We’re actually at the point where it’s surprising when someone doesn’t attack ideas like capitalism when speaking on a college campus.

The College Fix reports.

Campus Speech: Union Busting, Greedy Capitalists Stole American Dream

Free-market ideals, union-busting efforts and greedy capitalists stole the American dream, but a prioritization on fairness and an equalization of incomes can save this country, argued Hedrick Smith, a Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times journalist and best-selling author, in a recent speech at CU Boulder.

The divide between the have and the have-nots must diminish, said Smith during his keynote address at the university as it hosted the 65th annual Conference on World Affairs last week.

“We must make a democracy, or have wealth concentrated in the few – we can’t have both,” Smith said during his speech at the conference, which drew participants from across the globe for intellectual discussions, forums and debates.

Hundreds of students and scholars from across the nation attended Smith’s keynote address, which he fashioned after his recently published book, “Who Stole the American Dream?”

The book offers an analysis of U.S. political and economic trends over the last half-century, and it argues in part that capitalism was formally based on the ideals of fairness and sharing the wealth.

Smith said capitalistic business owners in the 1940s through the 1970s held such notions of equality, and during those years median incomes increased by leaps and bounds.

“Business owners … were fair and smart to share the wealth,” Smith said. “This business ethos is lost.”

Smith argued that the business ethos they had and that America should adopt, again, is stakeholder capitalism.

“Balance interests of everyone involved,” Smith said.

Since American business owners no longer honor this practice, the country continues to further be divided by class, he said.

“We have a divided society,” Smith said. “We are divided by ideology, money, and power.”