Russia could only dream of. But the Americans blew their chance by not working hard while believing they're special. Each kid from China grew up with 1000 peers competing for every spot they ever applied for, going all the way back to grade school.

      Americans complain about student debt yet spend their 4 years of college partying, while the Russian kids who clawed their way into the US buckle down and study. It takes a single glance tell their resumes apart.

  • by istartedi ( 132515 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:17AM (#51994571) Journal

    This probably means that a majority of them don't know what capitalism is. Their college professors taught them it was cronyism, fascism, patriarchy, etc., and K-12 probably didn't put it in a good light either. They're ripe with the kind of cognitive dissonance that buys a Che Guevera T-shirt from a vendor and doesn't put 2+2 together.

    • by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:58AM (#51994737)

      get your head out of your ass. capitalism is the United States of America right now. all the government corruption in the name of money, that's capitalism. letting people die because it's cheaper to pay a few dozen grieving families than a 50 cents more for a switch, that's capitalism. fucking over the global economy so that you can get rich while the world burns, that's capitalism. capitalism is greed and corruption.

      your imaginary world where psychopaths wouldn't kill you then sell your children into slavery does not exist.

    • by meburke ( 736645 )

      Right on the mark, and nicely said.

      On the other hand, NOBODY really knows what Capitalism "is" be cause "Capitalism" doesn't really exist as a noun. The word "Capitalism" exemplifies a nominalization (creating a noun out of verbs, which is also a nominalization) and is generalized of behaviors relating to the use of assets. The "is" illustrates the conflicts that exist in the "is" of identity (described by Aristotle and Korzybski). It is no surprise that you can ask a question that has no meaning and people

    • by sjames ( 1099 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:59AM (#51994979) Homepage Journal

      They were taught that what America has today is capitalism. What they see today makes them sick, and rightly so. If you don't want capitalism flushed, you better help it clean up it's act.

    • The only really defining attribute of Capitalism is private ownership of the means of production. But if the means of production is owned by a bunch of crony capitalist who are also able to control the political system, then the theoretical ability for individuals to own the means of production is meaningless. I have a theoretical chance of winning the lottery, but on an aggregate scale, that is not a solution to poverty. Capitalism thrives when the means of production are distributed among the population.

  • "Free" market? (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Dasher42 ( 514179 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:30AM (#51994611)

    Adam Smith was never writing about what's called the "free market". He envisioned small-scale peer-to-peer reputation-driven interaction, not what we have.

    We need to stop calling Wall Street crony-ism a free market. It's a rigged market working for a few. How many of you out there have chance to not be haggled down to the very minimum that can be paid? How many people are routinely being awarded bonuses, and are they really contributing that level of worth to society? There you have it - resources divided not by merit, but by political and economic clout.

    In other words, we have an unjust power differential, the same problem with the state-collectivized system that we refer to as socialism, but there are very different types of socialism out there and they don't all work like the totalitarian state-collective system of Stalin and Mao. Kerala's example of "land to the tiller" redistributes private ownership to guarantee ownership of the minimum tools and resources necessary to be self-sufficient. European social democracy may have problems, but many of those countries do have a stronger middle class and take for granted people in the USA only wish for. Again, the term is glossing over a lot and leaving key pieces out of the USA's public discourse, quite to the advantage of the ownership class who would keep anything demonized that would loosen their chokehold on the nation's wealth.

    The key differences in any society, if you were to ask me, are the levels of equality in distribution, and representation in policy, and of accountability - meaning that corrupt officials and representatives who listen to lobbyists instead of constituents would get kicked out of office. Equality, representation, accountability - not capitalism versus socialism.

    In those terms, people don't get hung up over whether government is big or small but whether it's in the public interest. Oligarchy in the form of Wall Street or a Communist party gets identified as oligarchy whatever the label. We remember that the real deal is that the people are in charge and can stop their government from going out of control.

    So please, let's start talking in actual useful terms instead of red herrings.

    • Re:"Free" market? (Score:5, Insightful)

      by religionofpeas ( 4511805 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:40AM (#51994647)

      Adam Smith was never writing about what's called the "free market". He envisioned small-scale peer-to-peer reputation-driven interaction, not what we have.

      Unrestricted freedom invariably leads to concentration of wealth and power into a few hands.

