When the young turn against the market, look to the market first

The Washington Examiner reports that Generation Z is driving a notable rise in the Democratic Socialists of America, pointing to the mayoral victory of Zohran Mamdani as evidence of the trend's political weight. Many observers treat this as a failure of civic education. I would treat it as a market signal — the kind a prudent merchant reads before blaming the customer.

I spent my working life near the practical mechanics of commerce: setting type for a living, running a print shop, tallying the cost of paper against the price a pamphlet might fetch. I learned early that a young tradesman who cannot find honest work at honest wages is not comforted by lectures on the invisible hand. He looks for whoever promises to put something in his actual hand. That is not ideology; that is hunger.

The animating complaint here, as I read it, is not a philosophical quarrel with private property. It is a household-economy quarrel: housing costs that outrun earnings, student debt that delays every other transaction in a young person's life, and wages that have not kept pace with the price of the necessities. Paper money badly secured steals quietly from everyone who holds it; a labor market badly managed steals just as quietly from everyone who needs it. The remedy to both is discipline on the issuer — whether that issuer is a colonial land bank or a modern employer.

Now, I will grant that the prescription offered by democratic socialism carries its own hazards. I am on record — by disposition if not by direct memory of modern events — as a skeptic of any arrangement that removes the discipline of accountability from those who manage common resources. A government monopoly on production is a printer's guild writ large, and I saw what printer's guilds did to the cost and quality of information. But skepticism of the cure does not mean denial of the disease.

The Examiner argues that Republicans must 'steal' the appeal of socialism to save capitalism from Gen Z. I would put it differently: capitalism saves itself only when it demonstrably delivers — to the young mechanic, the young nurse, the young farmer — the independence and upward mobility it has always promised. A commerce that civilizes must actually be accessible to those who wish to enter it. If a generation finds the door locked, they will not stand politely outside; they will look for a window, or a different house entirely.

A counsel to those who care about free markets: spend less energy denouncing the beliefs of young people and more energy removing the barriers — credential inflation, exclusionary zoning, predatory lending, and debt traps — that make those beliefs feel rational. The best argument for the market is a market that works for the person just starting out. Every young person who builds something, saves something, and owns something becomes a natural defender of the system. Give them the chance to do it.