Americans still prefer capitalism, but by a smaller margin
Posted by Wellsy on April 9, 2009
Rasmussen put out a report today stating that only 53% of Americans prefer capitalism, compared to 20% preferring socialism and 27% that didn’t know. Even though the head-to-head numbers indicate that almost 2-to-1 Americans prefer the capitalist system, the fact still remains that just over half of those polled are willing to stand up for the economic system that’s served us well for the last 200 or so years, although an earlier poll showed 70% support for the “free market.”
The partisan divide in the polling is a bit startling (or maybe not that startling if you really think about it). Republicans prefer capitalism 11-to-1, but Democrats are split 39%-30% with capitalism having a slight edge in those who had a preference.
HotAir takes a closer look at the divide among adults under 30, who preferred capitalism by only 4 points, 37% to 33%, with 30% undecided. Unsurprisingly, those over 30 have much stronger support for capitalism than their younger and more inexperienced counterparts.
Though some of this could be due to the fact that the poll didn’t define the terms “capitalism” and “socialism”, a lot of the blame lies in a useless educational system that has falsely defined capitalists as greedy money-hungry thieves and socialism as an altruistic system where everybody wins. I guarantee you that a large majority of the younger respondents know very little to nothing about very basic aspects of economic theory. I fall in the under-30 crowd myself, but I don’t share in my demographic’s myopic naivete of “let’s all get along and have someone else pay for it” mentality. Once you begin working and start paying more and more taxes, you begin to pay more attention to government attempts to spread it around to others. I’m embarassed when I hear people struggling to name the vice president, and frustrated when these same folks want to scrap our economic system for something they think will be easier.
And that’s really what it comes down to. People want socialism not because it’s more fair, but because it makes things easier for them. If someone else is helping you pay your bills, or paying them completely, then how cool is that, right? The response is that we cannot be our brother’s keeper, and it isn’t the responsibility of the state to care of the needs of everyone. But on a more fundamental level, without the struggle to improve your situation and to fulfill your dreams, life becomes a meaningless slog. We should have a safety net and we should always strive to be a land of equal opportunity, but we must realize that we cannot ever be a land of equal outcomes.
This entry was posted on April 9, 2009 at 10:05 PM and is filed under Politics. Tagged: capitalism, economy, government spending, socialism. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Linda said
Socialism fails and milton friedman was right. His DVD series is wonderful and shows exactly why 2.0 unemployment, under socialism, is still miserable.
The economy is the exchange of goods and services. And the economy accelerates when people really want to exchange goods and services. When you have rewards to creating something that others want, as in capitalism, you get motive to innovate new products through creativity and technology. If you have a bunch of people doing this, you exchange these goods and services and create jobs and wealth.
Under socialism, people stay complacent in their situation. there is relatively any motivation to create products that other people want, and this creates a domino effect. (you can motivate others to produce cool products if they want other peoples’ cool products). however, high taxes eliminates the motivation for many. And for this reason, most of the good products come out of capitalists countries.
There is not a set amount of wealth in this world. It can be created and people can join in by creating something that people want. Obama’s policies seek to make everyone equal by stifling competition and innovation — trickle up poverty.
So everyone is equal financially, and unemployment is very low — but everyone is just above poverty. Cuba has low unemployment, but there are no mansions and nothing to shoot for.
Furthermore, people stop progressing. People stop learning from failures.
http://www.tinyurl.com/socialismfails
Matt Ralph said
I’m all for competition, free market, fiscal responsibility and small government, but I’m also all for people living reasonable, conservative and compassionate lives.
I don’t trust the government to solve our problems but when people with all of the wealth are too busy “shooting for mansions” to help others, I don’t blame people for turning to the government for a hand-out.
I’d prefer a society where everyone lives in modest comfort to one where corporate CEOs earn $260,000 a day while helpless children are raised in squalor.
Ideally, I’d prefer lessons be learned from compassionless capitalism and competition-less socialism and create a new system that incorporates the best of both worlds. I guess you could say I believe in trickle down compassion.
Wellsy said
I’m all for compassion, too, and I don’t blame decent folks falling on hard times that need a helping hand. The question is where does compassion figure into economics and government? It would be fantastic if everyone could live in modest comfort, but who decides what “modest” is? The real issue is that we have neglected our own responsibilities as individuals to be both responsible and compassionate, and therefore we have a majority of people that are looking to government to act compassionate and tell us what responsible behavior looks like so they don’t have to themselves. Trickle down compassion is just another way of saying, in my mind anyway, that government and the rich should take care of those “beneath” them. I’m saying we need to take care of ourselves.
And I think it’s a false choice between capitalism and compassion. Economic systems aren’t inherently compassionate, especially not socialism, where you take from the rich (or the middle class) to give to the poor. Not so compassionate to those you take from, no matter how you jusify it. Further, the problem is that it never works in practice, as some are always “more equal than others”, as Orwell instructs us in Animal Farm. Anyways, glad to see you’re still coming around, I’m happy to discuss things with you anytime, as you are obviously a thoughtful and fair-minded fella.
Judith said
Wessley is still right. We think people in general would rather have the government hand it to them. I, as a business owner, am tired of paying a higher rate of taxes that the major corporations. Is that fair? What is capitalism telling me, that I should be more clever and learn how to hide my profits? Either or people are like people who say it is all “black” or all “white”, race not included although there is a lot of gray there as well.
