Posted on 12/29/2011 3:53:07 PM PST by mandaladon
While capitalism received a largely favorable response, Pew also found that at least 25 percent of respondents across all age groups, races, income levels and ideologies were dismissive of capitalism.
Tea Party sympathizers, conservative Republicans and those making more than $75,000 a year were the most likely to respond positively, while slightly more than half of blacks and Hispanics took the opposite view.
Almost 50 percent of those aged 18 to 29, those making less than $30,000 a year and Occupy Wall Street backers also had an unfavorable reaction to capitalism.
A majority of blacks and liberal Democrats, meanwhile, reacted positively to socialism. But while reactions to capitalism were fairly consistent across all age groups, 18-to-29-year-olds were more than three times more likely (49 percent to 13 percent) to endorse socialism than those older than 65.
(Excerpt) Read more at nation.foxnews.com ...
By now there have been at least 2 generations that have been taught by these communists, who have effectively hidden the evils of their system. This does not bode well for the future.
The problem is that socialism and communism seem like good ideas if you're ignorant of the actual meanings of their platitudes, combined with the belief that everything they do is terrific.
Capitalism is hard. It requires thought and work. Why would someone with no work ethic or willingness to learn on their own ever want to be a part of the capitalist system. Especially when you start talking about "fairness." After all, "from each according to his ability, to each according to his need" sounds like an idyllic lifestyle. At least until one realizes that the true meaning of that statement is, "from each according to his ability to serve the State, to each according to his need, in service of the State." They one begins to realize that this is actually slavery.
The next time you hear someone say that socialism is a great theory, but hasn't been put into practice properly (yet), tell them that it has... If they want to see a perfected socialist/communist society, simply take a look at an ant colony or a bee hive. Then ask them if that's really the way they want to live as a human being.
Mark
We’re not teaching Capitalism in schools.
What do you want me to say?
The citizens of this nation don’t understand how it works or where it came from.
So what do you expect?
I wonder how long this poll or similar polls have been taken, and I wonder when the high water mark for pro-socialist responses was.
And so are their liberal professors.
In the old USSR only about 10 percent of the population were members of the Communist Party. We are in deeper trouble than we can imagine if these numbers are anywhere near true.
Society has done a good job of teaching young people that they are “owed” something. Gone are the days of teaching that hard work reaps rewards.
No, just wise beyond your years! :-)
The permanent underclass (which includes a growing number of whites) doesn’t understand that their freebies come from the taxes on capitalists; we have the wealthiest, fattest poor people on the planet IN SPITE OF socialism.
Fixed it for you.
http://finance.yahoo.com/news/princeton-brews-trouble-us-1-000000782.html ..
Read the comment section too!!
And we musn’t forget the one added benefit is the inevitable police state. How else can you enforce onerous regulations and confiscatory taxation?
It’s more than 25%. Just try to take away Social Security and Medicare to watch how many cry foul for screwing with their favorite Socialist programs.
.................Blacks and Hispanics? That figures. Does anything else needs to be said?..................
Yes I’d like to say something.
Moved to Texas from RI two years ago. Down here in southern Texas, of all the folks I’ve hired to rebuild my house, the Mexicans owning or working for a contracting firm are the hardest workers, and take great pride in their trade, much greater than the whites.
In RI, the large Portugese population had an incredible work ethic. Dad would hand his paycheck to Mom, and bust his butt to make as much money as he could. I had a team of boatbuilders rehab my sailing vessel, and the quality of the Portugese workers was incredible, even though all I could do was to gesture or sketch out what I wanted done to the one guy who semi spoke english.
Yeah there’s lazy hispanics and blacks, but there’s lots of lazy whites in the 99% OWS crowds.
They’re rioting in Africa
They’re starving in Spain
There’s hurricanes in Florida
and Texas needs rain!
The whole world is festering with unhappy souls,
The French hate the Germans, the Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs..
South Africans hate the Dutch
AND I DON’T LIKE ANYBODY VERY MUCH!
But we can be thankful and tranquil and proud
for mans been endowed with a mushroom shaped cloud
and we know for certain that some lucky day
someone will set the spark off
AND WE WILL ALL BE BLOW AWAY!
