Socialist Eat Their Young

It’s well known that “millennials” prefer socialism to capitalism. That doesn’t worry me, though. Someone said that if you aren’t a socialist when you’re young you don’t have a heart; if you’re not a capitalist when you age you have no head.

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?

Don’t nudge; reform Social Security

My sister-in-law taught me to do the “Dallas nudge.” It’s sort of a dance, like the Texas Two-Step, except it’s a tactic for getting onto one of Dallas’ many twelve-lane expressways. So you floor the gas pedal to match the speed of the traffic you want to merge with and then look away. The other drivers think you can’t see them and make room for you.

Behavioral economists have been pushing the government to nudge us since some of their own won the Nobel Prize. Like CS Lewis’ “do gooders,” we’ll never be free from their needling and meddling. The latest comes from the Chicago Booth School of Business in an article “Why policy makers should nudge more" by Alex Virkhivker. He wrote,

In one case, the researchers looked at a nudge by the tax-preparation firm H&R Block, which offered clients assistance in filing college financial-aid paperwork, and compared that approach with subsidies and tax incentives offered at the state and federal levels. The nudge produced 1.5 additional college enrollees per $1,000 spent—making it 40 times more effective than the next most effective intervention the researchers analyzed.

Likewise, nudging turned out to be the most cost-effective way of encouraging energy conservation. One program to nudge consumers into lower electricity use, sending letters comparing a household’s energy consumption to that of its neighbors, saved 27 kilowatt-hours per dollar spent. In contrast, a rebate offered by California utility companies produced savings of only 3.4 kWh per dollar, and other demand-management policies that relied on a combination of consumer education and monetary incentives averaged 14 kWh per dollar.