A majority of millennials now reject capitalism

Capitalism and free markets are not the same. Though you are correct, they are often seen as being synonymous. Capitalism foments monopolies, and monopoly markets aren't free by any stretch of the imagination. Below is a article which elucidates the differences a bit more. Many of the markets in the US are not free, because they are regulated. Healthcare in the US isn't a free market. Transportation isn't a free market. Capitalization is about ownership. Free markets are about the lack of regulation. The two are not the same.

http://www.investopedia.com/ask/ans...-capitalist-system-and-free-market-system.asp

I've live in the US for almost 62 years and I have never heard the mainstream left deride capitalism. They have derided capitalists (e.g. The Great Recession of 2007-2009). But mainstream liberals or leftists have never used the word "capitalism" is a derisive or pejorative manner. The American left isn't nearly as left or as liberal as what we see in Europe as evidenced by Obamacare. Obamacare didn't change the ownership structure of American healthcare not even by a single iota. It just changed how it was regulated and financed. Regardless of all the claims made by so called American conservatives, healthcare in the US is still a private sector enterprise. The mainstream American left, isn't advocating government ownership. It is advocating regulating business to mitigate some the intrinsic problems associated with capitalism like the excessive accumulation of capital among a few individuals. As previously noted, by others capitalism is the best of a bunch of flawed economic systems. It's a great tool, but it is not without problems (e.g. The Great Depression, robber barons, pollution, bank runs, frequent depressions, hyper inflation, et al.).

 

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Indeed. I have some trouble getting to a good definition of capitalism. In theory I'd have thought it should relate, not just to a market economy, but to something about the way capital, i.e. stores of money or other assets, are used in the economy - or rather in society generally. So, it should, I'd have thought, be about investment, issuing and ownership of shares (stock in the US) and so forth. Ancient societies were "market economies" in spite of having practically none of the financial structures that we have nowadays, were they not? Shares in the modern sense seem to have started with the East India Company in the c.17th.

Regarding the negative image of the term, I think this is bound up with the class resentments we have in Europe, originally born of the division between aristocrats, landed gentry and labourers. In Britain the Norman Conquest was what originally set the scene for class division (Norman aristocrats vs. Saxon peasants, each speaking literally different languages!). The New World is mercifully fairly free of this miasma of blaming everyone's station in life on their birth, and has the more positive attitude that anyone with brains and energy can make it - hence perhaps capitalism is seen as the vehicle to allow the talented to realise their dreams.

 

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The problem is the Democratic party has destroyed the economy with regulation, taxes and crony capitalism, none of which are part of a capitalist system. These are things which government added to make the capitalist system corrupt and inept for jobs.

For example, the housing crisis of 2008, was an accident waiting to happen, when the Democrats decided it would be good if everyone could own a home, years earlier. The free market did not want this, since not everyone is a good credit risk for a house loan. The fear was massive default. The Democrats sweetened the pot and said they; US government would underwrite the loans, so there was no risk to the banks; crony capitalism. This created a housing bubble which broke. The very thing the banks said would happen, happened. If movement had butted out this would have been avoided.

This is reinterpreted, in liberal education, via revisionist history; Blame Bush and Greedy Banks. The greedy banks tried to nip this in the bud, but were enticed to act in a corrupt way via crony capitalism.

The current Democrat party disaster in the making, is connected to the idea of college for all. This brain fart is leading to another potential debt crisis due to huge crippling student loans. The misinformation taught in schools has placed the blame for this on everyone but the creators of the disaster in Washington; Democrats.

Free market Capitalism would not lead to a housing crisis or a college loan crisis. The fact that Millennials don't trust capitalism shows they are not being taught what capitalism is, in school. We need to get rid of the Department of Education Propaganda which protects the incompetent an corrupt in Washington.

 

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i am amused at the fact that most in this conversation continue to say " democratic and republican " are such and such... (comical)-- just to inform everyone, a politician is a politician-- it is, simply, politicians that destroy.

 

Thatcher's "rehabilitation", coincident with Reagan's in the US and the rise of the alternatively labeled "neo-con/neo-lib" crowd that has brought the US so much unnecessary misery, was a con job - in both senses of "con".

In the US it was a deliberate, organized, well-financed PR campaign to identify deregulation of corporations, market exchange itself, choice and freedom, and democracy in general, (the direction of implication in the PR was the reverse of that) with capitalism.

Capitalism, basic foundation concept, is an ideological feature: the economic organization of an industrial society by ownership of the product established via ownership of the means of production (the "capital"), ownership of the capital established through monetary purchase -

the means of production of a society thereby established as privately owned capital exchangeable for money alone (no "social" criterion involved), the product thereby owned by the owner of said capital.

