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When people think about wealth, envy tends to make them irrational.

For instance, suppose you could choose between earning $50,000 a year in a world where everyone else earns $25,000 a year, or you could earn $100,000 a year while everyone else earns $250,000. The second option is clearly the better deal — you’re given twice as much money, and the only “cost” is knowing that everyone else is richer than you, as opposed to half as wealthy.

Surprisingly, research has found that the majority of people would choose the first scenario — to earn less, so long as others are worse off than they are. In fact, inequality makes people so uneasy, they’re willing to support self-destructive leftist policies to remedy it — even if it’s bad for them…and it is.

As the Daily Wire reported:

in a new video, Ami Horowitz hits the streets to find out what’s rattling around in the younger generation’s collective mind on the hot button millennial topics of income inequality and socialism — particularly, the socialist utopia Venezuela, which is experiencing economic collapse, prompting crisis-level food shortages and the eruption of violence on the streets.

Horowitz ended up finding what anyone paying any attention to the Democratic presidential primary last year will not be surprised to learn: the generation which adores “Democratic socialist” Bernie Sanders hates income inequality so much that they’d be glad to stand in Venezuelan-style food lines so others could have as little as them.

Horowitz asks the interviewees, all of whom no doubt are “still feeling the Bern,” if they think that we should model ourselves on another country that promises “income equality”: Venezuela, which, he explains, is in the midst of an economic death spiral to the point where it is experiencing dire food shortages and frequent violence between citizens and police forces. Despite the hellish reality of Venezuela’s failed socialist state, all of his interviewees still thought Venezuela’s day-long food lines would be preferable to the United States’ selfish, “undignified” capitalistic system.

“Even though there’s some downside, there’s some violence there and some food lines,” Horowitz says to bandana guy, “but still everyone has to do the same thing — they wait in line equally.”

As for the reactions, they’re about as coherent as you’d expect. Watch below:

Why is income equality a goal anyway? Since when is it a problem that some professions (i.e. those requiring specialized skills) pay more than those that require less specialization?

Becoming like Venezuela to live in a world where taxi drivers earn the same as doctors (in communist Cuba cab drivers actually earn more!) isn’t exactly a trade off to advocate for.

[Note: This post was written by Matt Palumbo. He is a co-author of the new book A Paradoxical Alliance: Islam and the Left, and can be found on Twitter @MattPalumbo12]