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Comment by gsam | Hacker News Reader

It's no surprise people reject concepts they don't adequately understand. I don't know who exactly you could blame here. But if they all understood what it meant, I don't believe nearly as many would be rejecting it.

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I think this is half correct. Part of the reason they “don’t understand” it is because leaders in business and politics misuse the term to mean “back the fuck off and we’ll make things better.” It’s sort of a catchall diversionary term for deregulatory policies and Ameican exceptionalism, and I think millenials have a pretty valid reason to be critical of those things after getting the short end of the economic stick and entering one of the worst job markets since the 1930s.

That’s quite the accusation. I understand capitalism quite well. It often optimized the wrong thing. I have no problem with being in the socialist democracy of canuckistan with regulations and all.

Canada is still more capitalist than socialist. It has a few socialist Bells and whistles like socialized medicine, but really not that close to socialism over all.

Yet it's enough to provide a significantly better quality of life than the US. As a 24 year old, living in America is rough. I'm $30k in student loan debt, struggling to find a job in a non-coastal region, and can become bankrupt and homeless with an unlucky illness.

And my situation is not unique, if anything, I'm above average. I'm lucky enough to have some money in my savings, a middle-class upbringing, and some personal finance classes under my belt. For someone not as lucky, it would be obvious to them that something is incredibly broken in our society.

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