“Workers have always been exploited, but that rate of exploitation — measured by the productivity wage gap we talked about earlier — is increasing exponentially for millennials.”

That’s a line from a piece I recently read where Vox.com’s Sean Illing interviewed Malcolm Harris, author of Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials.

The crux of the piece is this: capitalism is why millennials are so burned out. Woven through and through is overtly dark language that the “historical task in front of us” is revolution; that there is no other “solution short of overthrowing it. In other words, the only solution is revolution.”

The piece doesn’t stop there; Harris goes on to quote Malcolm X (vis-à-vis there are no revolutions without bloodshed), and then commented, “we’re in a situation now where the ruling class feels so powerful and I’m not sure what it will take to change things.”

So in other words, this Malcolm Harris (who is, among other things, a trainer with the Democratic Socialists of America) believes capitalism is the single greatest threat to this world’s peace and prosperity, and that he and his fellow socialists may very well take up a bloody (literally, not figuratively) revolution in order to try and jam it down this country’s unwilling throat.

Well gosh, that escalated quickly.

No seriously—the piece starts with the standard fare: “What made millennials the way they are? Why are they so burned out? Why are they having fewer kids? Why are they getting married later? Why are they obsessed with efficiency and technology?”

…and it quickly veers into “yeah, *sighs, * I guess we’ll just have to shed capitalist blood until there’s nothing left but the faint smell of a crumpled dollar bill.”

Geez.

I kid a little here, but these people are literally talking about violent revolution here—and if you don’t believe me, I’ll link it for you here for the fifth time.

Before I address millennial burnout (and oh, will I address it), I want to just you all—and my revolution-hungry friends on the left—to think about something:

How many people have been killed in the name and in the interest of furthering socialism?

No seriously, there have been millions of people tortured and killed by those trying to get to socialism or communism. At what point do we pay attention to that? At what point does THAT suffering fundamentally outweigh the so-called “suffering” under the capitalist system?

Let’s look at that “suffering” for a moment, shall we? “Wealth and innovation spurred by capitalism has done more to help the poor than any government program ever could,” writes The Daily Wire’s Aaron Bandler. How? By improving the lives of not just those living in free market countries, but across the entire globe. Whether it’s an 80 percent decline in the number of people living in extreme poverty, or how the world is “120 times better off today than in 1800 as a result of capitalism,” or the fact that mortality rates for children under five has drastically dropped.

In the United States, our poor are richer than 70% of the rest of the entire world. Indeed, “typical person in the bottom 5 percent of the American income distribution is still richer than 68 percent of the world’s inhabitants.”

In contrast, socialist countries are notoriously impoverished, violent, and desperate. For those “more attractive” big government states that the likes of Bernie Sanders loves to cite (i.e. Scandinavia), those are places that had embraced socialism and have now begun to pivot once again towards free markets.

And yet millennials are gobbling up socialism like candy.

Which brings us to … burnout:

Millennials aren’t burned out because of a system that has done more for the world in a few centuries than countless empires and leaders and ideologies spanning millennia (ha, see what I did there) ever did. They’re burned out because:

We’re dumbing down the education system—so they’re entering adulthood and the workforce less prepared than ever before. Don’t believe me? Try taking this 8^th grade final exam from 1895. Most working adults couldn’t pass that basic test, let alone our nation’s students. Indeed, “recent scores on reading, math, and writing, released this month, are dismal. Fewer than half of students are rated “proficient” in each of these subjects,” and while we aren’t doing a good job of preparing our children for the careers of their choice, we are doing a fantastic job of churning out mediocrity.

Vox’s article bemoans the idea that “education is all about job preparation” and how it puts us all on “a really dangerous course because that’s all about human capital production, and then you have a system where the schools set out to produce skills in children based on what people who own companies say they want those kids to have, what skills they’ll need from their workers.”

Uh—yeah. That’s what education is for; to allow us to function in adulthood. And when we don’t get basic education (you know, good ol’ readin’, writin’ and ‘rithmetic). The funny thing is that if anyone’s “producing” drones, it’s the left and their rigid, zero-tolerance-for-anything-that-is-not-leftist approach to education that leaves our next generation completely indoctrinated to think, act, and live a certain way. It is indeed the leftist approach towards education that takes away a free-thinking mind.

They’re not given tough love and real constructive criticism about their limitations. And then, they go out into the real world which, until it is fully dominated by millennials, will still consist of bosses and managers and leaders who did not grow up being told that they could do anything.

Think about it: how awful is it that we’re setting kids up for disappointment by telling them they can do ANYTHING, when in fact not everyone has a knack for everything (which is what it would take to be able to do, in fact, anything.). It’s just not how we’re wired. Making matters worse in this regard, our society’s entitlement drumbeat grows stronger by the day. Instead of appreciating talent for talent’s sake, today’s young people see a society that puts people on a pedestal for being, for example, female, or black, or gay—or any other qualifier (minus Christian and/or conservative, of course)—and makes them believe that they are entitled to what they want out of life. Just because.

They’ve been told over and over and over and over again that they’re either the victim, or the victimizer—putting them in a perpetual state of either fear or some level of guilt. Seriously though, my generation has gone through life in a perpetual state of victimhood and “what am I owed-ism,” or white/male/wealth etc. guilt for the sins of those before us, or the fact that some of us have more money than others. Pile that on to everything I just said, and it’s no wonder millennials are spiraling into depression and burnout.

They’ve been conditioned to look at children as nothing more than a money-suck, a time-suck, and a fun-suck. And they’ve been conditioned to put #1 first: “Today’s copulating post-youths are much more interested in their careers and life goals than they are in raising from a larval stage a human money suck, and as a result, our nation’s birth rates are declining.”

Beyond this inward-focused approach to life, millennials are afraid to have children because, according to this piece, “millennials are the highest-educated, worst-paid generation ever.” Here’s the thing, though. As this piece points out, “most households with student loans spend nearly as much on entertainment as they do on their monthly student loan payment,” and “only 3 percent of households that owed on any student loans comprised the highly publicized media horror stories of bearing six-figure loads.”

In other words, millennials are choosing other things over children, and that’s fine if it’s what you want–but then don’t blame not having children or buying a house on capitalism.

We live in a society that—thanks to capitalism—is blessed with more conveniences than ever before. (Vox, if there’s one thing you can *sort of* pin on capitalism, this one’s it). We have the world at our fingertips through smartphones and tablets; we have machines that wash and dry (and even fold!) our clothes in record time; there are vacuums and mops that drive themselves; we have devices that cook our dinner in half the time or less—the list goes on. The more convenience there is, the more time there is to pack even MORE into our schedules. Or, as this piece points out, even more time to waste—say, on our smart devices. That’s less time for REAL social interaction, reading books, exercising, self-care, etc. etc.—all things that help keep a person well-rounded able to continually move forward in life.

That’s not capitalism’s fault—no one forced us to pile more and more into our days and fill any free moment with the closest screen.

Bottom line: millennial burnout is in and of itself a product of societal engineering by our friends on the left, and their constant drumbeat of societal engineering, entitlement, victimization, and of course, their love affair with an economic system that destroys progress.

Mary Ramirez is a full-time writer, creator of www.afuturefree.com, and contributor to The Chris Salcedo Show on KSEV 700 Radio in Houston. She can be reached at: afuturefree@aol.com; or on Twitter: @AFutureFree