I was at the University of Colorado from 1970-1974 and thought that I got a pretty good education. It appears today’s students are not going to be able to look back and say the same thing, at least not after the real world disabuses them of all the magical thinking they have going on in their skulls today.
On the other hand, if you ask any of several dictionaries for a definition of socialism you won’t find anything that truly resembles the real world experience of socialism in the last 150 years. So it’s no wonder these students get tongue tied when asked to define socialism.
A wise professor would refer them to the history of socialism from the mid-19th century to the present. Anyone who seriously studies the subject will learn that it was the god that failed. It seems to nevertheless be constantly resurrected Phoenix like by every new generation of young people with their skulls full of mush.
I wish they would read the books of some worldly philosophers they’ve probably never heard of, such as Arthur Koestler, Friedrich Hayek and Ludwig von Mises. Those great thinkers and their books were well known and read deeply on the CU campus when I was there in the early 1970s. I can safely say you’d have a hard time finding anyone on campus today who has ever heard of any of them.
Millennials say they want equality. Socialism does do that. It makes everyone equal, equally miserable that is. A good working definition of socialism, if it is to be defined by what it always turns out to be rather than what today’s college students want to think it is, it is government by a criminal gang where everyone not a member of the gang is exploited to serve the interests of the gang.
If socialism could ever have worked anywhere it would have worked in the Israeli kibbutz system. It didn’t. It failed there like everywhere else it’s been tried. Our universities are teaching their charges to love something that will never love them back, and will destroy every hope and dream they have.
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