Beyond student debt and lack of affordable housing, what other factors—political, social and economic—might be driving millennials towards socialism?
For context, this is a question I answered on Quora
I would throw access to affordable medical care that doesn’t cost a literal arm and leg into that mix. Of course, what leftoid millennials and zoomers blame on markets are actually an amalgamation of state enforced monopolies and oligopolies that insulated bad faith actors from market discipline. The three conglomerates that control the insulin market (Eli Lilly, Novo Nordisk, and Sanofi) use secondary patent applications called evergreening to maintain their hegemony. Drug makers are already given an obscenely long 20 year monopoly post approval. With evergreening they extend their monopoly for another 7.5 years on average, but sometimes the monopoly can be extended for another decade or two creating a perverse incentive that allows price gouging.
Answer: How would the economy be affected if Big Pharma lowered medication prices?
Most states enforce certificate of need laws on medical providers that require new providers to get state approval, by an agency or review board run by people who are current or former employees of incumbent industry, before they can do business. All but 6 states with certificate of need laws allow incumbent providers to directly participate in the review and approval process making them de factor competitor veto laws, that would violate anti-trust law if it wasn’t done by governments. Many certificate of need laws do not even allow the same service to provided in area where it already exists by default. The net result is that hospital expenditures are about 20% higher per capita in states with certificate of need laws while variable costs in general acute hospitals are about 10% higher where there are certificate of need laws.
Certificate of Need Laws in Healthcare: Past, Present and Future
And as I noted in a prior answer:
In a Statement before the House Committee on Energy and Commerce Oversight and Investigations, an economics professor from Carnegie Mellon University revealed that ‘hospitals that have fewer potential competitors nearby have substantially higher prices’ with hospitals with a monopoly over an area charging 12.5% higher prices than hospitals with 3 or more competitors. He also found that when two nearby hospitals merge they raise prices 6.2% while mergers in already concentrated markets can increase prices by 20–50%. The same is generally true of insurers as well as insurance premiums have suppressed real wages over the past couple of decades. Between 1999 and 2016, employee contributions to health insurance premiums increased 242% while their wages grew by only 60%. This is not a sustainable healthcare paradigm for an economic system mostly dependent on consumer spending.
Boomer NIMBY shitbags are responsible for our housing shortage by forcing their anti-density policies on the younger generations. Again, this is not a result of capitalism. Boomers were a product of government largesse. The sprawling suburbs that dominate the American landscape are a product of New Deal welfare statism (e.g. FHA, Fannie Mae) not a natural outgrowth of a housing market left to its own devices. It is an even starker example of crony capitalism and economic planning than the medical industry.
And 90% of student loan debt is owed to the federal government. They are the ones that made the sky the limit for student borrowers which gives colleges the perverse incentives to hike tuition sky high.