That's according to a Rasmussen report that asked Americans which economic system was better.
I'll admit that capitalism has been taking a beating these last few months, but it's striking the age gap and experience gap highlighted in this study.
Adults under 30 are essentially evenly divided: 37% prefer capitalism, 33% socialism, and 30% are undecided. Thirty-somethings are a bit more supportive of the free-enterprise approach with 49% for capitalism and 26% for socialism. Adults over 40 strongly favor capitalism, and just 13% of those older Americans believe socialism is better.
Investors by a 5-to-1 margin choose capitalism. As for those who do not invest, 40% say capitalism is better while 25% prefer socialism.
So, those who actually start businesses and create wealth prefer capitalism. Those who either don't work or work for somebody else, aren't so sure. That makes sense, doesn't it? If you are using the system to create your own business and opportunity, you probably like the system better. And if you aren't creating your own business, you probably think it's only marginally better than government running businesses.
Lone Star Times points out that the party split is staggering.
Republicans - by an 11-to-1 margin - favor capitalism. Democrats are much more closely divided: Just 39% say capitalism is better while 30% prefer socialism. As for those not affiliated with either major political party, 48% say capitalism is best, and 21% opt for socialism.
No wonder those tea parties seem to be attracting more Republicans than Democrats!
Of course, Jesse Taylor knows why capitalism is taking such a bashing. Who else would be responsible but Republicans.
The real secret is that the Berlin Wall fell, which paved the way for conservatives to call everything Democrats have proposed in the interim socialism (this isn’t to say that they weren’t doing that before, but it became much easier for them to say it without the Giant Socialist Enemy Beast forcing us to duck and cover under our desks every day). I came up in a world where “socialism” was defined in popular parlance as “liberalism”. Bill Clinton, effectively a liberal Republican, was a socialist. Barack Obama, a moderate Democrat, is a socialist. There’s an actual socialist in the Senate, and yet all the Democrats in the Senate (except Ben Nelson and Evan Bayh)? Socialists.
The main people responsible for the embrace of “socialism” are the pro-capitalist conservatives who’ve so diluted its meaning that it’s okay to embrace socialism, because the majority party in the country and our tremendously popular president are socialists.
Translation: When Democrats propose socialist legislation and you call it that, then you must be wrong.
Oddly enough, Jesse's partly right; those pups in their 20's don't have the contact with in-your-face communism that older folks have. They probably didn't watch the films of the Berlin Wall being built or what it meant to most of the inhabitants of the earth.
We were taught that socialism was an economic structure, not a poltical one. But we knew that communism didn't work where capitalism flourished, and that socialism was the younger brother of communism. That many Europeans accept socialism doesn't mean that Americans--who began as a ragged band of people unwilling to settle for European ways--should.
Young people, who don't have as much experience in the world as their elders, may only marginally favor capitalism, but the biggest gap is between Democrats, who blindly assume that government does a better job with the economy than private enterprise, and Republicans, who know that freedom is real choice, which includes the choice to be successful or fail.
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