53% of college students have a negative view of capitalism, but only 23% have a negative view of socialism, even though socialist regimes killed over 100 million people over the last hundred years, and socialism stunted the economies of the countries that adopted it. That’s shown in
a newly released poll from Axios and The Generation Lab. The results came out shortly before Tuesday’s election of self-described democratic socialist Zohran Mamdani as mayor of New York City, a clear indication of the growing appeal of the left-wing ideology among voters, including college-aged ones.This poll was conducted during the last week of October, surveying 1,574 college students at two- or four-year colleges nationwide, including 728 Democrats, 217 Republicans and 629 independents.
Defenders of socialism sometimes falsely claim Scandinavian nations are socialist.
Those nations are more prosperous than most countries (they are poorer than the United States, although oil-rich Norway is almost as prosperous as America).
But Scandinavian nations aren’t socialist. They have expansive welfare programs (which they expanded only after they already had achieved prosperity), but they don’t have socialist policies such as government ownership of industries, and they have fewer regulations than the U.S., less licensing, and sometimes don’t even have minimum wage laws. Their bankruptcy laws are more conservative and pro-property rights than America’s are.
Scandinavian nations have fewer trade barriers than the U.S. Scandinavia has produced more billionaires per capita (as a fraction of its population) than the U.S.
Scandinavian nations generally outrank the U.S. on indexes of economic freedom compiled by the Heritage Foundation and pro-capitalism think-tanks like the Cato Institute and the Fraser Institute (although the U.S. used to outrank them and still outranks most countries in economic freedom).
Socialism is bad for your health. Soviet central planning turned most of the Aral Sea into a toxic desert, and killed countless whales.
Hard-core socialist regimes have killed many people. As law professor Ilya Somin explains,
The Black Book of Communism estimates the total number of victims of communist regimes at 80 to 100 million dead, greater than that caused by all other twentieth century tyrannies combined…..While communism is most closely associated with Russia, where the first communist regime was established, it had equally horrendous effects in other nations around the world. The highest death toll for a communist regime was not in Russia, but in China. Mao Zedong’s Great Leap Forward was likely the biggest episode of mass murder in the entire history of the world.
