Headline of the Day

Memo to Those Who Fear Socialism: Why Don’t You Try Fix Capitalism? 

— The New Republic, on the current socialism panic.

I can answer this question:  Because the Free Market Mousketeers believe that capitalism cannot ever fail, it can only be failed. 

Everywhere I look, I see people expressing alarm about the popularity of socialism. It polls in the mid-to-high 30s, and considerably higher among younger people. Older people, who have a living memory of the various socialist regimes that once dotted the planet, which at best didn’t deliver prosperity to their people and at worst threw them in jail by the thousands, can’t understand how this could be and seem to want to talk endlessly about it.

I, however, marvel at the other consistent result of all these polls, which these people don’t seem nearly as interested in talking about. I refer to the ratings Americans give to capitalism. They’re terrible. A big Gallup poll from last fall is representative. Socialism won the approval of 39 percent, while capitalism’s positive number was 54 percent.

That is pathetic—barely half the country! In the country that invented modern capitalism and where it is worshipped by the elite class! And you know what? It’s entirely deserved. In fact, it deserves to be a little worse (as it is among Democrats). The kind of capitalism we’ve been practicing in this country over the last 40-plus years is cruel, corrupt, and a perversion of what humane capitalism ought to be. The people who are so freaked out about socialism ought to realize that the only way they’re going to arrest its rise is to change capitalism for the better.