The Cold War with the Soviet Union and its puppet states in Eastern Europe was a very big deal, too. The generation of Americans who lived through that likely remember that U.S.S.R. was an abbreviation for the "Union of Soviet Socialist Republics." That generation also likely remembers that the Soviet Union was such a bad idea that they had to build a wall to keep people in and shoot those who tried to escape.

People who are in college now are too young to remember the U.S.S.R. in its evil-empire heyday, and their history teachers have barely taught them about the American Revolution, let alone modern European history. When our kids think about Russia or Eastern Europe today, the words that likely come to mind are "fashion models" or "billionaires in mega-yachts," not "failed socialist menace" or the "nuclear holocaust."

It's counterintuitive, but it's actually been a disadvantage (at least as far as making this argument is concerned) that no country with a state-run economy has risen to threaten America in recent years the way that Nazi Germany or the Soviet Union once did. There is no "evil empire" anymore that Americans can rally against or compare themselves to. Turkmenistan and Equatorial Guinea aren't exactly the stuff of front-page headlines. Sure, Iran and North Korea are serious threats in terms of their ability to wreak havoc with a nuclear weapon. And China does challenge America, though its economy has grown stronger largely by adding more capitalism, not less. But none of them, at least for now, is even close to the scale of a Nazi Germany or Soviet Russia.

But it's not merely an accident of history that has strengthened support for socialism among our youth. Another big part of the story is the way these young people are being bombarded with anticapitalist messages in popular culture and in schools.

SOCIAL(ISM) STUDIES.

It starts the moment a parent brings their child to a playgroup or to a park with a sandbox. The message to children with toys is "share everything," as the line of Robert Fulghum's bestseller All I Really Need to Know I Learned in Kindergarten puts it.

That may make for more peaceful playgrounds and playdates, and kids obviously need to learn how to share, but it's easy for that message to be taken to extremes. The children's book The Rainbow Fish tells the story of a fish with special shiny scales who decides to give them away to the other fish. According to the book's conclusion, "His most prized possessions had been given away, yet he was very happy." At the end, the rainbow fish is no longer different from the other fishes because he has ripped the scales off his own body to give them to others. One negative (although sadly accurate) review at Amazon.com is titled, "Great for the young communist and socialist."

Children's movies haven't been much better. Disney's The Muppets, a family-oriented film that came out in December 2011, has a plot that is summarized on the movie's website thus: On vacation in Los Angeles, Walter-the world's biggest Muppet fan-his brother Gary, and Gary's girlfriend Amy from Smalltown, USA, discover the nefarious plan of oilman Tex Richman to raze the Muppet Theater and drill for the oil recently discovered beneath.

As one critic wondered, why do these movies never seem to be about nefarious plans by evil poor environmentalists to turn the Muppet Theater into a wildlife refuge or wind farm?

After the books and movies a child finally graduates to school, where, as we covered in the previous chapter, any chance they stood of becoming a procapitalist adult quickly vanishes.

One thing that really shocked me as I researched this was the content in the textbooks themselves. It's one thing to have a liberal teacher tell kids what to think, but it's another thing to have a textbook-something that should be completely void of political commentary-blatantly argue against capitalism.

Lawrence Reed, president of the Foundation for Economic Education, looked at high school economics textbooks and found that "errors abound." But that's a huge understatement. I think what he found is less about errors and more about very carefully crafted political speech clearly meant to subtly influence our students. For example: "Despite fears by some Americans that governmental tampering with the free enterprise system would be harmful, most government policies have met with success."-from David E. O'Connor's Economics-Free Enterprise in Action "Under a balanced budget, the government would not be able to do things that many people think it should do, like building roads and providing for the needy."-Henry Billings, Introduction to Economics "As societies become more complex, the need for government power tends to increase."-Sanford Gordon and Alan Stafford's Applying Economic Principles These opinions clearly rub off on students. The Higher Education Research Institute surveys tens of thousands of college students from dozens of different institutions each year when they arrive on campus as freshmen, and then again when they leave as seniors. Here are the results of one recent survey:

Change in Life Goals

Percent of students reporting that the following are "essential" or "very important" to them: At college entry At end of college Change Becoming involved in programs to clean up the environment 19.9.

30.2.

10.3.

Helping others who are in difficulty

70.0.

76.6.

6.6.

Becoming successful in a business of my own 36.2.

35.2.

-1.0.

Being very well-off financially 67.2.

59.9.

-7.3.

Change in Political Values Students' characterization of their political views: At college entry At end of college Change Liberal or far left 29.8.

39.0.

9.2.

Conservative or far right 30.3.

23.7.

-6.6.

In other words, students entered college about evenly split between being liberal and conservative, but after four years of propaganda, the liberals gained a 15-percentage-point advantage. College made the students a lot more likely to want to clean up the environment, but less likely to want to be well-off financially or successful in their own businesses.

