A spectre is haunting Europe and America – the spectre of gen Z socialism.
That’s the urgent warning from the Economist in a new cover-story editorial, How to fight back against Gen-Z socialism. Alarmed by a youthful threat to the established order, the magazine is calling for heightened vigilance from defenders of private enterprise.
“Gen-Z socialism is a me-first doctrine,” says the editorial, unlike the selfless doctrine of capitalism. The young socialists have succumbed to “a zero-sum mindset, where a better outcome comes not from creating but from taking”.
Taking, we are to understand, is frowned upon in the capitalist system. And what better way to instill wisdom in gen Z than to set a good example by creating without taking?
Those with stakes in the Economist itself are cases in point.
The investment company Exor, controlled by one family with $38bn in net assets, has the biggest stake in the magazine. Meanwhile, the investor with more than a quarter interest in the Economist, the Canadian businessperson Stephen Smith, has a personal net worth of $6.9bn.
Of course, young socialist hotheads might carp that in the UK, where the Economist is based, the overall poverty rate is 21%, while among children it’s 31%. But cooler heads prevail among the Economist’s editorial writers, who lambast the idea that “spending can be paid for by the richest”. They opt for stability by not getting carried away with fanciful notions.
Some realities are, of course, unfortunate. As the BBC reported last fall, a survey by the charity Trussell Trust “found more than 14 million people in the UK faced the prospect of going hungry last year due to lack of money. This marks an increase from the trust’s last survey in 2022 when that number was 11.6 million people.” One-third of children under age five “are living in UK homes where there is not enough access to healthy and nutritious food”. In the United States, the Feeding America organization reports, one in five children “don’t have enough to eat”.
But with the free-enterprise system, it can be said that those children have the opportunity to put any hunger behind them when they grow up. As the Economist’s editorial notes, an economy flourishes not when rewards are guaranteed but when opportunities are available, giving everyone a chance of success.
The Economist warns that all too many digital natives have been enticed into a kind of honey trap of desire for a welfare state: “Saying that prices should be capped to keep your bills down while someone else pays for your public services is a seductive, shareable message.” A new generation of socialists is swooning for affordability.
“Gen-Z socialists demand handouts funded by billionaires” and harbor “a remarkable hostility to private enterprise”, the Economist observes, at the same time that those young socialists “are uninterested in letting the market rip and redistributing the proceeds”.
The logic is compelling, even impeccable, for rich people who don’t want to part with their money. After all, they know full well from first-hand experience that the ripping market can effectively redistribute capital.
“A robust defence of the ideas that have brought unprecedented riches has barely been tried,” the Economist explains. However, “what is so worrying about the Gen-Z socialists is how deeply their ideas are bleeding into the centre-left”.
And so, the magazine concludes: “Resisting Gen-Z socialism is therefore an urgent task.”
That urgency must outweigh any urgency of feeding hungry people. The machinery of a system that offers so much prosperity to some must push back against leftists trying to throw a spanner into what works with such efficiency.
“The first step,” the Economist urges, “is for free-market liberals to stop apologising. A series of popular criticisms of capitalism, each containing a grain of truth, has in aggregate obscured the fundamental wisdom that private enterprise is at the root of human prosperity.”
So come on, you free-market liberals. Recognize the danger that the youngest adult generation on both sides of the Atlantic is being swayed by the siren songs of socialism just because they don’t like vast income inequality and all the human suffering that comes with it. The Economist has sounded the alarm. Now it’s up to you to rescue us from the clear and present threat of social equity.
Norman Solomon is the director of RootsAction and executive director of the Institute for Public Accuracy