Plunder and Deceit (2 page)

Certainly, not all parents or members of the ruling generation downplay or disregard the soaring costs and heavy burdens of scores of public policies on their children and future generations. Many are acutely aware of the gathering storm of societal and economic disorder and wish to do something about it. For them, the difficulty lies in not knowing how to effectively influence the omnipresence and complexity of a massive governing enterprise that is less republican and more autocratic, an ambitious project indeed. The masterminds and their flatterers are progressively immune to regular democratic processes and pressures, such as elections and citizen lobbying, unless, of course, the electoral results and policy demands comport with their own governing objectives. Otherwise, they have an escalating preference for rule by administrative regulation, executive decree, and judicial fiat as the ends justifies the means.

Many in the ruling generation have themselves become entrapped in economically unsustainable governmental schemes in which they are beneficiaries of and reliant on public programs, such as unfunded entitlements, to which they have contributed significantly into supposed “trust funds” and around which they have organized their retirement years. They also find self-deluding solace in the politically expedient and deceitful representations by the ruling class, which dismisses evidence of its own diversion and depletion of trust funds and its overall maladministration as the invention of doomsayers and scaremongers.

In his two-volume masterpiece
Democracy in America
, French historian and scholar Alexis de Tocqueville, writing about the species of despotism that might afflict America, observed: “Our contemporaries are constantly excited by two conflicting passions: they want to be led, and they wish to remain free. As they cannot destroy either the one or the other of these contrary propensities, they strive to satisfy them both at once. They devise a sole, tutelary, and all-powerful form of government, but elected by the people. They combine the principle of centralization and that of popular sovereignty; this gives them a respite; they console themselves for being in tutelage by the reflection that they have put in leading-strings, because he sees that it is not a person or a class of persons, but the people at large who hold the end of his chain. By this system the people shake off their state of dependence just long enough to select their master and then relapse into it again.”
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Thus mollified, many in the ruling generation are by and large inattentive and heedless about the bleak prospects inflicted on younger people, who will neither benefit from the government's untenable programs, into which they are or will also be forced to make “contributions,” nor possess the wherewithal to pay the trillions of dollars in outstanding accumulated debt when the amassed IOU bubble bursts during their lifetimes or the lifetimes of future generations. Still, it is argued that millions of people benefit from such programs. Of course, trillions of dollars in government expenditures over many years most assuredly benefit the recipients of subsidies or other related payments. But this does not change the arithmetic. The eventual collapse of a colossal government venture will indiscriminately engulf an entire society and economy, including its millions of beneficiaries and benefactors, resulting in widespread disorder and misery. While this alone is daunting, no less derelict and pernicious are the other seemingly myriad ideological pursuits and social designs loosed on society by a ubiquitous federal government.

There is no comparable corporate structure shoring up the civil society and counterbalancing the federal government's discrediting and impositions. The federal government makes, executes, and adjudicates the laws. It even determines the extent to which it will comply with the Constitution, which was established in the first place to prevent governmental arrogation. Oppositely, the civil society does not possess mechanical governing features that, at the ready, can be triggered and deployed in its own defense. Ultimately, a vigorous civil society and a well-functioning republic are only possible if the people are virtuous and will them.

Therefore, what parents and the ruling generation owe their children and generations afar are the rebirth of a vibrant civil society and restoration of a vigorous constitutional republic, along with the essential and simultaneous diminution of the federal government's sweeping and expanding scope of power and its subsequent containment. If the ruling generation fails this admittedly complicated but central task, which grows ever more difficult and urgent with the passage of time and the federal Leviathan's hard-line entrenchment, then the very essence of the American experiment will not survive. As such, it can and will be rightly said that the ruling generation betrayed its posterity.

But what will be said of the younger generation—that is, the
rising generation
—say, young adults from eighteen to thirty-five years of age, if their response to the mounting tyranny of centralized, concentrated governing power is tepid, contributory, or even celebratory? Do they not wish to be a free and prosperous people? Do they not have a responsibility to preserve their own well-being and that of subsequent generations by resisting societal mutation and economic plunder?

The rising generation seems wedged in its own contradictions. While it is said to distrust ambitious authority and question the so-called status quo, further examination suggests that in large numbers its members sanction both through their political behavior and voting patterns. Although they self-identify as political independents, Pew Research reports that the rising generation “vot[es] heavily Democratic and for liberal views on many political and social issues,” including “a belief in an activist government.” Furthermore, when asked “would you say that most people can be trusted or that you can't be too careful in dealing with people, just 19% . . . say most people can be trusted.”
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But what is activist government if not trust in a relative handful of political masterminds exercising extraordinary power and commanding a large army of civil servants to manage the lives of millions of individuals? Paradoxically, there is no age group more enthusiastically reliable and committed by political deed to an activist if not fervent governing elite than the rising generation, and no age group more jeopardized by it.

Anomalies can be difficult to unravel; however, a few observations are merited. As a general and logical matter, younger people's dearth of life experiences and their quixotic idealism make them especially vulnerable to simplistic appeals and emotional manipulation for utopia's grandiosity and social causes, which are proclaimed achievable only through top-down governmental designs and social engineering and, concurrently, the detachment from and deconstruction of societal traditions, customs, and values, for which they have little or modest conception and investment. Consequently, while in the main and abstractly the rising generation may be distrustful of authority and people, younger people are also especially susceptible to seduction by demagogic politicians, propagandizing academics, charismatic cultural idols, and other authority and popular figures propounding splendid notions of aggressive government activism for and through such corresponding militant causes as “social justice,” “environmental justice,” “income equality,” and other corollaries of radical egalitarianism.

