Ever wonder why so many intellectuals
and academics are often left leaning and drawn to socialism?
Well, it has to do with a hero complex.
There's an economist by the name of Joseph Schumpeter,
and he explained this really well in one of his books, Capitalism,
Socialism, and Democracy.
He explained that highly developed industrialized capitalist societies create enough abundance to produce a large quantity of these intellectual class.
And these people are like journalists,
college professors,
lawyers, political serious academics,
and they're often very resentful of capitalism.
And this resentment usually stands from the fact that capitalism mostly rewards entrepreneurs,
inventors,
merchants, and businessmen, people who actually produce real goods and services for society.
It doesn't do much to rewards these intellectuals because most of them don't produce anything.
Um, their products are usually ideas,
critiques, and theories about society and how it should function.
And because they don't actually solve any real problems, their easiest path to influence for them is by criticizing
capitalism.
Think of people like Michel Foucault, Noam Chomsky,
Herbert Macuso,
and most notably Karl Marx. And because they believe that they're actually smarter than most people, they often feel that capitalism doesn't properly rewards them for their intellect. But under socialism,
it will be different because they'll be more valuable.
Um, and since socialism needs a lot of bureaucrats, experts,
economic planners, ideologues,
and guiding intellectuals.
So it gives them the starring role that they don't have in a market economy.
And on top of that, they also don't suffer the consequences of their own failed ideologies.
You see, unlike an engineer who's built a bad product, you can see it in real time if that product works or not. And if it doesn't, then you have to go back and try to fix it. But for these intellectuals,
their product is their ideas.
So they can be catastrophically
wrong and then still get to keep their careers.
And if their ideologies and predictions fail, they can always write a new essay explaining why it wasn't real socialism or that somebody implemented it wrong. So because they have no skin in the game, there's no limit to what they can come up with.