The point is that we face an increasingly steep uphill battle. It's not just books or just movies or just liberal teachers and textbooks-it's all of it. To fight back we are going to have to do a lot more than just attack the messengers; we're going to have to attack the message itself.

EARNING IS LEARNING.

Most young people have rebellious, anti-authoritarian impulses. They don't like being told what, when, or how to do something. It's ironic, then, that many of these same people embrace a system in which there would be far more regulations, many more bureaucrats micromanaging their lives, and far more rules and restrictions on how things can be done.

And that is the beauty of the free-enterprise movement: it has the word free right there in the title. Yet when we think of these "rebellious" youths we don't think of them joining their "Young Republicans" club at school; we think of them camping overnight at Occupy protests or road-tripping to an Obama event.

Why?

Simple: we've done an absolutely terrible job at selling the message. Capitalism isn't "cool." It's not something you fight for or get excited about. But it can be. In fact, it should be; a free market is the very thing that gives every American kid the hope that they'll achieve their dream. After all, when asked what they want to be when they grow up, very few twelve-year-olds are going to answer "class warrior," or "environmental activist," or "welfare recipient."

But the job of selling this message of freedom of opportunity can't just happen in the classroom (that battle is lost for the foreseeable future) or in the bookstore or cinema-it must happen at home. Parents have an enormous role to play in this effort, not by mandating that little Johnny become the next Milton Friedman (remember, mandates don't work) but by showing them what it really means.

I'd love to take my son Raphe out and open up a lemonade stand with him. I'll show him how to market his stand, how to get people to tell others it's the best lemonade they've ever had, and how to change his prices throughout the day based on the demand. I'll tell him that he should work as hard as he can because he'll get to keep every cent he makes; he'll just have to pay me for the supplies.

The following weekend I'll take him out again. This time I'll tell him that, no matter what happens, he'll get to keep just five dollars at the end of the day. If he makes less than that, I'll pay him the difference. If he makes more, he'll give me the excess.

I'm pretty sure this little exercise wouldn't make me Father of the Year, but hopefully it would give my son something tangible to think about as he grows up. It's one thing to hear "redistribution of wealth," and it's another thing entirely to put in a long hard day of work only to have your money taken away.

Another option for parents is foreign travel. Exposing kids to the "real world" outside of America can have a lot of benefits. Seeing the struggles and the challenges of day-to-day life-the shortages, the corruption-can help to drive home the advantages of free enterprise.

If Only We All Had Yachts

One highly successful capitalist had a child who went off to England to study after graduating from high school. He came home "immersed in the idea and ideals of socialism," declaring himself in favor "of all people sharing equally in the world's wealth." The child's mother told him, fine, if that's what he believed, they'd take away his cherished boat, and he could spend his time just fishing off the pier. The defender of capitalism, in this case, was, of all people, Rose Kennedy, and the young socialist was Joe Kennedy Jr., who didn't want to give up the boat, and who later died in World War II.

Admittedly, a trip like that isn't for everyone; it's a lot riskier than just reading about the country on the Web. And if you wind up detained by Obiang Nguema Mbasogo or Gurbanguly Berdimuhamedov, don't count on me coming to rescue you.

A less aggressive approach is to ensure that our kids spend some time with immigrants who have come to America from countries with much different views on economic freedom. Some of the most enthusiastic defenders of capitalism I've ever met, not to mention its most successful practitioners, are those who came here as legal immigrants or refugees fleeing Castro's Cuba or Communist China or the Soviet Union. They understand firsthand the disadvantages of the system they left behind.

If trips abroad or conversations with immigrants aren't your style, there are plenty of other options. Several volunteer-driven nonprofit organizations teach students about free enterprise by putting them to work. Junior Achievement, founded in 1919, now reaches four million students a year. In New York, hundreds of teams of high school students compete each year to write the best plan for a new business as part of Junior Achievement. Members of the winning teams get three thousand dollars apiece and iPhones, and they get to ring the closing bell on the NASDAQ stock market. The Boy Scouts have an "American Business" merit badge with requirements that include "Run a small business involving a product or service for at least three months. . . . For example: a newspaper route, lawn mowing, sales of things you have made or grow." Millions of Girl Scouts have learned sales and marketing principles selling cookies.

Even a job that seems menial, or a distraction from school, can become valuable training. Warren Buffett, who became the richest businessman in America, got started in high school working newspaper delivery routes for the Washington Times-Herald, Washington Post, and Washington Star. He invested some of his earnings in a business that put pinball machines in barbershops.

