(Town Hall)
“Here in the United States, we are alarmed by new calls to adopt socialism in our country,” President Trump warned in his recent State of the Union message.
Indeed, many wonder why America, the center of capitalist success in the world, would adopt socialism, which has egregiously failed everywhere it has been tried. Millennials are the group most fired up to experiment with socialism. According to a recent Gallup poll, there are more Americans between 18 and 29 years old with a positive view of socialism (51 percent) than there are supporters of capitalism (45 percent).
Who, or what is triggering this fascination? The short answer is “many of their teachers and their history textbooks.”
In President Trump’s speech, he also noted “America was founded on liberty and independence—not government coercion,” but in the minds, some of the most renowned writers of U.S. history texts, “government coercion” is the key to restoring American independence from a predatory capitalist class. The catalyst for the typical textbook critique of capitalism is Matthew Josephson’s The Robber Barons, which vilified America’s industrial pioneers, including Cornelius Vanderbilt, Andrew Carnegie, and John D. Rockefeller. Yet these three entrepreneurs helped vault the U.S. into worldwide economic dominance in the late 1800s. Read more