Note to visitors. Our podcast today is the introduction to a new book, titled, The American Millennial Attraction to Socialism, available May 2020, at gabbypress.com.
Introduction. The American Millennial Attraction to Socialism.
Our book extends the analysis of the Annual Report on US Attitudes Toward Socialism to explain why so many young Americans are attracted to socialism.
We describe a much more fair and just economic system than socialism for the millennials to support.
Our book compares the four major economic models in the world in order to help millennials better understand their possible choices about the best economic system, judged from their own perspective of fairness and social justice.
Our book addresses the topics of:
The American Millennial Attraction to Socialism.
The Chinese Communist Crony Economy.
The Crony Corporate Capitalist Economy.
The European Crony Socialist Economy.
The American Free Enterprise Entrepreneurial Economy.
Envisioning A New American Knowledge Creation Innovation Economy.
Buchanan’s Fair Constitutional Rules as the Foundation of the Entrepreneurial Economy.
We argue that Chinese communism, European socialism, and American crony capitalism, are all variants of crony capitalism that attempt to use government to distribute financial benefits to politically connected agents.
The key common characteristic of the three crony collectivist economies is profit exploitation by the elites over the production value produced by the non-elites.
Cronyism exploitation replaces the Marxist concept of capitalist exploitation of the workers with crony exploitation of non-elites.
The set of cronies who benefit from cronyism attempt to maximize a group collectivist concept, which is commonly described as a social welfare function.
In their case, their selfish social welfare function acts as a substitute for individualist national welfare function.
In the 3 collectivist economies, the entire society is seen as a synthetic entity, whose national welfare is measured by aggregate social indicators like GDP, fairness and income equality.
The propaganda of the collectivist society is that the elites know better than common citizens what promotes social welfare, and must, therefore, have the unchecked political power to exploit the production value of the non-elites in order to obtain the tax revenue to achieve better social welfare outcomes in fairness and income equality.
In contrast to group social welfare, we argue that only one economic system attempts to maximize individual welfare, which we call the American Free Enterprise Entrepreneurial Economy.
In the individualist innovation economy, social welfare is judged by aggregating all individual welfare functions into a national social welfare function.
Individuals are free to maximize their own welfare, and have property rights to enjoy the profits that they create through their own individual initiative.
We argue that young Americans do not know the difference between group social welfare functions and individualist welfare functions, and do not know how to evaluate the fair outcomes between a collectivist economy and an individualist economy.
In the collectivist societies, the concept of fairness is judged by political elites who determine fair outcomes, after income has been earned.
In the individualist societies, fairness constitutes the ability of the individual to appropriate the income that they produce.
Millennials are attracted to socialism because they believe that the socialist economic systems are more fair than their concept of American capitalism, which is the crony corporate capitalist version of capitalism.
Most young people in America do not know the difference between Milton Friedman and Lord Keynes, and end up in the economic muddle of Milton Keynes, embracing a fairy tale socialism that is antithetical to their desired state of fairness and social justice.
We explain that innovation economics is the most fair system, and that if millennials understood how the free enterprise entrepreneurial economy worked, that they would switch their allegiance from socialism to innovation economics.
We conclude that the progress towards a fair American entrepreneurial economy can be improved by visualizing the entire economy as a knowledge creation enterprise, modeled upon the logic of a regional metro block chain, whose end goal is the commercialization of radical new technology, and the creation of new future markets.