By getting personally involved, parents can help make it much more likely that their children grow up to be entrepreneurs rather than Occupiers. It can take some extra work and thought to find books and movies that aren't hostile to capitalism, to keep an eye on what's going on at school, to drive your child to Scout meetings, or to encourage them to apply for that first summer job-but it's more than worth it.

Of course, as any parents reading this already know well, there are never any guarantees. Even well-intentioned parents don't always get it exactly right-Bill Gates's parents were worried when he dropped out of Harvard to pursue founding Microsoft; the president of my production company dropped out of college to pursue his dreams and his mother responded by crying-but the potential payoff is huge: a child who takes care of you in your old age rather than one who lives in your basement.

Learning from Experience

Some of capitalism's most passionate defenders came to America or other Western nations as immigrants after fleeing state-controlled political and economic systems. Among them: Friedrich Hayek, the author of The Road to Serfdom and The Fatal Conceit, two books warning of the dangers of centralized government planning, was born in Austria, but in 1938, with Nazi Germany annexing Austria, Hayek became a British citizen.

Ludwig von Mises, an economist of the Austrian School and a close associate of Hayek, also fled the Nazis, arriving in America in 1940.

Rose Friedman, the wife of libertarian economist Milton Friedman, his collaborator on the 1962 book Capitalism and Freedom, and his coauthor on Free to Choose and Two Lucky People, was born in what is now Ukraine before coming to America with her family at age two.

Ayn Rand, the author of the procapitalist novel Atlas Shrugged and of the book Capitalism: The Unknown Ideal, was born in St. Petersburg, Russia, in 1905, and knew the oppressive rule of both the czar and the Soviet communist thugs that followed. She came to America in 1926.

WHO WANTS TO BE A BILLIONAIRE?.

Let's be honest: socialism and cradle-to-grave social policies do have a certain simple emotional appeal, especially when cloaked in the language of "fairness" and "equality." It's easy to see a poor family and imagine how they might be helped by a government program. It's much more abstract and complex to think about the people who might be taxed to fund that program, or about the jobs that could've been created if that program didn't have to be funded, or about the chances that the government program might create perverse incentives or have unintended consequences that could wind up hurting the people it is intended to help.

Capitalism is sometimes harder to defend than other economic systems, but we can never forget that morality is actually at the center of this. One of the most influential economic thinkers of all time was the Scottish philosopher Adam Smith. His book An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations came out in 1776, the same year that America declared independence from Great Britain. That book described important economic concepts, such as how free trade benefits both sides because of comparative advantage, and how the "invisible hand" of self-interest benefits society overall.

But it was Smith's earlier book, The Theory of Moral Sentiments, published in 1759, that is perhaps more important. That book focused on how market rewards encourage virtues such as hard work-what he called "industry"-and trustworthy behavior. He explained this in a section titled "Of the influence and authority of the general Rules of Morality, and that they are justly regarded as the Laws of the Deity." Smith asked, "What is the reward most proper for encouraging industry, prudence, and circumspection? Success in every sort of business."

In other words, capitalism is good not only because it is the best system around for generating lots of great stuff that people want to buy, but also because it's the best way to encourage people to work hard and be honest in their dealings. Capitalism is, at its core, survival of the fittest-and a "fit" business is one that not only offers value, but also treats its customers right. That last point is too often missed. There's a lot of attention paid to how capitalism encourages cutthroat competition, but much less attention is paid to how it encourages cooperation-among employees on the same team, between companies and their suppliers, and between entrepreneurs and their financial backers.

Believers in what Adam Smith called "the Laws of the Deity" have come at capitalism from all kinds of angles. The very big deal that the Bible makes out of the Exodus of the Children of Israel from slavery in Egypt, for example, leads to the idea that the individual, not the pharaoh or some modern equivalent, has the ownership of his own labor. The commandment not to steal brings with it the concept that what an individual has worked to produce belongs to that individual.

When it comes right down to it, though, the case for capitalism doesn't require a lot of deep study of the Bible, eighteenth-century Scottish philosophers, or even adventure travel to Equatorial Guinea or Turkmenistan. It just requires our kids to open their minds and eyes to what's standing right in front of them, to just connect the dots and start appreciating that they are among the 0.3 percent of humans who have ever been fortunate enough to live under this kind of freedom.

One thing that might open further their appreciation for capitalism is the fact that it is one of the few economic systems in the world in which a regular kid can be a billionaire in less than a decade. For example, Facebook's twenty-eight-year-old founder, Mark Zuckerberg, is worth more than $20 billion. Under what other economic system can a smart person with a good idea, who isn't the heir to a kingdom, make $20 billion before they're thirty years old?

But maybe the best way to talk about capitalism with our kids is to show them how it's cutting out the middlemen and giving them the power to decide their own destinies. For example, I used to be a Top 40 deejay and I knew very well the long and arduous process that artists went through before their song might eventually be played on my station.