Besides, there really isn't a lot of percentage in trying to get the answers across to someone who thinks Ghaddafi and Chavez were working "for their own countries' benefit."

Even your "high school graduate" definition is complicated, since the number of such graduates has been a rapidly moving curve since the 1950s, and would have to be calculated against the rest. I understand what you're driving at. You think there is an ideal universe where all high school graduates can be union workers at high wages with massive benefits, months of vacation, and defined pensions*. That universe doesn't exist. Europe is finding this out the hard way.

Liberals and leftists believe...not know, believe...that there is some way, some how, some world, in which you can make a government-controlled society work better than a free one. History settled this a long time ago, which is why we're talking belief, not knowledge. If you really were interested in an answer, the objective verdict on "American-style" capitalism has been in for decades.

I watched a young idiot in one of the tent cities screaming about the evils of capitalism while holding in her lap--in her lap!--a computer a thousand times more powerful than the $9 million Cray 1 was when I was her age.

There are those who try to tell me that the answer is some "compromise" between freedom and government control, some correct mixture that we have yet to arrive at. But every last person I have ever talked to with this belief always insists that the proper mixture includes a lot more government control than we already have. Again, Europe is hammering one of the last nails in the coffin of "democratic socialism."

(*and a nice chunk of their wages funneled to The Party.)