(LOVE that song...hee hee)
For many decades now, America's founding ideas which produced liberty, opportunity, prosperity, and plenty were excluded from the textbooks and curriculum of the nation's schools. The term "capitalism" does not adequately describe the "economic dimension of liberty" it is intended to convey.
College and university professors, by and large, taught other ideas about economic matters, including the ideas which now dominate the current Administration's policies.
If America's youth had been taught the principles of liberty and the role of what Madison called a "benign" influence of government in a free society, this poll's results would be far different, as would the economic health of the nation.
The following essay is excerpted from "Our Ageless Constitution," a 292-page history of the ideas of liberty in America, again available after 20 years of being out of print.
"Agriculture, manufactures, commerce, and navigation, the four pillars of our prosperity, are the most thriving when left most free to individual enterprise." - Thomas Jefferson
"The enviable condition of the people of the United States is often too much ascribed to the physical advantages of their soil & climate .... But a just estimate of the happiness of our country will never overlook what belongs to the fertile activity of a free people and the benign influence of a responsible government." - James Madison
America's Constitution did not mention freedom of enterprise per se, but it did set up a system of laws to secure individual liberty and freedom of choice in keeping with Creator-endowed natural rights. Out of these, free enterprise flourished naturally. Even though the words "free enterprise' are not in the Constitution, the concept was uppermost in the minds of the Founders, typified by the remarks of Jefferson and Madison as quoted above. Already, in 1787, Americans were enjoying the rewards of individual enterprise and free markets. Their dedication was to securing that freedom for posterity.
The learned men drafting America's Constitution understood history - mankind's struggle against poverty and government oppression. And they had studied the ideas of the great thinkers and philosophers. They were familiar with the near starvation of the early Jamestown settlers under a communal production and distribution system and Governor Bradford's diary account of how all benefited after agreement that each family could do as it wished with the fruits of its own labors. Later, in 1776, Adam Smith's INQUIRY INTO THE NATURE AND CAUSES OF THE WEALTH OF NATIONS and Say's POLITICAL ECONOMY had come at just the right time and were perfectly compatible with the Founders' own passion for individual liberty. Jefferson said these were the best books to be had for forming governments based on principles of freedom. They saw a free market economy as the natural result of their ideal of liberty. They feared concentrations of power and the coercion that planners can use in planning other peoples lives; and they valued freedom of choice and acceptance of responsibility of the consequences of such choice as being the very essence of liberty. They envisioned a large and prosperous republic of free people, unhampered by government interference.
The Founders believed the American people, possessors of deeply rooted character and values, could prosper if left free to:
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Such a free market economy was, to them, the natural result of liberty, carried out in the economic dimension of life. Their philosophy tended to enlarge individual freedom - not to restrict or diminish the individual's right to make choices and to succeed or fail based on those choices. The economic role of their Constitutional government was simply to secure rights and encourage commerce. Through the Constitution, they granted their government some very limited powers to:
Adam Smith called it "the system of natural liberty." James Madison referred to it as "the benign influence of a responsible government." Others have called it the free enterprise system. By whatever name it is called, the economic system envisioned by the Founders and encouraged by the Constitution allowed individual enterprise to flourish and triggered the greatest explosion of economic progress in all of history. Americans became the first people truly to realize the economic dimension of liberty.
Footnote: Our Ageless Constitution, W. David Stedman & La Vaughn G. Lewis, Editors (Asheboro, NC, W. David Stedman Associates, 1987) Part III: ISBN 0-937047-01-5
The more non-whites you have, the more socialism you’re going to get. I imagine the non-white percentage of young people is way higher than the non-white percentage of old people.
Most people, for example, are generally in favor of a more equal distribution of incomes. (I am among them, and so probably are you; the question is legitimate vs. illegitimate means.) Most people would also agree that people should be able to keep most of what they earn, and that there should be a maximum tax rate beyond which government should not go. A majority of Americans believes that the major entitlements should be protected, and simultaneously that government spends too much money and that spending should be restrained. And so on, ad nauseam.
Between ignorance and flat stupidity, the electorate is wide open to manipulation. Only the integrity of the political class and the competence of a vigilant and impartial press protect us from the charlatans. Sleep well.
Those getting handouts think it’s teriffic.
Reminds me of a saying way down south, “You either accept the silver or the lead”
Too many people are accepting the silver from the socialists.
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