The Occupy squatter movement has been trying hard to turn the word capitalism into a curse word. A new poll released by the Pew Research Center last week demonstrates their failure in that effort, with Americans still preferring economic freedom over a market controlled by government bureaucrats.
From The Hill write up on the poll:
The Pew Research Center found that half of U.S. adults reacted favorably to capitalism, while 4 in 10 responded negatively.
Meanwhile, 6 out of 10 adults disapproved of socialism, while 31 percent endorsed it.
All those responses, Pew said, are largely unchanged from April 2010, the last time the group checked on those words.
In a not-surprising-at-all crosstab, Pew found that nearly half of 18-29 year olds had a positive view of socialism. The poll found that as respondents got older, and thus had to spend more time in the real world without their parents' credit card, they became increasingly opposed to socialism and more favorable towards a free market.
That views towards capitalism haven't soured during the worst economic depression in generations speaks volumes about the enduring ideal of a free market economy in the American ethos. As much as the Occupiers demand their right to take dumps in public parks, in a protest of the economy that pays for their feces to be disposed of after riot police clear them out, they are not succeeding in getting Americans to adopt their warped view of the world.
Fear not, conservatives. The Pew poll lets us rest easy, knowing that the best cure for leftist economic ideals is simply a cold, hard dose of self-reliance.
Socialism, it appears from the Pew poll, is only popular when it's someone else's money. But as Margaret Thatcher once said "the problem with socialism is you eventually run out of someone else's money."
Chew on that, socialists. You suck. We rock.