Half of millennials would prefer to live in a socialist or communist country

….preserved part of East Berlin as a memorial to the Victims of Communism. I remember visiting that city a few months before the Wall fell. Ghastly. Anyone who wants Communism or socialism ought to be sent for a few months to live on standard rations in the non-tourist areas of Havana, or sent to Venezuela. Unless they’re as dumb as Bernie Sanders, they’ll learn.

(Half of Americans, the poll finds, associate socialism with welfare states in Western Europe and Scandinavia—not Marxist dictatorships.)

This is the problem. My relatives in Sweden don’t like their country being called “Socialist” by Americans. Yes, their Welfare net is larger than ours, but Sweden, in some cases, is much more market-friendly than the US. The democrats that are running for president would scoff at several Market-Friendly policies that are in place in Sweden, such as privatizing their version of social security and nation-wide school vouchers that give Swedes a choice of either private (non-Christian), Christian or public.

Check out these videos about how Sweden is not the “socialist ideal” that Bernie and others progressives in America aspire to, but rather their success has come more from free markets.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=jq3vVbdgMuQ&t=255s

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0lxD-gikpMs

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http://www.utmgr.org/blog/

The unemployment rate has dropped to 3.6 percent, the lowest in almost 50 years. 50 Years! Wages have gone up this year 3.2 percent. Taxes have gone down for most Americans. The average hourly wage is now over 27 dollars. The employment participation rate is higher now than it has been for the last 15 years. There are many more jobs than workers right now. What we need is a more educated workforce to fill the good jobs that are out there. We need education that gives our young people the skills necessary to fill these jobs (instead of Leftist propaganda education which poisons and destroys everything it touches). Thankful to be an American! Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China,Vietnam, North Korea, et. al. – take your pick Mr. and Miss Millennial. Be careful what you wish for! Bernie, the capitalist millionaire, loves communism and socialism for everyone else except himself.

When I was in Stockholm in 1989, I visited one of the museums and got their version of Swedish history—the ruling party must have been the socialist/labor party at the time, because they gave a LOT of credit for Sweden’s prosperity to the social safety network. It was only with great difficulty that I refrained from pointing out to anyone who would listen that it also had something to do with selling iron ore and steel to the Nazis, and that Sweden’s unemployment rate, like most of the countries of Europe, dwarfed the U.S. rate.

So I’m glad to see that many Swedes have learned a bit since then.

[Mike Harding]

The unemployment rate has dropped to 3.6 percent, the lowest in almost 50 years. 50 Years! Wages have gone up this year 3.2 percent. Taxes have gone down for most Americans. The average hourly wage is now over 27 dollars. The employment participation rate is higher now than it has been for the last 15 years. There are many more jobs than workers right now. What we need is a more educated workforce to fill the good jobs that are out there. We need education that gives our young people the skills necessary to fill these jobs (instead of Leftist propaganda education which poisons and destroys everything it touches). Thankful to be an American! Cuba, Venezuela, Russia, China,Vietnam, North Korea, et. al. – take your pick Mr. and Miss Millennial. Be careful what you wish for! Bernie, the capitalist millionaire, loves communism and socialism for everyone else except himself.

We are in the longest bull market run in history which started in something like 2009. Optimism is good but this is not going to last forever. It appears that this bull market is being fueled by consumer credit exactly like the last time in the 2000’s.

I posted a job this week and got 530 resumes in two days before I cut it off. As usual, 95% of them I discarded immediately because people have not figured out that they need to spell correctly on a resume. But that is what is weird about this low employment. Everyone in the world seems to still be looking for a job.

[GregH]

I posted a job this week and got 530 resumes in two days before I cut it off. As usual, 95% of them I discarded immediately because people have not figured out that they need to spell correctly on a resume. But that is what is weird about this low employment. Everyone in the world seems to still be looking for a job.

I am wondering if these are applicants who are currently unemployed, or are they currently employed in lower-level positions but seeking higher-level employment?

I would say 75% were underemployed (or at least they felt so) and the other 25% were unemployed though most of that category had not been unemployed for long.

The position I am hiring is an office manager in the $50K range which is lower than the $27/hour Mike quoted. I believe him on that number; there has been an enormous jump in wages recently because Amazon and other large companies have all of a sudden decided to pay a $15/hour minimum wage. It happened very suddenly but has made a big difference in the business world.

It might be noted that socialism doesn’t just mean that government pays all the bills, which is overwhelming welfare. It means that the government owns the means of production. Now they correlate pretty well, hence the confusion, and “progressive” and “socialist” politicians further muddy the waters by using welfare as a synonymn for socialism, but outside the old Warsaw Pact, China, Cuba, and the like, some of the closest things we’ve seen to socialism is when the U.K. nationalized health care, coal mining, automobile manufacture, and the like.

And the results on British industry were just devastating—nationalization kept some industries going for a little while, but pretty soon, quality went south and any hope of profitability—and jobs—disappeared. A good word picture is that Jaguars were so bad, you needed two of them—one to drive while the mechanic fixed the other.

And all that makes the welfare state—the thing a lot of modern “socialists” are really voting for—unsustainable. Basic same thing you see in Venezuela and Cuba these days. My favorite story from Cuba—well at least it would be if people hadn’t died as a result—was when mental patients froze to death in the tropics because staff either would not or could not shut the windows and turn on the heat.

To the extent that China is livable, it’s a freemarket, capitalist society. To the extent that life there is abominable, it is a communist dictatorship.

You can have your communism.

Communism is a system of government where all the people pretend to work and the government pretends to pay them.