Countries that were once imprisoned by Soviet tyranny — think Poland, Hungary, and the Czech Republic, not to mention Ukraine — tend to be more conservative and nationalist than countries where peoples have less first-hand experience of unbridled socialism.
For the same reason, people from that once benighted region of the world who emigrated to the United States or to other countries of the West are less likely than their host populations to flirt with socialist prescriptions or to wonder whether they might be better than free enterprise.
This is because people remember their personal experience when they have had to endure the squalid, impoverished, repressive, and bleak conditions that socialism inevitably brings with it. They know the reality. They are not tempted by the fantasy. They want nothing to do with it again.
(I arrived at an understanding of socialism in Britain in the winter of 1978-1979 when everyone, even gravediggers, were on strike for more pay amid double-digit inflation. Nothing worked, and I would emerge from my local subway station in London and have to navigate my way home around tons of garbage in 15-foot piles that swelled and oozed off the sidewalks and into the roads.)
Those who have never lived in such conditions, who have not been exposed to the ideological virus that produces such symptoms, have few antibodies with which to fight the contagion of socialism. That’s even more true of idealistic young adults, who’ve lived nowhere very long and under socialism not at all. These are the Americans who, as Jeremiah Poff writes, are increasingly turning toward socialism. Free enterprise has not worked well for them in the past decade, so they are widely receptive to the blandishments of a system based on central planning and living off other people’s money.
But it is not a socialist of the berniesanders or ocasiocortez genera who is showing young people this month how they can live off other people’s money. It is, on the contrary, an exemplar of free enterprise, Michael Dell, the man whose name is the brand on millions of computers.
He and his wife, Susan Dell, are giving $6.25 billion to 25 million children under 10 to put into investment accounts where the money can grow until it may be spent after they turn 18. This massive gift will complement Trump accounts that are doing a similar thing and were approved by Congress in the recent tax and spending bill.
FISHY SMELL COMES FROM DEMOCRATS, NOT DRUG BOATS
The big difference between this and socialism is that the money will not come in repeated subventions that suggest an endless supply and sap self-reliance. It will be a lump sum that immediately becomes the property of children who can watch it grow their personal wealth as the stock index funds in which it is invested rise from bottom-left to top-right across a valuation chart over the next decade. It will give the young owners a stake in our free enterprise economy.
It is to be hoped that this free stuff, unlike the free stuff of entrenched socialism, will encourage the next generation to understand what so many politicians and 20-somethings don’t, which is that America’s businesses are owned not by “millionaires and billionaires” against whom socialist demagogues rage, but by ordinary people, who work, build, and have hope for the future.