By Steve Levy
When you’re a young and impressionable college-aged student, you have a mind of clay that can sometimes be molded to the whims of your revered elder professors. Many of these Marxist-leaning college educators preach a dogma that fits rather snuggly into a young person’s sense of idealism and altruism.
As Churchill famously said, if you are not a liberal when you’re twenty, you don’t have a heart; if you’re not a conservative at forty, you don’t have a brain. So, be skeptical when your professors preach to you that America is a horrid place, where the rich and powerful – usually meaning the white male patriarchy – exploit those of lesser means.
Not having the knowledge to counter these one-sided arguments, many young people tend to adopt this seemingly humanistic philosophy that seeks to take from the greedy and give to the poor. If only we could crush the wealthy and redistribute their income in a more socialistic fashion, everyone would be happier, say the socialist professors.
It’s hard to preach the values of capitalism to youngsters who have been ingrained with the thought that capitalists are nothing more than greedy power brokers angling for the next dollar at the expense of a poor defenseless exploited member of the working class.
The anti-Marxist elements within our society do a lousy job countering the Marxist propaganda preached primarily in our colleges, but which is now seeping more readily into our K-12 schools and the culture at large.
So, here are a few steps that Americans wanting to preserve our special status in world history can take to negate the indoctrination that our young students have endured in our academic institutions.
First and foremost, understand that words matter.
The term “capitalism” evokes images of Charles Dickens’ Tale of Two Cities or Gordon Gekko in Oliver Stone’s movie, Wall Street, proclaiming that “greed is good.” What 20-year-old wants to be part of that? Instead, we should use the terms “free market economy” and “free enterprise” to describe the American success story. Freedom is a word that’s hard to belittle.
Don’t you want the freedom to start your own business? Don’t you want the freedom to keep enough of your hard-earned money so that you can control your discretionary spending rather than surrender it to a deep state? Don’t you want the freedom to work more or less depending on your particular needs, or to invest your money in an enterprise with which you are impassioned, and be able to reap the rewards? Don’t you want the freedom to work harder to earn more to better your station in life?
As I stated in my book Solutions to America’s Problems, explain that equality, for equality’s sake, is a foolish notion. What good is having equality with everyone else if we are all equally poor? A level of inequality is certainly superior to that, especially if everyone’s piece of the pie grows as the economy is stimulated.
Take the difference between North and South Korea. Look at the two countries from a spaceship. In the evening, the north is dark, barren, and desolate. The south is thriving with light and energy.
There’s far more inequality in the south, but even the poorer folks in South Korea live better than the average North Korean citizen who lives in basic poverty.
That’s why Kamala Harris’ quest for equal outcomes as opposed to equal opportunity is so dangerous, and so un-American.
And if that doesn’t work, try this: Imagine thirty students in this class went on a boat trip, hit rough seas and got stranded on a deserted island. It makes sense that, early on, we’d try to gather fruits and farm the land and share it collectively. It would help us survive, but only at a bare sustenance.
Now imagine further that, upon exploring the island, one of our clans came upon a person who had built a big house and had cultivated an impressive working farm with advanced equipment, including hoes, tractors and an irrigation system. Imagine that he extended an offer to the stranded group. “I’ll help you grow your farm and dramatically increase your harvest by lending you some of my equipment,” the farmer said. “The only thing I ask in return is a ten percent take of the harvest. Since you will be tripling the number of crops you can grow, it will be a small price to pay.” The farmer gets wealthier, but so do all of the stranded students who, thanks to the advanced equipment loaned by the owner, can eat better and have more time for leisure. It’s a win-win for everyone. That is what capitalism – or a free market- is all about.
The collectivism of Mao’s China never worked. China allowed hundreds of millions to escape poverty because Deng Xioaping introduced a form of capitalism in the 1980s. A billion people in Asia escaped poverty over the past three decades because industrialization, international trade and capital investment flooded the continent.
And don’t forget to tell these impressionable students that Venezuela was the richest South American democracy just twenty-five years ago. Then they elected a Marxist, Hugo Chavez, who confiscated wealth and imposed an extreme form of socialism that made it one of the hemisphere’s poorest countries.
And now we have the Democratic nominee for president preaching Chavez’s policies of price controls and taxing unrealized capital gain.
If Venezuelans had the opportunity to turn back the clock and keep the communists from gaining power, they’d do it in a nanosecond. The question is: Will we learn from their failures?
And will we stop vilifying free markets and stop the trend within our schools that indoctrinate our younger generation that socialism and communism are utopian goals they should strive toward?
Steve Levy is President of Common Sense Strategies, a political consulting firm. He served as Suffolk County Executive, as a NYS Assemblyman, and host of “The Steve Levy Radio Show.” He is the author of “Solutions to America’s Problems” and “Bias in the Media.” www.SteveLevy.info, Twitter @SteveLevyNY, [email protected]
