Posted on 01/11/2014 11:28:01 PM PST by Cincinatus' Wife
“In America,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone.
The magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” Jesse A. Myerson's essay captures nearly everything the unconverted despise about left-wing youth culture, starting with the assumption that being authentically young requires being theatrically left wing.
Writing with unearned familiarity and embarrassingly glib confidence in the rightness of his positions, Myerson prattles on about how “unemployment blows” and therefore we need “guaranteed work for everybody.” He proceeds to report that jobs “blow” too, so we need guaranteed universal income. He has the same disdain for landlords, who “don't really do anything to earn their money.” Which is why, Myerson writes, we need communal ownership of land, or something.
One wonders why he bothered to single out landlords, since he calls for the state appropriation of, well, everything. Why? Because “hoarders blow” and he doesn't mean folks who refuse to throw away their Kentucky Fried Chicken buckets and old Sharper Image catalogs. He means successful people who “hoard” the wealth that rightly belongs to all of us.
Apparently “blowing” is an open warrant to undo the entire constitutional order. If only someone had told the Founders.
In the ensuing kerfuffle with conservative critics, Myerson, whose Twitter hashtag is “#FULLCOMMUNISM,” seemed shocked that any of his ideas sounded Soviet to his critics. Blogger Andrew McCoy offered the specific citations for Myerson's proposals in the Soviet constitution. I suspect this was news to Myerson, but even if not, I bet he doesn't care.
It is a permanent trope of the left that its ideas failed because we didn't try hard enough.
One of the wonderful things about America is that both the left and right are champions of freedom. The difference lies in what we mean by freedom. The left emphasizes freedom as a material good and the right sees freedom as primarily a right rooted in individual sovereignty. For the left, freedom means “freedom from want.” If you don't have money, health care, homes, cars, etc., you're not free. Or as FDR put it when pitching his failed “Economic Bill of Rights”: “Necessitous men are not free men.”
The relevance of the Soviets' effort to provide every goody imaginable isn't to suggest they came up with the idea; it's to demonstrate that when such ideas are put into practice and allowed to run their course, they fail — and often crush both kinds of freedom in the process.
Regardless, the failure of communism didn't put the debate to rest because the debate is eternal. It is a permanent fixture of the human condition, particularly among the affluent and fashionably rebellious young, who are always eager to explain why this time is different.
To be young and stupid.
Is this the same stupid magazine that Dr Hook used to sing about? We keep getting richer, but we can’t get our picture on the cover of the rolling stone.
It would blow if the Rolling Stone paid this child for his little book report.
That would mean the rich people that publish RS blow. It also means that the kid is a budding capitalist, which blows.
It never ceases to amaze me: the people that shout the loudest about the greatness of communism are the same people that do anything necessary to safeguard their own property/money.
The terrible thing about socialism is that eventually you run out of other people’s money!
I was young and stupid once upon a time. Still kind of am. Never about this communistic filth though.
Ever notice how the Red Diaper demographic never changes over the decades?
How about redistributing all of the wealth of the East Coast to the southern states? Let some of the ultra-pampered Communists, reared in luxury and sent to sit at the feet of Leftist instructors in Ivy League universities, go work on a ranch in Wyoming or a food truck in Texas. That would broaden their deformed view of life outside the gated enclaves of their upbringing.
I was a bit more credulous.
I honestly thought that socialism could work. Right up until the 8th grade...
Progressive Narcissism "..................It is the same idea that is found in the Social Gospel that impressed the youthful Hillary Clinton at the United Methodist Church in Park Ridge, Illinois. And it is the same idea that she later encountered in the New Left at Yale and in the Venceremos Brigade in Communist Cuba, and in the writings of the New Left editor of Tikkun magazine who introduced her to the “politics of meaning” after she had become First Lady. It is the idea that drives her comrades in the Children’s Defense Fund, the National Organization for Women, the Al Sharpton House of Justice and all the other progressive causes which for that reason still look to her as a political leader.
For the self-anointed messiahs, the goal, “social justice,” is not about rectifying particular wrongs, which would be practical and modest -- and therefore conservative. Rather, their crusade is about rectifying injustice in the very order of things. “Social Justice” for them is a world reborn, in which prejudice and violence and inequalities no longer exist. It is a world in which everyone is equally advantaged and lacks fundamentally conflicting desires. It is a world that could only come into being through a reconstruction of human nature and of the social order itself. Even though they are too prudent and self-protective to name it anymore, the post-Communist left still passionately believes in their totalitarian future.
