How does socialism hurt the young? More than a century of experience should make the answer obvious. The record of capitalist democracies is strong, whereas socialist countries such as Cuba, North Korea, and Eritrea have floundered economically and failed to protect individual rights.
Yet a rising generation of Americans has managed to unlearn this lesson, and are backing a spate of candidates who will reinject socialist ideas into the political mainstream. Antipathy toward Israel and so-called “oligarchs” are the animating issues of these campaigns. But once elected, these voters and candidates will push the Democratic Party to enact programs such as Medicare for All, adding a thick layer of centralization and redistribution to the top of the U.S. economy. In the long run, the brunt of this economic damage won’t be borne by the billionaires who are so often the targets of socialist attacks. Instead, it will fall on the young enthusiasts of socialism who are driving the trend.
Nowhere is the risk of socialist harm to the young clearer than in healthcare—the very issue on which so many progressive voters are demanding radical reforms. That’s because we are currently in a boom of medical and pharmaceutical innovation, and when radical innovation is emerging, capitalist economies outperform socialist ones by even more than usual. This was true for the information technology revolutions of the 1980s, when America outpaced the Soviet Union, and it is proving true today as healthcare becomes more about innovation, AI, and information technology.
