Most young people think they can transfer the morality of the family to the nation and it takes a while for them to understand the fallacy, if they ever do. A lot of PhD economists haven’t caught on.
The public school system has taught them “milk cow” economics for twelve years that says socialism is about sharing and caring while capitalism is nothing but greed. Who would want to identify with capitalism after a dozen years of such brainwashing?
But the main reason millennials oppose capitalism is that they can see how the student debt problem, lack of jobs, slow wage growth, etc. assault them, while the media, economists and conservative politicians chant daily that this is a capitalist system. Why wouldn’t they hate capitalism?
Fortunately, they don’t know the half! The US system is much more skewed against them than just the student loan and jobs problems they face. Take healthcare insurance. States, and now the feds, have always insisted that the young and healthy subsidize the costs of healthcare for the elderly by limiting the highest and lowest premiums to a 3:1 ratio. The only way insurance companies can do that is to charge young people more and older people less. If seniors paid the real cost of their insurance, healthcare insurance would cost millennials about the same premiums as car insurance. The way the government forces insurances companies to structure premiums would be the same as a car insurance company subsidizing drunk drivers.
Then the young must deal with Medicare and social security taxes, both of which extort a brutal amount from their pay checks to subsidize the healthcare and lifestyles of the elderly. Medicare drives up the cost of medical care by creating an unlimited demand chasing a limited supply that the government has choked off. Any high school student who took economics will understand that drives up prices. Then the young have to subsidize those costs for the old people through higher insurance premiums. BTW, according to PricewaterhouseCooper, 85% of all health insurance premiums goes to pay doctor and hospital fees. 10% goes to operations and 5% to profit.
The states and federal government have subsidized college education for decades and thrown trillions of dollars at it. As a result, price inflation for education is about twice that of the nation consumer price index because colleges fattened their administration and professor pay rather than building more schools. State licensing legislation has made it almost impossible to get a job as a street sweeper without a college degree. And the flood of diplomas has driven down their value, just as economics said it would. So many millennials are trapped with student debt they can never pay off and the federal government prevents them from filing for bankruptcy like every other citizen; they have become second class citizens.
Pile up all of the pummeling that US youth take from their elders and it’s brutal – high insurance premiums, high taxes, the soaring costs of education, stagnant wages, poor job creation, high student debt without the normal right to bankruptcy. What is there to like? Yet, the media, economists and all politicians tell them this is capitalism, so learn to like it! Save more and you’ll be all right. But they can’t save more because high taxes and healthcare costs plus student debt make it impossible.
At some point, millennials need to grasp that everyone they trusted lied to them. The US is not a capitalist nation by any decent definition of the term. This is democratic socialism; the milk cows are wrong.
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