Many people labour all day, working their hands and backs to the bone to enrich the rich, being paid less than deserving wages and with decreasing benefits. That is the capitalism I hate. We can send our men and women to an illegal war that was designed to enrich corporations that produce weapons that kill, and when they return having lost their homes and major parts of their bodies, that we do not want to be saddled with their woes, “they must learn to take care of themselves”, and “not on my dollar.”
I believe all Americans should have health care, it is a right. But greedy capitalist don’t think they should share in their bounty made upon the backs of the workers, and by taking advantage of the ignorant and poor. If one is ignorant in Capitalism, that is their problem. Predatory lending is the American way. President Bush filed a law suit to prevent the state’s Attorney General’s from enforcing their own laws against preditory lending.
Matt, I bet you have lots of income generated from your stocks where profits are made by denying workers their fair share of the profits. Sorry, but pure capitalism just doesn’t exist and so you might as well learn where it is kind to compromise and give back, and where to draw the line. Black and white mentality will solve nothing. You are no smarter than Wellsly so stop being condescending. Open your mind to new possibilities. Think outside the box.
Wellsy said
I sympathize with some of what you say and disagree with a lot of the class warfare rhetoric you’re using, but the fundamental problem I have with socialism is that someone else decides who has too much and too little. My wife and I make a five-figure middle class income that some would still say is too much. And while you understandably don’t want to pay a higher tax rate than major corporations (though I don’t see how that has been resolved), as a business owner I can’t see how you would want your tax money poured into a social support bureaucracy that is at best ineffective and at worst counterproductive. It’s in my mind a fundamental fallacy to think that to solve a problem, especially ones of human nature, one needs only to throw more money at it – it hasn’t worked well for the education system, has it?
And be nice to Matt – he’s a good guy.
Judith said
As a retired business owner and individual, I would not mind paying for insurance for other Americans whose income prohibits their paying the full fare. All children in this country should be covered by health insurance. That is the moral thing to do. I am not sure how moral America is.
Most developed countries have a national health care system. There was a good documentary on PBS about an investigation of many countries’ health insurance programs. Citizens and bureaucrats were interviewed. They loved their health care systems. It made America look very selfish and uncaring about those who cannot provide insurance for their health care.
The reasons I have for preferring a national health care plan is the following experiences.
I worked for the Medicaid program in Michigan as a Utilization Review nurse. Six nurses reviewed the medicaid hospital invoices for the entire state. We looked at invoices that were over the 70th percentile for length of stay. We were very efficient and effective. I had 70 hospitals, one a 1000 bed hospital in Detroit.
Later, I worked for King County Blue Shield in Washington state. They had no screens for review. They paid everything that came in because they were courting hospitals for their underwriting contracts when they all became PPO’s. There were bogus invoices for one patient who was billed to be in ICCU. I saw numerous invoices for thousands of dollars. It was not my contract to review but since they would not let me do what I was hired to do, review contracted by a group of insurees in the lumber industry who wanted their costs kept down, I looked into the “CCU patient”, last name the name of a tug boat company in the area, and learned she was never in CCU. Likely was never in the hospital. There was a lot of chatter and congratulations to me for finding this problem and saving hundreds of thousands of dollars, something that would have been caught if the insurance company had screens. Later the Medical Director told me they retracted the overpayment and made up some story about a minor mistake, blah, blah, blah. The Medical Director of Blue Shield told me they did not want to anger the hospitals because they wanted to get their underwriting contracts. He was going to tell the hospital that I didn’t understand what I was supposed to do.
Blue Shield paid for half of Barney Clark’s artificial heart surgery although he was illegally enrolled in a program with full time working dentists. As you can expect the bill was over the top, hundreds of thousands of dollars. Yet, they denied payment for a woman, a wife and mother of two, to have a bone marrow transplant because it was considered experimental. She later died. I quit the company I was so disgusted with their phony administration of insurance policies.
Now they are only including insurance companies when discussion a health care plan for the nation, excluding a representative for a national health care plan which is the only way to go as private insurance will not be as efficient or nondiscriminatory. By the way,after I left King County Blue Shield, the company built a new building in Seattle downtown and had it paid for in five years!
I don’t know what you mean by the educational system? Is that the fault of something other than our capitalistic system.
Wellsy, You are not making a lot of money if it is under 100K for two wage earners. No one would expect you pay more than what you are paying now, in fact I think Obama will be giving you a tax cut. Corporations are not paying their fair share and Obama has taken a step to stop their off shore tax shelters. You and your wife need a decent wage and standard of living.
Small business loans are more available and hopefully those at the lower end of the spectrum will take advantage to increase their own income potential.
Take care, and thanks for the comment. I will try to stay on the issue, but I thought my experience with insurance companies is very relevant. By the way, the Medical Director loaned me a magazine titled “Leaders” which had an article about the development of PPO’s (health care groups) and the magazine was subscribed to leaders of countries. There were two page ads for weapons for sale to apparently anyone who wanted to buy them. Available to other countries regardless of their political views. They listed tanks, missles, airplanes, etc. For sale by American corporations. Wished I had made copies of those pages, or “lost” the magazine. Good old capitalism.
Judith said
Correction: I was assigned 34 hospitals, not 70. Whoops. Trying to be accurate and that was way off. It has been a while since then, 1978.