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How Slovenian Students See the World They Live in
Matjaz Steinbacher from the Free Society Institute in Slovenia reports on the general opinion prevailing among students in his country. It shows, if necessary, that our Institutes have still much work to do to explain the basic working of a free society and its moral underpinning…
Matjaz Steinbaker, January 2007:
People and politicians living in the continental Europe have always found arguments for solving economic and people’s problems in the literature that is closer to Karl Marx than to Adam Smith.
Some might say that this is because Marx, who was German, infected the entire nations and populations. We leave this for economic philosophy, and look what this means for people’s behavior and their lives. The story of Slovenian students reported below might come to be useful here to demonstrate the very negative attitudes of the future Slovenian elites towards principles of the free society, capitalism and foremost the USA. And this is not an isolated story: you might hear such stories all over campuses and in each and every bar. The good news, however, is that this attitude is founded on a biased perception of realty and a total ignorance of economic principles. If our institutes do their jobs properly, public opinion could change color rapidly.
In fact, every debate that is connected with economic policy, libertarianism and similar topic very soon becomes a debate on “how to beat America.” Thus, if you stand for the values of a free society and libertarianism you become an American.
In Slovenia, it is very modern these days to speak of “the social country”. Starting with this is therefore a good beginning for a debate. I asked colleagues what, in their view, makes a country social? And which country is more social: the one where wages are low, the unemployment rate at 15 percent and where unemployed are fully compensated by the government, or the one with a high standard of living, high wages and with only two percent of unemployed people? As expected, there was no answer; they tried to turn the debate around on how income inequality harms the society even when everybody is better off. A boy even said that it is true, that we are not as wealthy as Americans, but at least we are social, and nobody dies out in our streets. After asking him if he had seen anybody dying on the streets in the USA, he admitted that he had not. He replied that the USA is the least free country that he and his girl friend have ever seen. After asking them why they think so, they continued that there are controls and imposed to restrictions on every corner.
A funnier argument was that Americans fake every smile they make and that the smile of storekeepers there are in fact disgusting and faked, while faces of the Slovenian storekeepers are genuine, though not smiling. It was hard to continue arguing on what is faked and what is not, so we went on. The truth of the matter, I believe, is that, if you are looking forward to see faked smiles, you definitely see them, for you do not want to be disappointed in your expectations. As we have not agreed practically on a single case, it was clear that we were relying on different core values. Ours were more individuals’ oriented and welcoming market behavior while theirs were very socialist.
Their quite selfish attitude, however, surfaces clearly as they were very shocked that Indians and other nations do not live according to their historical tradition anymore. After I said how nice it is that liberalism has offered to other nations chances to benefit from the progress of mankind, they said that Americanization and industrialization have damaged their tradition and how fooled tourists are, as they can not see those cultures living as they did or as they have read in books. Could you imagine not allowing Indians to wear suits and work in a bank with a mobile phone in the hand if they want so that tradition can be preserved?
Final topic my debate with the students was child work in Africa. Following a provocative remark on child work in Africa, I remarked that child work is the consequence of the fact that people are very poor and that children are forced to work in order to survive. I added that our parents and foremost our grand parents needed to work when they were children just to survive. Some of them had even worked in factories. Of course, they claimed that one cannot compare the two cases: African children, they said, are fully sweated by foreign firms who are making profits for themselves. As those friends are not economists, I gave them a short lesson about marginal values, production factors, productivity, the effect of illiteracy on productivity, and the role played by foreign firms, and I argued that a dollar in the Africa is worth more than a dollar in Slovenia. Even then, they could not answer that very simple question I out to them: When a new factory comes to that village with poor people, isn’t it that those poor people are given a new opportunity to choose between different alternatives, which is at least not worst than the previous one where those children and their parents were forced to accept the only alternative, i.e. working on fields for almost nothing? They agreed that the poor get the new alternative, but continued nonetheless to argue that such an alternative is bad, as it is obvious that everybody will go on working to the factory of foreign owners. I then asked whether they would rather have children in Africa dying from starvation, or working in the factory and survive. They then started to speak of the humanity of those children, but could not understand that their current position is the result of their policies, of illiteracy, religious fights and similar causes; and that what is needed there is a freer society.
The lesson I draw from this discussion is that, as socialism makes people indoctrinated and even self-indoctrinated, it is very hard to debate with them. It is hard to explain them that, if you are looking for the wrong in the Western economies, if you expect to find it, then you will find it. One tramp might be enough! Inversely, when students go to Cuba, they expect to see only happy people there, with a rich culture; and when a taxi-driver is driving them a whole week for a dollar or two, they do not see in this how poor that driver really is. When they see one good thing in those countries, they are filled with wonder how rich they are, and how genuine they are as well. You cannot, they say, see such things in the West!
This attitude is very similar to beliefs that are still very much alive here in Slovenia; the belief that in the former Yugoslavia we had everything and that we wanted nothing more. Hence, it is quickly forgotten that many Slovenians were driving to Austria or Italy to buy washing powder or Milka chocolate. Not to mention, driving a Yugo, the ugliest car ever imported to the USA.
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