YAF at Northwestern University: Advancing Free Enterprise and Exposing Socialism

Just yesterday, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation released its latest survey, Annual Report on U.S. Attitudes towards Socialism, which reveals that one in two American millennials would rather live in a socialist or communist country than a free market democracy. No, that’s not a typo. 51% of millennials claim they would rather live in a country like Venezuela or Cuba than America! It’s clear that our schools and textbooks have failed to educate our country’s young people about the dangers of an all-powerful dictator such as Nicolás Maduro; the evils of government takeover of food, housing, and basic healthcare; and the social destruction that a centrally-controlled economy can wreak upon individuals and their families. This is the precise reason Young America’s Foundation is taking the timely message of individual freedom and free enterprise to students on campuses nationwide. We’re continuing the fight against the idea of socialism by sponsoring Chairman and Editor-in-Chief of Forbes Media, Steve Forbes, to deliver an eye-opening lecture to millennials at Northwestern University. Forbes will speak at a public event at Northwestern on Monday, November 6 at 7:00 PM in Fisk Hall Room 217. Interested guests can reserve free tickets via the following link: Steve Forbes at Northwestern. Young America’s Foundation is grateful for the opportunity to sponsor Forbes to inform and engage with students at Northwestern University in honor of the memories of Thomas and Marjorie Mairs. As part of his talk at Northwestern, Forbes will bring the following message to our country’s future leaders:

• The free market, not socialism, turns scarcity into abundance. “One hundred twenty years ago, a car cost over $110,000. It was a toy for the rich. But Henry Ford came along with the moving assembly line and turned this toy for the rich into something every working person can afford.”
• Cut, cut, cut taxes. Federal income taxes are a monstrosity that even the so-called experts at the Internal Revenue Service don’t understand. “Take this monster. I would say bury it, but I don’t know if the EPA would let us bury something so toxic.”
• Remove the power of the government bureaucrat to make healthcare choices for individuals and their families. “The crummiest motel in America wouldn’t dare put you in a room with another guest with a curtain in between. But they do it routinely in hospitals.”

Young America’s Foundation has already partnered with Steve Forbes this semester for lectures at the University of Louisville and Cornell University that drew hundreds of students who had previously not heard these ideas in their classrooms, and we’re committed to exposing socialism for the fraud that it truly is. Raj Kannappan is the Director of Young America’s Foundation’s Center for Entrepreneurship & Free Enterprise.