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After my mother died, I found a folder she kept of things I had written in school, everything from first-grade scribbles to my senior-year autobiography. There were assignments that made me groan as I read them, but also a kind of amazing fifth-grade essay about my maternal grandfather. Probably the most ambitious project was a research paper from my junior year comparing the U.S. and Soviet economies. Stand aside, Adam Smith and Karl Marx, Trygve Hammer will get this capitalism versus communism thing sorted out in ten typewritten pages.
We were in the midst of the Cold War when I wrote that paper, and a mature reading of it revealed that I hadn’t exactly checked my biases at the door. Being a good little American patriot, I found that capitalism was a flawless force for all that was good, and communism was the godless scourge of those Soviet bullies who wanted to rule the world with an iron fist.
My rosy view of capitalism was pretty universal among my high school peers, but a look at social media reveals that today’s teenagers do not share such blind faith in our economic system. They know that they are unlikely to end up better off than their parents even though the economy has continued to grow and productivity has steadily increased. Those of them who are thinking of college expect to be paying off student loans for decades, and they do not expect to be in the market for a home anytime soon.
And it’s not just the teenagers. There is broad dissatisfaction and economic anxiety in American society. I believe we are still in financial and psychological recovery from not only the COVID-19 pandemic, but also from the Great Recession, when big Wall Street firms were too big to fail and the rest of us were left feeling too small to matter.
Many younger Americans don’t buy that this economic dissatisfaction stems from inefficient government or unchecked immigration. They have grown up with a form of capitalism that cannot focus beyond the next quarterly earnings report, a “greed is good” system where the only stakeholders who matter are shareholders. Many of these younger Americans have applied for jobs and then been ‘ghosted’ at some point in the process. Others have found jobs but remain dissatisfied not because of their salary but because they don’t feel valued at work. They sense that they matter only to the point where regulation requires that they matter.
The weight of all the wealth redistributed upward over the last forty-plus years has been grinding over them like a tectonic plate, building heat and pressure. It shouldn’t be surprising, then, that they are not brimming over with shock and empathy when a CEO is murdered by someone frustrated with corporate greed.
What if Luigi Mangione is just be the first kernel to pop from the bottom of the kettle? Maybe there are others who are weary of this survival-of-the-fittest system where the true test of fitness is inherited wealth and connections and where only a lucky few catch the right breaks and move up the ladder. Maybe the kids aren’t buying it. Maybe some of them, after years of school-shooter drills, are instead buying into the Second Amendment solutions they’ve heard tough guys hint at. Maybe the survival-of-the-fittest system is evolving into The Purge. Let’s hope not.
Relief is not on the horizon. There will be no reckoning or self-reflection among the moneyed elites, no injection of compassion into the system. There might be more investment in executive security. There will likely be more tax cuts for the wealthy, and we will definitely see two stooges riding in to rescue us from government inefficiency, because there’s nothing like inspection by a puerile billionaire and a multi-millionaire pharma scammer [ [link removed] ]to make government less wasteful.
Musk and Ramaswamy are the problem, not the solution, but they can’t see it. They have all the self-awareness of an abusive boss puzzling over why there aren’t more employees at the office holiday party. No one who has lost faith in capitalism will look at those two men and return to worshiping at the altar of the Almighty Dollar. Young folks will remain unafraid to impugn capitalism on social media, and their refusal to be unequivocally positive about it means that folks on the right will continue to label anything they don’t like as Communism or Marxism.
Instead of the rather Orwellian-sounding Department of Government Efficiency, what we really need is a ten-page high school research paper on how to fix everything that is broken in our economy and our politics. And speaking of Orwell, I’m pretty sure I wrote that ode-to-capitalism research paper in 1984.

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