In
Liberty and Tyranny
, I explained that this way of thinking “all but ignores liberty's successes in the civil society in which humans flourish, even though [we are] surrounded in [our] every moment by its magnificence. . . . Liberty's permeance in American society often makes its manifestations elusive or invisible to those born into it. Even if liberty is acknowledged, it is often taken for granted and its permanence assumed. Therefore, under these circumstances, the Statist's agenda can be alluring. . . . It is not recognized as an increasingly corrosive threat to liberty but rather as co-existing with it.”
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Inasmuch as the proclaimed injustices and imperfections of the civil society are presumably illimitable, so are the infinite reactionary governmental prescriptions and interventions allegedly required to abate them. Therefore, government activism and social designs in this context are perceived as routine, indispensable, and noble. However, the erosion of individual sovereignty, free will, and self-sufficiency necessarily give way to dependence, conformity, and finally tyranny.

Although the pattern is not unique to the rising generation, younger people often find self-esteem, purpose, passion, and, frankly, coolness when associated with or devoted to causes and movements self-proclaimed as righteous or even sacred. Eric Hoffer, the brilliant longshoreman philosopher, writing about the nature of mass movements, declared: “The prime objective of the ascetic ideal preached by most movements is to breed contempt for the present. . . . The very impracticability of many of the goals which a mass movement sets itself is part of the campaign against the present.”
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These utopian causes and movements are evinced by demands for assorted forms of expanded statism—increased governmental usurpations and empowerment—which invariably contribute to the deterioration of the civil society. To be clear, however, the rising generation is among the most devoted advocates of activist government. Consequently, it cannot be said to rebel against authority, although its members may believe that they do, but sanction its exercise and abuse in an incrementally severe centralized government, the latter of which, and its effects, have steadily emerged as the predominant characteristic of the actual status quo.

In particular, undergirding the rising generation's ethos in this regard is the relentless indoctrination and radicalization of younger people, on a daily basis and over the course of many years, from kindergarten through twelfth grade to higher education in colleges and universities, which engrains within them a vulnerability to exploitation and zealotry. It builds among them acceptance or even clamor for self-destructive policies and conditions that ensure future economic and political instability.

Even the most diligent parents have little effective input into what their children are taught in these classrooms. Indeed, they have no adequate or routine influence in the selection of teachers and professors, curriculum, or textbooks, which principally advance, either openly or through insinuation, a statist agenda and ideological groupthink hostile to the civil society and the American heritage. The immunization of formal education from parental and community input is a monumentally disastrous event. Professor Bruce Thornton of California State University observes that the project is deceitful and insidious: “The founding of the United States . . . was not about things like freedom and inalienable rights, but instead reflected the economic interests and power of wealthy white property-owners. The civil war wasn't about freeing the slaves or preserving the union, but about economic competition between the industrial north and the plantation south. The settling of the West was not an epic saga of hardships endured to create a civilization in a wilderness, but genocide of the Indians whose lands and resources were stolen to serve capitalist exploitation. Inherent in this sort of history were the assumptions of Marxist economic determinism and the primacy of material causes over the camouflage of ideals and principles.”
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In fact, Thornton's point about the perversion of formal education as a format for class warfare proselytizing is the modern American version of a central theme in
The Communist Manifesto.
Its authors, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, argued: “The history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles.”
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They continued, “Freeman and slave, patrician and plebeian, lord and serf, guild master and journeyman, in a word, oppressor and oppressed, stood in constant opposition to one another, carried on an uninterrupted, now hidden, now open fight, that each time ended, either in the revolutionary reconstitution of society at large, or in the common ruin of the contending classes.”
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By cultivating agitation and balkanization almost nothing about the civil society is said to be true, right, or lasting and, therefore, worth preserving and perpetuating. Instead, much uproar is generated in the quest for utopian abstractions and societal transformation—the fundamental cause around which younger people have been encouraged and trained to rally, to their detriment and the jeopardy of subsequent generations, and to the benefit of the statist.

The ominous signs of the rising generation's imperilment from these ideological contrivances are already abundant. For example, respecting contemporary social and economic conditions, Pew Research reports that today's younger people “are . . . the first in the modern era to have higher levels of student loan debt, poverty and unemployment, and lower levels of wealth and personal income than their two immediate predecessor generations had at the same stage of their life cycles.”
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Specifically, at the end of 2012, individuals under 40 had $645 billion in student loan debt, an increase of 140 percent since 2005.
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In 2014, unemployment for individuals between the ages of 16 and 19 hovered around 20 percent
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and the underemployment rate for recent college graduates stood at 46 percent.
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Among those aged 25 to 32 today, 22 percent with only a high school diploma are living in poverty compared to 7 percent of individuals aged from approximately 49 to 67 years of age who had only a high school diploma in 1979 when they were in their late twenties and early thirties.
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In a separate study, Pew also found that “Young adults ages 25 to 34 have been a major component of the growth in the population living with multiple generations since 1980—and especially since 2010. By 2012, roughly one-in-four of these young adults (23.6%) lived in multi-generational households, up from 18.7% in 2007 and 11% in 1980.”
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