    • Re:"Free" market? (Score:4, Informative)

      by bugmenot1 ( 4272221 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:40AM (#51994649)
      Elizabeth Warren is the only one who gets predatory lending and predatory credit cards. She also has some good ideas on how to fix our system. The banksters already have a hit out on her and have started their dirty tricks campaign. I hope she gets a chance to be heard. She talks about what you have mentioned in your post.
    • Umm... Adam Smith definitely talked about oligopolies... And large scale commodity based transactions. In fact, his work was The Wealth of Nations

  • by bugmenot1 ( 4272221 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:33AM (#51994619)
    The invisible hand does not exist, that is why capitalism has so many problems. Adam Smith got it wrong. The younger generations are screwed. There is no longer a decent path to paid insurance at a nice company with a nice salary. H1B visa holders own those jobs now. I work at a tech company in California. A billion dollar software company, a household name. Several managers from India (located in CA) were telling external recruiters they only wanted resumes of other workers from India. They did this for years. The major qualification was someone who once came from India so we ended up with a lot of technicians who knew nothing about our products and many with very little coding skills. They took almost all the new jobs over time. I checked around and other major tech companies almost all have this problem. Why do managers from India break the rules of companies committed to be equal opportunity employers? If you look at your organization chart at your tech company I bet you notice quickly that Indian managers and executives have tricked HR and managed to hire only other people from India or of Indian descent. At worst I suspect they are racist and believe the blacks, latinos, chinese and caucasian people are inferior. At best they are just hiring their friends, be an interesting study to find out what is going on. However, it is already too late, the young people of this country are screwed.
  • by FlyHelicopters ( 1540845 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:34AM (#51994621)

    Only 42 percent said they support capitalism -- there was a margin of error of 2.4 percentage points. When asked what alternative system they would prefer, there wasn't a clear winner. Just 33 percent said they supported socialism.

    Of course there wasn't a clear winner, they are rejecting what the schools and media have told them to reject, but frankly most of them have no bloody idea what they are talking about.

    It's ok, they'll grow up and learn.

    In my experience dealing with anyone under 30 years old, most of them have absolutely no idea how the economy works, how money works, what the difference between capital investment and expenses are, and so on. What it takes to turn raw materials into a $2 cheeseburger is completely lost on anyone who hasn't actually studied it.

  • Riddle me this (Score:5, Insightful)

    by engun ( 1234934 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:47AM (#51994677)
    The pundits have weighed in with their disdain for uninformed millennials - but don't seem to grasp the basic question their generation is confronted with - how does unbounded inequality lead to equality of opportunity? - a central paradox at the heart of Capitalism.

    The reward/optimisation function in capitalism is greed - why act surprised when the end-game is inevitably an oligopoly? All this yada yada about crony capitalism is just a facile rationalisation from people who are unable to provide a clear-cut answer to this simple paradox inherent in a capitalist system. Millennials are seeing through this - and they are seeing through the fact that most ideologically driven systems that fail to take real-world evidence into account, inevitably lead to injustice.
  • result of abuse (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Gravis Zero ( 934156 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:48AM (#51994685)

    Capitalism can mean different things to different people, and the newest generation of voters is frustrated with the status quo, broadly speaking.

    can you blame them?

    * the two party political system is really just one party with caveats
    * their voice in the election has been snuffed out by super delegates
    * laws are purchased via bribes aka "campaign donations"
    * billions are being funneled into government defense contracts that we don't need
    * taxes are being used to subsidise the fossil fuel companies that are destroying the planet
    * they are being enslaved by hoisting debt on them before they even get out of college
    * a whole lot of bankers just stomped on the global economy and were then bailed out of a problem they created
    * multibillion dollar companies dodging paying billions in taxes
    * H-1B fellows are being used to replace them in the workforce
    * 0.01% of the population has 40% of the total wealth

    this isn't a favorable outcome for anyone but aging psychopaths, so it's understandable that they are unhappy.

  • Of course they do. (Score:5, Insightful)

    by Qbertino ( 265505 ) <moiraNO@SPAMmodparlor.com> on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @02:53AM (#51994707)

    The last war and/or global economy crisis that truely leveled the playing field is roughly 70 years - two full generations - ago. The market is completely staked out and capital sucktion is rampant. For millenials the game has been rigged from the beginning.

    The efficiency of capitalism as we now it continues to decline. Any millenial feels this instictively. To be honest, I have grown more sceptical myself throughout the decades.

    To anybody with a brain to think capitalism as we know it has run it's course. When even billionaires, or especially them, start calling it out [politico.com], you can be sure that your strange feeling somethings wrong is spot on.

    My 0.02 Euros.

