Taking too much for granted.

According to a Gallup Survey published in September, 57 percent of young adults age 18 to 34 have a favorable view of socialism – a disheartening number.

It’s driven by economic illiteracy – a fancy way of saying ignorance.

As irritating as it is, ignorance on the part of the young, including just-out-of-college young voters, can be forgiven. They haven’t lived long enough to know what we elders know and, in far too many cases, they’ve been ill served by an education system that has been hijacked by the Left.

But we must somehow get them – and, to a distressing degree, the idiot teachers and professors who fill our kids’ heads full of mush and from whom ignorance is far less forgivable – to understand that the abundance of this country is not the default state of mankind.

Naked, destitute and vulnerable to the forces of nature is the default state of mankind.

Over time humans, little by little, improved their lot somewhat. But only somewhat. For millennia humans in every corner of the world lived lives of inescapable poverty under a dark cloud of tyranny and strong-man rule.

Viewed in the context of the grand sweep of history, the individual liberty and widely shared prosperity that we enjoy in the United States is very recent and very much the exception. The abundance that the young take for granted exists because the men that we call the Founding Fathers literally put their necks on the line and revolted against a strong man named King George III of England.

They went on to midwife a republic that took the entire concept of government as it had been practiced for nearly the entirety of recorded history and stood it on its head.

In the late 18^th century, when this nation was born, authoritarian rule was the norm all over the world.

So, too, was poverty.

The individual freedom that was baked into our founding documents changed everything. America’s founding promise was never a life free from hardship, uncertainty or failure. It was something new and far more consequential: sovereignty over one’s own life.

The Founding Fathers guaranteed neither comfort nor prosperity. But they guaranteed the liberty to pursue both. They promised no one a successful life. They promised everyone the freedom to build one.

That freedom unleashed creativity and enterprise that built the most successful society the world has ever known. Never has prosperity been as widely shared as it is today in this country.

Young voters and ignorant voters (a distressing percentage of whom don’t have the excuse of being young) would trade liberty and the abundance that liberty unleashed – in return for a guarantee of freedom from hardship. A guarantee that will always prove hollow.

The socialism that these young naifs say they favor will come, as socialism always comes, with the same despotic hand of authoritarianism that crushed the people of the Soviet Union, Cuba and Venezuela.

But these kids don’t know that. So, somebody has to explain it to them – before they learn the hard way.