Say socialism and college-educated young people start to dance and cheer. But when you ask them about the specifics of what it would mean, they quickly sour on it as shown in a recent Harvard Caps/Harris poll.
Karl Marx promised a utopia governed by the principle “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs.” The Democratic Socialists of America has called for an “adequate income for all” and a guaranteed federal job paying a “living wage” to anyone who wants one. But the poll finds that 77% of registered voters under 25 believe their paycheck should be based on the “merit and value of their work.” That belief is even more prevalent among older voters.
Sixty-eight percent of young voters say they want to own their own home. Meanwhile Cea Weaver, Zohran Mamdani’s director of the New York City Mayor’s Office to Protect Tenants, has declared that “private property and . . . especially home ownership is a weapon of white supremacy” and that housing should be regarded as a collective good.
Mr. Mamdani and the DSA platform have also called for “seizing the means of production” and nationalizing all large corporations and essential industries. Claire Valdez, Democratic nominee for New York’s Seventh Congressional District, would “nationalize the airlines.” The mayor plans to establish city-owned grocery stores that he says would “pay no rent and no taxes,” giving them a competitive advantage over ordinary privately owned shops.
All this is out of touch with young voters and how they see their future. Seventy percent of them want to own their own business and 63% see America as the land of opportunity.
Today’s young adults must be the most entrepreneurial socialists in history. What accounts for the divergence between their stated views and the ideology they claim to endorse? Another result may provide a clue. The same poll asked Americans if they have a favorable view of America. For all age groups, 74% answered yes. Only 52% of those under 25 did. Nearly 40% liked China.
Speaking of socialism, here’s Cato’s Tad DeHaven on Trump’s continuing embrace of it.
President Donald Trump’s latest temper tantrum over Canada, including the renaming of Lake Ontario as Lake America after the collapse of trade negotiations, is premised on the claim that “Canada has been ripping off the United States for decades.” At least, that’s what the White House insisted in an August 25 press release about the tariff dispute. But, if that’s true, why are Canadians poorer than Americans and falling further behind?
A new study from Canada’s Fraser Institute points out that while our northern neighbors started the century with high hopes for their economic prospects, the years since have shown them lagging Americans. If Canadians are taking advantage of us, they’re doing a remarkably poor job of it.
“In 1999, inflation-adjusted gross domestic product (GDP) per person in the US was CA$10,766 higher than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had more than doubled to CA$23,757,” write study authors Grady Munro, Jake Fuss, and Joel Emes. “Similarly, in 2010, inflation-adjusted median employment income in the US was CA$6,126 higher than in Canada. By 2024, that gap had increased to CA$8,663.”
The Fraser study notes that since 1999, government-sector employment has been growing faster than private-sector employment in Canada. The opposite has been true in the United States. And while Canadian workers have increased their productivity by 26.7 percent since 1999, they’ve still lost ground as Americans increased productivity by 67.9 percent.
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“Despite some early hopes prior to 2014, Canada has made virtually no economic progress relative to its southern neighbour and has instead fallen further behind where it stood at the turn of the century,” the Fraser authors conclude.
Every Labor Day, unions claim responsibility for much of modern America’s cushy living standards. They argue that the eight-hour workday and five-day workweek wouldn’t exist without their valiant efforts against the mighty industrialists. We are supposed to thank unions for minimum wages and workplace safety laws, too, and for banning the scourge of child labor. If not for organized labor, the story goes, we would essentially still be living in the Gilded Age.
The comforts of working in today’s U.S. economy are nothing to scoff at. But to attribute these improvements to labor unions — ignoring the underlying force beneath them all — is to engage in historical revisionism. At best, organized labor ratified improvements in living standards that were already enabled by rising productivity.
It is crucial to remember that mankind’s economic baseline is universal grinding poverty, with life sustained only by subsistence. All improvements in material welfare, from the First Agricultural Revolution onward, must be forged through investment and ingenuity. The Industrial Revolution, the era that unions decry, was an extraordinary advancement in human welfare. Daily economic life has only gotten better since, as free peoples have developed new ways to arrange capital and labor to yield greater wealth for all involved.
Begin with labor hours. Since the 19th century, the number of hours worked per lifetime has more than halved worldwide, while leisure time has increased fivefold. Weekly hours worked by men in the United States have also gradually declined, even as the unionization rate rose and then collapsed. The same is true of American seniors.
The now-standard workweek — five eight-hour days with a two-day weekend — was not a union creation. Rather, it was innovated by Henry Ford at his company’s strictly non-union Highland Park Plant. The productivity revelation that was the assembly line first permitted Ford to give workers one day off a week in 1922, then two days off in 1926. With mass production came the free time needed for mass consumption.
Wages for production workers were rising steadily for decades before the advent of unions. When the first federal minimum wage took effect in the 1930s, at 25 cents an hour, most unskilled workers were earning nearly twice that amount.
As for safety conditions, the rate of workplace fatalities in America has been falling since at least the 1920s, as factories became increasingly automated and more workers shifted into the service sector. When we look at a graph of deaths over time, it’s impossible to tell when federal workplace safety rules were enacted. Child labor was almost nonexistent by the time Congress prohibited it in 1938, since it had plummeted in the prior decades.
Time and again, laws pushed by labor unions were enshrined only after economic growth made them feasible — and after such standards were already being adopted voluntarily. When businesses must compete for employees, they have every incentive to boost productivity and share the proceeds through higher wages and more attractive working conditions.
“The jobs apocalypse is postponed. An AI jobs boom is here.”
Corey DeAngelis continues to expose the dysfunction of government-supplied K-12 “education.”
We study the effects of vast increases in U.S. small business program eligibility standards, which expanded larger firms’ access to support for small businesses. Exploiting quasi-random variation in the timing of these expansions and using administrative Census data, we show that revenues decline for the smallest firms, particularly those that are younger, more productive, and financially constrained. Government procurement contracts also are reallocated to larger firms. Consequently, firm exits increase, wages decline, and patenting falls. These findings highlight the economic consequences of expanding eligibility: by crowding out the smallest firms, resources shift away from high-potential firms, reducing dynamism and innovation.