The modification that created the Western economies we know was the legal creation of the "corporation" - a new kind of owner, capable of exchanging money for capital and thereby owning that capital, and through that capital ownership all of its product. And that completes the picture - capitalism, realistically, refers to an ideological preference for corporate ownership of the means of production, and that establishing ownership of the product.

So a Wall Street hedge fund can "own" the entire potable water supply of a town in Montana none of its investors have even seen. Because they own the means of production. Because they paid for it. They don't have to own the rain, the river, the aquifer, or gravity - those are not "capital", and ownership of the capital establishes ownership of the product.

And so we see that capitalism can exist in - and may even lean toward - the absence of democracy, choice, and market exchange itself, let alone "free" market exchange. The classic example would be the internal economies of the slave plantation regions in the American south circa 1845, or the island economies of Sicily and - to a lesser extent - Hawaii in certain eras.

It's not that complicated, really. It took a deliberate propaganda campaign decades to muddle the current political vocabulary to the current extent.

So fascism, liberalism, and in many modern societies (such as the US) conservatism, are all capitalistic ideologies - they share that feature, if few others.

Hence the danger in, say, ascribing the virtues and efficiencies of democracy, choice, and free market exchange to capitalism, and thereby to the economic structures contingent upon any capitalistic ideology - as was the con job.

Capitalism may be beneficial or even necessary for a society that aspires to be both free and industrially modern (I think so, anyway), but it is nowhere near sufficient or even protective.

 

Except none of that is true, beginning with the fact that the economy hasn't been destroyed. The US has the largest economy in the world...oops. Democrats are opposed to money in our polity. The leading Democrat has proposed a Constitutional amendment to take money out of our electoral process. Republicans are for more money in our polity and have put more money into our polity (e.g. Citizens United).

Except, that too is not true. The "free market" isn't a person. It doesn't have wants. Two, it wasn't a housing crisis. It was a liquidity crisis. That's why it was necessary for the government to step in and provide cash in order to prevent businesses from defaulting. The Great Recession of 2007-2009 began in 1999 when at the behest of industry lobbyists and Fed Chairman Greenspan (Republican) a Democratic president signed into law a bill which repealed laws which were enacted after The Great Depression to prevent another great depression (i.e. Glass-Steagall). Not surprisingly, that deregulation nearly caused another great depression in relatively short order. The problem wasn't banks loaning money and making bad loans. We have seen that before (e.g. the Savings & Loan Crisis). They didn't cause this kind of crisis. What caused the Great Recession of 2007-2009 was derivative trading which was enabled by the repeal of Glass-Steagall and passage of the Commodities Futures Modernization Act. That was the problem. It wasn't bad loans. Bad loans are manageable. The unlimited and unknown risk and liabilities posed by derivative trades were not. Prior to the Repeal of Glass-Steagall, banks were prohibited from making those kinds of trades. Deregulation caused The Great Recession. Rush Limbaugh won't tell you that. But that's the God's truth of the matter.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Savings_and_loan_crisis

Uh...I feel sorry for you. A Republican Congress passed the bills and a Democratic president under the influence of a Republican Fed Chairman and industry lobbyists signed those bills into law and repealed regulation which had protected the economy for almost 70 years and which led to The Great Recession of 2007-2009. And Baby Bush further deregulated the securities industry which exacerbated the the effects of The Great Recession. To Baby Bush's credit, he did in the final days of his administration respond appropriately to the crisis. But he did nothing to prevent it, and he should have.

You know who else didn't like educated people and institutions of higher learning? Joseph Stalin, Mao Zedong, Vladimir Lenin, Benito Mussolini, the Khmer Rouge, they didn't like educated folks or institutions of higher learning and what was being taught either. What's that old idiom about birds of a feather flocking together? It seems apropos here.

"Anti-intellectualism is a common facet of totalitarian dictatorships to oppress political dissent.Perhaps its most extreme political form was during the 1970s in Cambodia under the rule of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, when people were killed for being academics or even for merely wearing eyeglasses (as it suggested literacy) in the Killing Fields.[2]"

During the Spanish Civil War and the following dictatorship, General Francisco Franco's civilian repression, the White Terrorcampaign, killed an estimated 200,000 civilians, heavily targeting writers, artists, teachers and professors.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anti-intellectualism#Soviet_Union

You should really ask yourself why Republicans hate institutions of learning and educated folks.

One more thing, the Democratic candidate advocating "free college for all" is losing in the Democratic primaries.

Except as with the vast majority of your posts, if not all, that simply isn't true. The cause of the Great Recession was deregulation, the repeal of laws which would have prevented banks from doing the things they did and led to the The Great Recession.