Today, Sanders rakes in $174,000 every year from serving in the upper chamber Senate. He has earned $2,248,500 in his 12 years there and had earned $2,272,500 from his 16 years in the House, so federal taxpayers have financed his life to the tune of more than $4.5 million.
I would encourage graduates to marvel at the modern world. I would make clear that the best way for them to change the world — really, the only way to change it for the better — is to work to strengthen and spread the commitment to individual liberty and free markets.
It will be Venezuela all over again, and meek half-steps will not check the social ills. As civilization crumbles, the choice will be suppression now or repression later. Rebel now, get suppressed now. Don’t rebel now, get repressed later anyway.
At the apex of American society stands a heritage of individualism. The United States being a country founded by immigrants looking for freedom from the oppressive political regimes of Europe is a nation with a strong commitment to the values of individual responsibility, personal freedom, and belief in limited government.
Why do intellectuals, particularly university professors, resent capitalism? Simple, Mises explains: they resent the higher incomes and prestige of the risk-taking, entrepreneurial widget makers they look down upon.
The Founders wanted a written constitution, strictly limiting federal authority, because they knew that human nature’s inborn selfishness and aggression would lead government officials to abuse their power if not restrained. At crucial junctures, the Supreme Court has twisted the Constitution that guarantees liberty toward government oppression.
But just because young people aren’t signing up in droves for socialism doesn’t mean they aren’t concerned about the future of the U.S. economic system. A 2015 poll by the Harvard Institute of Politics found that nearly half of 18- to 29-year-olds believe the American Dream is “dead” for them.
Such harsh words are used about profit, and yet it is the social signal of approval. People who are benefiting from capitalism, like Hollywood celebrities and Silicon Valley billionaires, do not understand capitalism and decry it. What should entrepreneurs do? Just keep working at entrepreneurship.
The innovation, quality improvements, and timely care offered by competing private firms would be largely destroyed by adopting a single-payer system. Those now clamoring for a single-payer system would have us believe this all must be abolished in favor of near-total government control.
The economic and political deterioration of Venezuela has followed the pattern that Hayek described in 1944. In Chile, in contrast, free markets dispersed economic power amongst millions of Chileans and the military government, which ran the country between 1973 and 1990, gave way to democracy. Today, Chile is both economically and politically free.
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