  • by Kiuas ( 1084567 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:09AM (#51994781)

    Maybe it's because I've been raised in what the Americans would call a 'socialist' country (Finland) but it always irks me to see capitalism and socialism thrown about as some sort of polar opposites, or capitalism in general being talked about as if it's some single clearly defined ideology.

    There are many versions of capitalist economies, and some of them are socialistic. In fact, most all of them are that to a degree, as even the US has a large public sector. Capitalism at its core means nothing more or less than the private ownership of the means of production. If the question was framed "Do you support the right of individuals to own goods provided they pay their share of taxes on them?", the answers would look quite different I reckon.

    So the problem is not capitalism as such, the problem is they paying of the fair share of taxes. Neo-liberalism and the fact that the US sliding to the right continuously for the past decades has created this tilted landscape in which gigantic corporations and massively rich individuals have been uplifted to a status in which they're quite openly above governments: bribery and outright buying of bills via lobbying has been made legal (and relatively cheap compared to the profits of these companies), taxes can be circumvented easily if you're wealthy, and megacorps are allowed to wreck havoc to the environment and cause global economic meltdowns without any risk of anyone facing any jail time or even significant fines. They're given fines which are slaps on the wrist compared to the kind of money they can make by continuing illegal operations. To them, it's just a cost of doing business, and the cycle repeats.

    So is that capitalism? Well, yes, yes it is, but it's not the one and only true implementation of capitalism, in fact I'd argue it's one of the absolute worst implementations of it possible. It's a corporatocracy/plutocracy. And unless you happen to be one of the chosen few who actually benefits from such a system, there's no rational reason for anyone, on the right or on the left, to support such a model. Even a true conservative should realize that the government allowing legislation as well as elections to be sold to the highest bidder skews the market as it means whoever has the most cash can dictate the rules. That's not how a fair market is supposed to operate, regardless of what one thinks of socialist income redistribution policies.

    The tittle would be more appropriately stated: "A majority of millenials now oppose free market/laissez-faire capitalism." And that's only a good thing.

    • It's also not even that useful for those at the top. The post war years showed that when you have an economic system where people go to work every day to add to the pool of assets in a society, rather than fight each other over the assets that exist, everyone can literally live like a king. By shifting away from this productive economy to one where the most lucrative jobs are in trading assets between each other in a giant casino, even the rich miss out on things like new products and services, medical adva

  • by Ferocitus ( 4353621 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @03:29AM (#51994849)

    How will they ever know what Capitalism truly is if they continue to use Ad Blockers?

  • There are two objective problems with pure capitalism:
    1. Morality and redistribution of wealth. Any economics philosophy should aim at maximizing well being. Capitalism favors the accumulation of capital, or, basically, draining resources from society. Remember servitude, aristocracy and the middle ages? Yeah, that's the end game of pure capitalism.
    2. The assumption that a free market solves all the problems. First of all, it doesn't work at all. In fact a purely free market leads to monopolies, which break its rules. So a free market needs a strong government to keep it free. Secondly, not all social problems are best solved through a free market. Things which are strategic to society might not be profitable to be run at best. In fact, in general infrastructure is best when not run by the free market because it needs to be neutral. Think of health, defense, basic transportation... they are naturally loss-leading, and not amenable to free market logic. You want free market defense? You get an industry that creates wars to increase their shareholder value... not morally acceptable at all.

    Furthermore, pure capitalism is leading to its own death because progress is undermining some of the basics of capitalist economy, such as scarcity. Capitalism works because money is valuable. Money is valuable because you can buy stuff with it. Stuff is valuable because there's not enough to cover demand. In a society where basic needs are covered essentially for free, money accumulation becomes much less important. In a society where basic and luxury needs are given for essentially free, money accumulation is way less interesting or compelling to anyone. This, in the short term, leads to a society with an inflated artificial demand. Did you not notice the amount of ads you are subjected to? Yeah, that's why. Of course this is only a temporary solution to a structural problem. Market forces will make sure ads are minimized, and this is something which has a marginal cost of zero, so it will eventually be free for all, which is exactly what is happening with adblockers, and adblocker-blocker blockers. After that, demand will collapse and eventually we will move towards an economy of abundance, not of scarcity. I don't know what that will look like, but certainly it won't be capitalism or communism.

  • by DirkDaring ( 91233 ) on Wednesday April 27, 2016 @06:32AM (#51995495)

    I'd love to see those answers. And then ask if they support it.

In the long run, every program becomes rococco, and then rubble. -- Alan Perlis

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