Oh I know. Portland and Seattle pushed my politics so far to the right it's not even funny.
I was practically a Communist when I was in college. Moved to the Seattle area when I was 29. Every year I lived in the PNW, I moved further and further to the right.
Last night I was watching a documentary about the Bolsheviks in Russia. In my 20s, I looked at stories like that, and believed that Socialists were just trying to claw back some money from the bourgeois, to improve the lives of the workers.
As and adult, watching the very same stories, it becomes totally obvious that the Bolsheviks were just leveraging the resentment of losers to create an army of useful idiots. For instance, the Bolsheviks killed off all of the farmers, based on the idea that the proletariat would take the farms over. They predicted that farm output would rise 400%. Instead, farm output plunged, and people starved to death by the millions.
You'd think these idiots would learn their lesson at some point, but China just stopped keeping track of youth employment. In a Capitalist economy, rampant youth employment would inspire corporations to hire people for peanuts. In a Communist economy, they just stop collecting the stats, because nobody wants to give the leaders bad news, for fear of getting a bullet in the head.
The country's central bank also unexpectedly cut key interest rates as it tries to boost the economy.
www.bbc.com