Opinion: Beware this year’s Summer of the Socialist Sharks
By Arthur C. Brooks Arthur C. Brooks Columnist focusing on policy, culture and social science Bio Follow Columnist May 17 at 6:09 PM The summer of 2001 was slow in the news business. But that changed over the Fourth of July weekend, when a shark attacked a young boy in Florida. Suddenly, it seemed as if sharks were attacking Americans every day. The news cycle was consumed; experts weighed in on television; tourists canceled their beach vacations.
It’s true that young people are more sympathetic to socialism than their elders are. According to Gallup, in 2018, 51 percent of adults ages 18 to 29 had a positive view of socialism vs. 41 percent of 30- to 49-year-olds, 30 percent of 50- to 64-year-olds and 28 percent of people older than that. This shouldn’t be much of a surprise. It’s more or less like observing that Florida has more shark attacks than Maine.
But just because young people aren’t signing up in droves for socialism doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about the future of the U.S. economic system. A 2015 poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds believe the American Dream is “dead” for them. That is the real challenge — and a welcome one, because it provides an incentive to discuss the merits and problems of free enterprise as it now functions in the United States.
What explains this amazing progress? Globalization, free trade, the proliferation of property rights and the rule of law, and the culture of democratic capitalism spreading around the world. As President Barack Obama, not known as a conservative dogmatist, put it in 2015, the “free market is the greatest producer of wealth in history — it has lifted billions of people out of poverty.”
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