This Is What Happens When You Raise Kids on Slogans

One capitalist speaks truth to 20 lost young socialists

Communism, socialism, CAPITALISM! Stressed out yet? These three words get thrown around like dodgeballs online in every American political debate you’ve ever watched. Substantive ones anyway. It goes something like this: capitalism is “greedy,” socialism is just “basic human rights,” and communism is a sci-fi future where nobody has to work and everybody’s needs are met. Everything that went wrong in the 20th century, the massacres and organized death, “That was just a fluke,” they say. Whistling past the graveyard.

As parents, our job is not to raise kids on slogans. We’re raising adults who can tell the difference between a story that sounds good and a story that’s true.

A recent Jubilee debate featured Patrick Bet-David vs 20 anti-capitalists for a show called Surrounded. It’s always a spectacle. Let’s just say about the debate, this circle of very confident young people is a perfect snapshot of where the country is at right now. And it should worry you. These young people will be your neighbors one day, if they ever figure out how to save money and invest responsibility… sorry, did I say that out loud?

The anti-capitalists in this debate insist they’re not calling for “equal wealth for everyone.” They say they’re just fighting for “basic rights”—housing, food, health care, education—guaranteed to every person by the government. In other words, if you’re alive, society owes you all the essentials. It’s sad but quite funny that these kids think they’re the first people to ever have this thought.

Their mask is that of compassion, but what they’re doing is quietly redefining all “rights.”

A right, traditionally, is something you possess by nature that no one is allowed to take from you—speech, life, conscience, self-defense. What these activists are calling “rights” are not protections from force. They’re claiming someone else’s labor.

“I exist, therefore you must feed me, house me, care for me, and educate me.” That’s not the same category. That’s not the doctrine of “Leave me alone.” That’s them saying, “Serve me.”

The first move toward institutional socialism is creating a moral system for total dependence.

One kid says that socialism is “workers owning the means of production.” Another takes it further: “Socialism is a transition toward communism, where there’s no private property and eventually we reach a moneyless, stateless, classless society.”

That sounds like a college seminar pitch for a utopian video game. No money, no inequality, no status fights. Humanity evolves past selfishness in its little story. It’s basically Star Trek. The problem is: even in Star Trek, someone is still in charge of every starship. There is no world without hierarchies, because hierarchies always form out of a power vacuum. Stopping hierarchies from forming naturally would actually involve… a hierarchy empowered to squash them. See how this logic goes in circles?

And make no mistake, if you hear the words “collective ownership,” translate it correctly: political ownership. Which is to say, control by whoever runs the political machine. There is always an owner and someone renting out the use of goods.

When pressed on the moral case, one of the debaters facing Patrick Bet-David says flat-out that people shouldn’t “have to work in order to survive.” She calls our current world—where you either work to earn a living or rely on charity—a “dystopian world.” Her preferred world is one in which food, housing, health care, and education are all “decommodified,” meaning you get them whether you produce anything or not.

They did that in Cambodia when the Khmer Rouge took power in the 1970s. Only a few million died putting the theory of collective ownership into practice… do you think these kids even know who Pol Pot was? If you’re looking for a movie to watch, try First They Came For My Father on Netflix. You’ll see what a real dystopia looks like, and meet the survivors who are still warning us today about what happened there.

The Core of a Very Rotten Apple

This is the emotional core of socialism. The promise is not to raise wages or stop corporate fraud; it’s the promise that “you won’t have to earn survival or comfort.”

Stop and sit with that. As a parent, ask yourself what happens to a child raised on that promise.

The moment you say work is a suggestion and someone else will always tend to your needs, you’ll have a kid who can’t make their own bed or do homework. Why would they consider paying taxes or earning money to gas up their car? Hell, why learn to drive?!

At this point in the debate, someone predictably tries to morally nuke capitalism by pointing to atrocities. King Leopold II of Belgium is held up as capitalism’s champion, a man who claimed the Congo as his personal fiefdom, extracted resources, and killed millions.

This is offered as proof that capitalism is evil, because in their lexicon:

Capitalism = Exploitation

Exploitation = Capitalism

This is rhetorical sleight of hand, of course. You take any atrocity committed by a king, dictator, or empire, and you slap the label CAPITALISM on it. Meanwhile, anything that collapses under state control is excused away as “not real socialism.” So slavery becomes capitalism, something the 1619 Project crowd is happy to do. But Venezuela? The Soviet Union? Maoist China? Those weren’t “real socialism,” you see. The scam is obvious. Capitalism is blamed for everything ugly. Socialism gets credit only for imaginary futures.

C.S. Lewis nails this in The Screwtape Letters when he points out, in the voice of a demon,

“The Past is frozen and no longer flows, and the Present is all lit up with eternal rays. Hence the encouragement we (demons) have given to all those schemes of thought such as Creative Evolution, Scientific Humanism, or Communism, which fix men’s affections on the Future, on the very core of temporality. Hence nearly all vices are rooted in the future.”

Communism/socialism draws from the well of humans’ imaginations about the Future. The antidote is gratitude, which looks to the Past.

China? Seriously?!

In the debate, one of the young socialists says China “lifted 800 million people out of poverty” mostly through centralized state planning and redistribution. The story sounds like this: big government stepped in, invested, and saved everybody.

That is not what happened, heavens no.

In the late 1970s, China was still living under rigid communism. Collective farming, no private property, everyone “equal” and starving behind forced smiles. In one small village called Xiaogang, the farmers and their families were so poor that they drafted an illegal contract dividing the land among families. They all agreed that each family will meet the state’s quota, but anything grown above that, you keep. When the party leaders found out, they surprisingly decided to exploit this as an offramp from failed communist orthodoxy and embraced the farmers as model citizens.

That one rule—“you keep what you produce beyond the quota”—changed everything. That’s a market system rooted in contract law. Guess which system is based on that foundation?

To claim that “the state lifted millions out of poverty” is like a kidnapper bragging about how healthy you look after he stops starving you. It’s pretty sick.

Here’s why all of this matters for parents…

A lot of young people in that Jubilee circle are in pain. You can hear it when they talk. They’re buried in bills. They feel useless and stuck. They want work that feels “noble and good,” and they resent the idea of taking a job that doesn’t match their identity or ideals. They look at billionaires and think, “That guy is stealing my future.”

That emotional state is real. Ignoring it is a mistake.

But selling them communism as the answer is so much worse.

So here’s what we tell our kids:

• You are not entitled to someone else’s work.

• You are capable of creating value that improves your life and the lives of others.

• Prices are not an insult. They’re coordinates.

• Ownership is not theft. Ownership is responsibility.

• Scarcity is not always oppression. Sometimes, it’s physics.

Our kids will inherit a world built by people who took responsibility, not people who outsourced it to the state. The more we raise a generation that believes “I shouldn’t have to earn survival,” the more we guarantee a future where someone with a badge and a gun gets to decide who deserves to survive.

That’s not justice. That’s just a new master.