The Kids Are Kinda Not Alright

“Millennials” are rapidly approaching “Baby Boomers” as the most over-doted generation of all time.  Since the baby boom is slowly ageing out of the demographic hogpile, I figure “millennials” will soon eclipse the Boom as the most hated generation in history around the time the peak of their demographic bell curve hits 45 or so.

Not that its any more the Millennials’ fault than it was the fault of any individual baby boomer.  It’s not that they are individually and severally awful people.  It’s just that they had such awful spokespeople.

In the case of the Millennials, the spokesman I refer to is Jesse Myerson, whose piece “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For” (in the ever more vacuous Rolling Stone, natch) delivers eighty distilled years of “progressive” fever dreams in a few pages of Yale-via-video-game argot.

I was going to respond to the whole noxious mess – I spent a week noodling with the idea as I nursed my flu last week – but Walter Hudson has done it, and done it better.

It’s not what Myerson presents so much as what he takes for granted which deserves rebuttal. His proposals proceed from unspoken assumptions which have been promoted in the popular culture by an organized Left, manipulating the nation’s youth into sacrificing their future. Here are 6 lies millennials must reject to live free.

Hudson’s conclusion:

Like each generation before them, millennials will define their own destiny with the ideas they choose to embrace. The whole of human history reads as a tale of tyranny, of political will trumping individual rights. Whether a pharaoh, an emperor, or a democratic majority, the powers that be tend to crush individuals under a banner of grandeur – an appeal to greatness, national pride, or the common good.

 

The American experiment stands out as a remarkable deviation from that dark standard, an attempt to recognize individual lives as ends in and of themselves, rather than a means toward the ends of others. What Myerson advocates is not new when viewed in historical context. He prescribes the old. He rallies for the tried and failed. Following his advice will return us to serfdom.

 

The real revolution, the truly youthful cause, erupts in the pursuit of liberty. A celebration of life and our living of it, liberty unleashes you to be who you are and pursue what you want, demanding only no trespass upon others. That’s the reform millennials–and everyone else–should enthusiastically fight for.

To get the logic that led from the beginning to the conclusion, you need to read the whole thing.

And have it ready, in case any of the “Millennials” in your life try to parrot Myerson.

10 thoughts on “The Kids Are Kinda Not Alright

  1. QUOTE: Outrageous though it may seem to suggest, the American economy better resembles fascism than capitalism, with actors constrained by ever more intrusive controls. Like all words, capitalism does not mean whatever an author wants it to mean. It requires the condition of liberty, a condition unseen in American jurisprudence and made incrementally more elusive which each “progressive” reform. We cannot blame capitalism when no such thing exists in practice.

    Then throw in that politicians can’t practice actuarial science, and the Fed can’t “help” the economy, and that’s the whole mess right there.

    This is why so many are hopeless, helpless, and confused and why it’s so hard for a n individual to procreate taxPAYORS and take care of them selves.

    They will vote left until the whole thing collapses on it’s self.

    We are doomed.

  2. 4. Make Everything Owned by Everybody
    Nostalgic for Stalinism.

    The whole point of a finance sector is supposed to be collecting the surplus that the whole economy has worked to produce, and channeling that surplus wealth toward its most socially valuable uses.
    This is the weirdest thing I have ever read. It’s like reading ‘the whole point of mermaids is to keep sailors from being lonely after they’ve drowned’. There is nothing about the sentence that makes sense or refers to the reality that normal people share.
    In the 1930s, in the Ukraine and Belarus, their was something called the “Young Communists League”. Their job was to visit the farms of the starving kulaks and remove anything that the kulaks might use as food or to produce food. Meyerson is like an especially zealous captain in the Young Communist League.

  3. I’ve been reading about this Meyerson fellow. He’s a hardcore commie and an OWS organizer.
    Imagine if a stupid person was nazi, and not only didn’t hide the fact that he was nazi, he walked around wearing a nazi uniform and ‘sieg-heiling’ while giving the nazi salute, and a magazine printed a story about him that never mentioned his nazi fixation with the headline ‘Champion of Labor says Government, Businesses Must Work Together to Create Jobs’.
    That’s what the Rolling Stone article is like.

  4. QUOTE: If the youth of today truly want to rebel, if they truly want to strike back against the establishment, they need to contend for liberty.

    Most people don’t give a damn about liberty at this point. They care about security. It’s pretty understandable for a variety of reasons. It’s not a values thing, either, most people can’t cope with the mess the Fed and the government has created. It’s ultimately luck and rent seeking that gets people by if you ask me.

    I think we need to talk about opportunity, prosperity and fixing entitlements more than “freedom” and “liberty.”

  5. A rather large number of fast food places, resturants, grocery stores, etc in the near south metro (West St Paul, Eagan, Mendota Heights) have help wanted signs on their doors. How about instead of demanding free stuff, you just get a job. Can’t live off of $8.50 an hour? Get two jobs. I’m doing that right now.

    A ray of hope? I went to this article when it came out. Read through the comments. About 90% of them passionatly condemned the little lazy commie. And the other 10% weren’t exactly overly supportive.

  6. I believe that the millennials have no more a desire for freedom or liberty than President Obama has for a lifetime membership to the NRA.

    This generation has pretty much been raised not to stand out, to be led from activity to activity, and to always return to the same roof they grew up under, and await further instructions.

    Any effort to organize the group would be more likely resemble the Children’s Crusade than any type of credible (successful or not) revolution. They’re certainly smart enough, they just do best in a group, standing in the second row.

  7. To quote our friend TFS: “Most people don’t give a damn about liberty at this point………I think we need to talk about opportunity, prosperity and fixing entitlements more than “freedom” and “liberty.”

    You may be right but I believe we need to frame the conversation around the concept that without Liberty and Freedom there is little hope for the opportunity or prosperity, and that greed and envy don’t entitle anyone. I believe we can accommodate some temporary help for the down and out, but limited to the minimal need for survival.

    A while back I had a few T-shirts printed with “Without Liberty there is no Freedom”, I wear them proudly and try to explain when asked what the words mean.

    I know quite a number of “Millennials” that are hard working, and self dependent, they seem to get it. They get down right pissed about the freeloaders of their generation. This tells me there may be a sliver of hope.

  8. Mitch, your blog has the best commenters around. Where do you find them?

    As noted above, this stands out for follow-up: “I think we need to talk about opportunity, prosperity and fixing entitlements more than “freedom” and “liberty.”

    Certainly, the words “freedom” and “liberty” fall flat when offered to people with no frame of reference to appreciate them. For far too many folks today, freedom means the provision of sustenance rather than the lack of trespass. Lefties think their policies promote “freedom” because you can’t do what you want without the means to afford it. You can’t enjoy life if you’re sick, or have medical bills, or don’t have a large enough income. You can’t proceed with peace of mind unless your future is secure, i.e. you have a retirement, a home, the means to live out your years. And so, from their perspective, freedom requires entitlements.

    Because of that, we have to tread carefully with our rhetoric about opportunity and prosperity. Outside any context to the contrary, lefties can claim their policies are all about those things. And they do, all the time. It enables them to offer a gift wrapped box of goodies called “opportunity and prosperity” which appeals more than the idea of liberty.

    I’m not sure opportunity and prosperity are the sell, at least not directly. The appeal of liberty is not a guarantee of circumstance, but a guarantee of autonomy and ownership. And those are things which people understand and value. You understand being restrained from acting as you wish. You understand having your stuff taken from you. And even the most radical leftist commie assclown objects when those things happen to them. That’s how to sell liberty. Sell its essence, not its byproducts. The trick is conveying that essence with more than just the word.

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