With apologies to Jeff Foxworthy of “You Might Be A Redneck” fame.
In a recent Gallup poll, 57 percent of all Democrats said they preferred socialism to capitalism with the highest ratings among liberal young people aged 18-29.
You might “think” you are a socialist at heart. But you probably aren’t.
Take this test and preface each question with “I might be a socialist if” to see if you really do qualify:
- I am willing to pay up to 56 percent of my income to the government every year without looking for loopholes or complaining about it.
- I want all major decisions to be made by faceless, unnamed, unelected bureaucrats in Washington, state capitals and local governments.
- I want state-run monopolies to control the marketplace.
- I want centralized government to monitor my speech and what I can say and when I want to say it or not allow me to talk at all.
- I want government to provide massive subsidies and protections to old archaic businesses threatened by new companies and innovations such as Amazon, Apple, PayPal, Uber and Netflix.
- I want all of my personal health care decisions to be made by government employees who run medical facilities as well as the government runs the U.S. Postal Service and the state DMV today.
- I don’t want any competition to the public education system or allow any alternative means of educating my children, even if the local public school to which we are assigned has been performing poorly for the past 30 years.
- I want everyone to be paid the same even though I have worked my tail off and studied and sacrificed when everyone else was playing around and partying.
- I want the process to start a new business to take up to five years to get through tons of government red tape, regulation and bureaucracy.
- I think my personal freedom is less important than everyone else’s needs, wants and desires.
Socialism where college and health care are “free for everyone!” might be initially attractive to the generation that grew up with Napster and saw everything being offered for free: Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, Pandora, Fortnite.
Except that each business is an extremely capitalistic enterprise that is utterly dependent upon advertising from the private sector to survive.
No profit. No business. The day they stop making a profit, they die.
Chances are very, very high that you might think you are a socialist when, in practice, you are very much a freedom-loving American who wants to better yourself and your family through the miracle of free enterprise and capitalism as much as anyone who has ever aspired to get to America legally or illegally in the past.
No one moves to any European country for the promise of their welfare state in retirement if it means restriction of their freedoms to do whatever you want earlier in life.
Close to 50 million legal immigrants live in America today. Fifteen percent of the U.S. population legally moved here to participate in the free enterprise system instead of going to socialist nations around the globe.
The U.S. represents 4 percent of the world’s population of 7.6 billion, and yet 20 percent of the 250 million international legal migrants worldwide have come here — not Sweden, France and certainly not Venezuela.
You want capitalism. You NEED capitalism. Not only to satisfy your needs and desires — like the next iPhone — but to be able to pay the taxes to pay for the social programs you say you want.
As hard as anyone in America tries to make socialism sound cool, the truth is that deep down in your heart, you are not a socialist and never will be.
Let Europe stay socialist. Go there if you want to visit. But you will always come back to the freedom of America.
