I had never heard of Professor Anthony Zenkus before last night when his Twitter account caught my attention.
“A new Harris poll found that 50% of American workers are thinking of quitting their jobs,” Zenkus tweeted. “I guess this capitalism thing isn’t really working out so well, is it now?”
In a second tweet, Zenkus wrote, “1 in 5 children living below federal poverty level in the richest country in the world is evidence that capitalism is a failure.” Clearly, Zenkus — whose LinkedIn shows he is an adjunct lecturer and professor at Columbia and Adelphi universities, respectively — is no fan of capitalism.
As a graduate of the University of Pennsylvania, another Ivy League school, I am plenty familiar with the tired and trite anti-capitalist claptrap that abounds on elite university campuses. I wouldn’t quite say it was dominant at Penn, but it was definitely prevalent. Still, Zenkus’s tweets did prompt me to fire: “It’s almost like you’ve never read about the poverty level of people living under communism.” And it’s true.
I could have added that workers’ freedom to quit and change their jobs is a salutary and healthy part of the free market, reflective of bargaining power for wages that no one in socialist countries ever enjoyed. I could have also pointed out that the federal poverty level, which doesn’t even count welfare benefits received by those below it, is set on purpose to include roughly the bottom quintile of the population. If we only counted those living on less than $1.90 per day, as the World Bank does, it wouldn’t be very useful for making policy in a country where practically no one’s income is that low. In communist countries, they would have to set the poverty level much lower because nearly everyone in Cuba today and in the Eastern Bloc of 40 years ago would fall well below the standard of living of nearly all American workers.
Sadly, Zenkus and people like him are entrusted with educating college students. He is entitled to believe whatever he wants — a freedom not available in communist countries, of course — but it’s a shame to see parents pay hundreds of thousands of dollars only to receive such ignorance in exchange. (On a side note, I always found it funny how such professors’ disdain for capitalism rarely targets the exorbitant tuition that goes into their paychecks.)
These were some of Zenkus’s tamer tweets. Past declarations have included tweeting that the U.S. flag “is a symbol of genocide.” This came in response to a tweet that said the hammer and sickle of communism were symbols of mass killings. Other tweets include further defenses of socialism and communism. One tweet stated, “Communists don’t want to take what you have. They want everyone else to have what you have.” How clever.
Another of his greatest hits reads, “Odd how you forget the millions who died under #capitalism…” Well, people die every day everywhere, but we haven’t got anything comparable to Stalin’s engineered famine in Ukraine, the liquidation of the Kulaks, the mass starvation of Mao’s Great Leap Forward, or the Killing Fields — let alone the political executions of GULAG and the Cultural Revolution.
If the entire population of Michigan, Indiana, and Illinois suddenly die of hunger by year’s end because of something the wealthy or corporations do, then perhaps we can start drawing equivalences. But I suspect we’re quite a long way from there.
Free markets are not perfect, but college professors don’t serve the truth by abandoning reality entirely. Colleges are meant to educate, not indoctrinate. Sure, teach people about America’s failures. We let slavery go on after the great powers had rightly abolished it, despite preaching founding principles that should have made its evils obvious. And yes, free markets do not place a necessary check upon greed on their own (neither does socialism, but that’s another story). There is no utopia — disaster will always result when we rely too heavily upon “systems” rather than upon the moral education and character of individual actors.
But also don’t forget that more people have been lifted out of poverty in the last 40 years than in all of world history, and it’s all because of the abandonment of socialist economic principles for relatively free markets by the governments ruling over enormous populations in China, Eastern Europe, and India. That is a very awkward thing for someone in Zenkus’s position to explain away — almost as awkward as the 100 million-plus death toll that communists managed to rack up in less than a century in power.
