THE LURE OF SOCIALISM

By Thomas Sowell....February 17, 2016


Many people of mature years are amazed at how many young people have voted for Senator Bernie Sanders and are enthusiastic about the socialism he preaches.

Many of those older people have lived long enough to have seen socialism fail, time and again, in countries around the world. Venezuela, with all its rich oil resources, is currently on the verge of economic collapse, after its heady fling with socialism.

But, most of the young have missed all that, and their dumbed-down education is far more likely to present the inspiring rhetoric of socialism than to present its dismal track record.

Socialism is in fact a wonderful vision — a world of the imagination far better than any place anywhere in the real world, at any time over the thousands of years of recorded history. Even many conservatives would probably prefer to live in such a world, if they thought it was possible.

Who would not want to live in a world where college was free, along with many other things, and where government protected us from the shocks of life and guaranteed our happiness? It would be Disneyland for adults!

Free college of course has an appeal to the young, especially those who have never studied economics. But college cannot possibly be free. It would not be free even if there was no such thing as money.

Consider the costs of just one professor teaching just one course. He or she has probably spent more than 20 years being educated, from kindergarten to the Ph.D., before ending up standing in front of a class and trying to convey some of the knowledge picked up in all those years. That means being fed, clothed, and housed all those years, along with other expenses.

All the people who grew the food, manufactured the clothing, and built the housing used by this one professor, for at least two decades, had to be compensated for their efforts or those efforts would not continue. And of course someone has to produce food, clothing, and shelter for all the students in this one course, as well as books, computers, and other requirements or amenities.

Add up all these costs — and multiply by a hundred or so — and you have a rough idea of what attending college costs. Whether these costs are paid by using money in a capitalist economy or by some other mechanism in a feudal economy, a socialist economy, or whatever, there are heavy costs to pay.

Moreover, under any economic system, those costs are either going to be paid or there are not going to be any colleges. Money is just an artificial device for getting real things done.

Those young people who understand this, whether clearly or vaguely, are not likely to be deterred from wanting socialism. Because what they really want is for somebody else to pay for their decision to go to college.

A market economy is one in which whoever makes a decision is the one who pays for that decision. It forces people to be sure that what they want to do is really worth what it is going to cost.

Even the existing subsidies of college have led many people to go to college who have very little interest in, or benefit from, going to college, except for enjoying the social scene while postponing adult responsibilities for a few years.

Whether judging by test results, by number of hours per week devoted to studying, or by on-campus interviews, it is clear that today’s college students learn a lot less than college students once did. If college becomes “free,” even more people can attend college without bothering to become educated and without acquiring any economically meaningful skills.

More fundamentally, making all sorts of other things “free” means more of those things being wasted as well. Even worse, it means putting more and more of the decisions that shape our lives into the hands of politicians and bureaucrats who control the purse strings.

Obamacare has given us a foretaste of what that means in reality, despite how wonderful it may sound in political rhetoric.

Worst of all, government giveaways polarize society into segments, each trying to get what it wants at somebody else’s expense, creating mutual bitterness that can tear a society apart. Some seem to blithely assume that “the rich” can be taxed to pay for what they want — as if “the rich” don’t see what is coming and take their wealth elsewhere

THE AGE OF WORKING CLASS DISCONTENT

 by RICH LOWRY February 2, 2016

We live in the age of working-class discontent, which, if it wasn’t obvious before, has been made plain by the passions roiling 2016 presidential politics. The media’s preferred description of the average Republican voter has often been “the angry white male.” This was crudely simplistic and meant to be pejorative. If the press wants to update the descriptor, it should refer to “the despairing white male.” Or more accurately, the despairing white working class. 

Two of the most illuminating and alarming books of the past few years — Coming Apart by Charles Murray and Our Kids by Robert Putnam — described the struggles of working-class America. This is the year that the facts and figures in the pages of those books have made themselves palpably felt in our politics, both left and right. White working-class life in America has been in a slow-motion disintegration for decades, and it shows. The white working class is an archipelago of hopelessness. It is in a funk about the economy (almost 80 percent think we are still in a recession) and, more fundamentally, the American future. 

We are conditioned by the media to be obsessed with race, when class is an increasingly important divider. According to the American Values Survey conducted by the Public Religion Research Institute, only about 40 percent of the white working class say the country’s best days are ahead. This is not only lower than college-educated whites (53 percent), but much lower than blacks (60 percent) and Hispanics (56 percent). It is astonishing to think that the white working class has a dimmer view of the nation’s future than blacks, who have been historically discriminated against and still lag badly on almost every socio-economic indicator. 

As noted by the National Journal’s acute analyst Ronald Brownstein, a survey for the Pew Charitable Trusts picked up the same finding a few years ago. It asked people whether they expected to be better off in ten years. Whereas two-thirds of blacks and Hispanics said “yes,” only 44 percent of whites without a college degree said the same.  Trump’s Reminder: Pay Attention to the White Working Class We are conditioned by the media to be obsessed with race, when class is an increasingly important divider. (No one ever earnestly says on a cable-TV show that we need to have “a conversation about class in America.”) 

The class divide among whites shows up again and again on questions about the fairness of the country. 

The American Values Survey finds that white working-class Americans distrust institutions like the government and business more than college-educated whites do; they are more likely to think that their vote doesn’t matter because of the influence of wealthy interests; they are more likely to think that hard work doesn’t necessarily lead to success. There is a sense among working-class whites that America has gone off the rails, and has been that way for a long time. 

 Sixty-two percent of them say American culture has gotten worse since the 1950s, whereas only 49 percent of college-educated whites agree. (Similarly, the working class has a much more jaded view of immigration, which has been a defining feature of American life in recent decades.) 

If our politics has a coloration of anger and despair, it is only the dismaying trends written about by social scientists Charles Murray, Robert Putnam, and Bradford Wilcox coming home to roost. Besides the economic battering that lower-skilled workers have taken in recent decades, the working class is increasingly disconnected from the institutions that lend meaning and hope to people’s lives: marriage, the workforce, churches, and other institutions of civil society. 

 To Attract Disillusioned Voters, the GOP Must Understand Their Concerns They believe that the longstanding American promise of a country where children are better off than their parents has been betrayed, and they sense that their time is past — a sense reinforced by a pop culture that tends to consider them afterthoughts, or fitting subjects for mockery. Although smaller than it once was, the white working class remains about 40 percent of the electorate. Its travails can’t — and won’t — be ignored.