This article was originally published by Mark Thronton at The Mises Institute. 

Children in the US are raised to be communists. Most of the parents are too and don’t even know it. It doesn’t matter if you send them to public or private schools as all the education degree-granting schools bias the learning process against the competitive capitalist “liberal” or open-minded society. Instead, the curriculum is less about learning about reality and is heavy on propagandizing children against capitalism and towards communism.

American society teaches hatred and distrust of everything capitalist, even though its benefits are all around us—helping to feed, clothe, house, and protect us. In contrast, the government screws up virtually everything it lays its hands on and charges us double to do so.

I remember when I was a child my mother would retrieve the morning milk, just outside the back door, from the “milk box.” I don’t remember how old I was when I finally asked how the milk got there, and my mother told me that the milkman put it there. I think I had previously chalked it up to something akin to Santa Claus or the tooth fairy, and when I realized how dark and cold—even snowy—it could be outside early in the morning, I was amazed!

Today, on the drive to work, I heard an otherwise intelligent retired athlete say the following:

If you are a billionaire sports team owner you obviously have screwed a lot of people over, but in the case of building sports stadiums, taxpayer subsidies are needed because they create jobs.

Everything about that statement is wrong and ignorant. People become billionaires because they serve their customers well. They outcompete others in serving customers. They normally create tons of high-paying jobs too, including for our retired athlete.

The exception to this rule is when billions are made from special privileges from the government, like taxpayer subsidies! Taxpayer-funded stadiums are the classic case of a losing proposition for the local economy and taxpayers as study after study has demonstrated. Only a few benefit from the subsidies, including the billionaire team owners!

With a brainwashed upbringing, is it any wonder then that more young adults have a positive view of socialism than have a positive view of capitalism? The positive beliefs in socialism only increase with more college education. Those beliefs should decline with more education if college was about learning, instead of indoctrination.

The only silver lining—and I will link to my journal article on the subject in the show notes—is that the rise of socialist sympathies has driven many others to try and learn more about Austrian economics.

One clear sign of socialist bias in higher education is that college professors who register Democrats outnumber those who register Republicans 10-to-1. Of course, Democrat professors are much more likely to favor extreme forms of socialism than the average American Democrats and Republican professors are more likely to stay in the closet or face the mean and career-ending dangers from Marxist professors who often control the campus agenda. The Republicans are also much more likely to teach in good career departments, like engineering, where their views would not come into play in the classroom.

Mitch Daniels was a pharmaceutical executive who came into the Bush administration to run the Office of Management and Budget. He went on to become a successful two-term governor of Indiana and then president of the prestigious Purdue University. At each stage, he tried and succeeded in trimming the worst excesses of public sector waste and abuse of the taxpayer. He has spoken favorably of both F.A. Hayek and limited government.

At Purdue, the business school is now named the “Mitch Daniels School of Business” and, at his beckoning, they have set up a mini curriculum called the “Cornerstone for Business” that proposes to expose students to “transformative texts with deep insights on the history, philosophy, and economic theory of market capitalism.” This is a well-intentioned attempt to “offset the influence of a culture that increasingly doubts the value that profitable businesses offer society.”

This effort should be commended. It recognizes the anti-capitalist influence in American culture and education, and it attempts to balance that by exposing the students to some “transformative texts.” Of course, that is what a liberal education and a liberal arts degree should be—was meant to be—in the first place!

Unfortunately, this is only an elective curriculum—students get a certificate for completing the three-course sequence: 1. “Money, Trade, & Power: The History of Capitalism,” 2. “History of Economic Thought,” and, 3. “International Organization.”

I was a little surprised it did not include a course in “Comparative Economic Systems.” That was a standard course that was taught every semester, open to any student, when I was an undergraduate student. The course compared various versions of capitalism and socialism. My teacher tried to convince us that the Soviet Union would soon dominate the West.

It’s not taught much anymore, anywhere. I don’t think it’s been taught at Auburn University for at least four decades, except when I volunteered to teach it, basically on a charitable basis. They haven’t even asked me to teach it in almost a decade.

The titles of courses, however, are just a surface issue and are just subterfuge in the long run. The titles of professors also don’t matter. I’m afraid that if every economics, history, and philosophy department in the country had a Murray Rothbard-named endowed professorship it would not change a thing.

The University of Missouri was given millions of dollars for six chaired professorships in Austrian economics, and they just handed them out to seemingly random business professors with no connection to Austrian economics. In an extremely unusual outcome, the University was successfully sued for its egregious actions against the donors’ wishes and had to return the money. Most donors are not so lucky.

Here is the crux of the matter:

Current professors don’t know what they are talking about concerning the relevant issues, they only mimic the political propaganda that their professor gave to them. The story suits the agenda, so it gets retold as if it is a real theory, or real history. In reality, these stories often simply fly in the face of logic, but because professors and students are not taught true critical thinking or exposed to competing approaches, they never think about questioning it.

The only critical thinking in modern academia that stands out are criticisms of capitalism—real and imagined. Case in point: it is widely taught that unions caused wages to go up, improved working conditions, reduced hours of work, eliminated women and child labor, etc.; issues that are bound to come up in various history and economics classes.

The problem with this story is that increased wages and benefits, etc., require free market capitalism and private property rights in the first place to generate the necessary savings and capital investment in worthwhile production. Capitalism and capitalist accumulation occurred prior to the labor guilds. The Industrial Revolution preceded labor unions. Capitalism proliferated the higher-skilled labor and higher-paying jobs on which unions are based!

All the good benefits that labor enjoys first appeared in the marketplace without government or union intervention. Henry Ford started the $5 per workday because he wanted a dependable, highly-skilled workforce and workers loved it!

Unions do benefit their members, but they hurt the employers and customers. They also can only sustain their higher pay by excluding others from skilled positions, so many people in the workforce are hurt by unionism. The net result is that “labor” in general is not better off and unionized economies go into decline. The US is one of the least unionized and most dynamic advanced economies in the world.

Listen to professors and their students and you would think only children would work in factories and that no one would ever have a day off from work if not for unions and the government. The capitalist process is responsible for higher wages and higher standards of living in society. As a system, governmental action and violent union activity can only drag down its beneficial social effects.

This is just one example of what passes for higher education. Don’t expect government bureaucrats and politicians to solve this problem. They helped to create it.