But this new world that has never existed, never will, while the attempt to reach it can only bring back the gulags and graveyards we have come to know too well. The century has taught us, to attempt the impossible is to invite the catastrophic. But progressives have failed to learn the lesson, to make the connection between their utopian ideals and the destructive consequences that flow from them. The fall of Communism has had a cautionary impact only on the overt agendas of the political left. Its moral arrogance is not diminished."................
If I go to heaven, it will be heaven there to me, because I will no longer have to listen to, witness, fight, or suffer from these people anymore. They bring such disorder, evil, madness and chaos to all of our lives ... their pull on the stupid and the lazy is just too strong to fight here on earth sometimes. At times I just really feel ready to give up the fight ... I want to go to a place where they are not present.
I wish we could construct that place here on earth, though, somehow. I wish I could join others who felt the same way ...and just HIDE, never to have to deal with them, EVER.
It’s their narcissism, fueled by the conviction that they are morally superior to all others. It’s a brick wall. You can’t reason with it; you must tear it down.
The conditions that existed in the USSR are well documented. We need to just build a wall around Detroit or somewhere, relocate any productive people who live there, if any are found and build a replica of the USSR. Then we could move geniuses like this, democrat congress members and their ilk and they could live the remainder of their wretched lives in soviet splendor. He could even write about it for all of us rubes assuming he could find paper and a pencil.
But then we wouldn’t all be equally miserable. ALL must suffer — in his not-so-subtle (or humble) opinion.
There are several respects in which the young do get screwed. After getting the needed job training the price for which is an outrage, they are usually deep in debt. They start life with a tax system that penalizes family formation. They find a job market in ruins, paying a fraction of what their forebears did. They both have to work to fund housing with a price massively inflated by regulatory government, pay a hugely regressive social security tax, to cover their parents, and also have to send their kids to very expensive daycare because the grandparents can't be bothered and want to "enjoy their retirement" in a home with more room than they can use. The employer often demands excessive amounts of travel. They taxes they pay for the welfare state supports an underclass that threatens their safety. To buy a house means more debt, usually for the rest of their working lives. Raised by liberal teachers and mass media advertising, their expectations of "a happy life" are outrageous. Because they cannot afford private or home education, their kids, also raised the inflated expectations of mass media and educrats, wind up a mess, which adds to the overall stress of the situation. There are fights; there is blame. Meanwhile, the divorce industry is circling above, waiting to pick the bones clean. All they can see is a future of a government going broke and handing them the bill.
Too bad they have been conditioned all their lives to fail to see that it is socialism that has done this to them. They have never been educated in the mechanics of liberty. They have no memes to grasp a way out. Even if they did get how they'd been had and what to do, it's going to be a very long slog against very heavy odds for them to dig out of the mess their forebears have made.
I would say that all of that "blows." No wonder they want our stuff.
There are a very few millennial software engineers and professionals that can afford this burden, but the work demands are so excessive that I can't see how the family won't end up under enormous stress unless the grandparents help. This is a sociological construct guaranteed to destroy the middle class, added to a demographic construct dedicated to doing the same.
It is very useful to look at how hunter-gatherer societies deal with these same problems. I recommend David Kelly's book, The Foraging Spectrum: Diversity in Hunter Gatherer Lifeways.
Post 14 is so data rich that I can only comment on a few points before I must take a colleague to the Everglades.
The assorted, sordid socialistic burdens can most easily be corrected by bankruptcy, specifically, Agency Bankruptcy brought on by “defunding”.
Only when America decides to simply shut down most of its regulatory agencies and remove most regulations is there any chance of a prosperous America. The OptOut.com videos about “Creepy Uncle Sam” convinced viewers “Don’t let Uncle Sam play doctor.”
The public educate must themselves about why anything government provides costs an average of four times as much as if the market produced the same good or service.
America can’t afford socialism’s 400% markup on government provided goods and services.
If the public continues to keep the agencies and regulations, their fate is a foregone conclusion.
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