I’ve been inclined lately to speak to a younger audience, under 40. I’m going to guess that my audience in this regard is only hypothetical because those who are under 40 generally don’t open traditional web pages and read text. For most, its video, or podcasts but even that’s started to become dated. Then it pictures (memes) and song lyrics. I exaggerate here a little, but the gap is real. At the same time, the numbers of college degreed young have hardly been higher so it’s more than a medium problem. Nevertheless, I speak. Based on national trend and the stark rise in acceptance of socialistic and communist structures, there is a fundamental and colossal breakdown in economic education.
The gap in economic understanding is born out in current events of the past year. There is significant anecdotal evidence that one issue that swayed the election was one-issue voters that had the short sightedness to base their vote on $1,400 of stimulus Covid relief payment. While I’m personally neutral on that exact measure, it was a grave mistake for anyone that used that promise of ‘free’ money to decide their economic future as defined by progressive Democrats, and Biden in particular. How do you feel now when you walk into McDonalds to buy a burger, the grocery store to buy chicken, Home Depot to buy a 2×4, the convenience store to fill up your gas tank? Is that $1,400 spent yet? I dare say that it is. Too bad you missed that lesson in school, or more likely, that you were never taught because the faculty was too busy tending to your identity issues. Even that circle may come back around to you because if you went to a liberal college, chances are, you may have demonstrated against that subject as ‘too white’, in which case, your ignorance was actually fueled by your own ignorance. Unfortunately, the vast majority of educators and school administrators just happen to also be sycophant beta personality types and didn’t stand up to you.
I understand that you, young people, are at a disadvantage from an experiential standpoint. You didn’t live through the Jimmy Carter years where we experienced long lines at the gas pump, rampant inflation, depressed economic growth, and double-digit mortgage rates. You instead actually lived through the benefit of numerous administrations that corrected those conditions, Reagan, even in some measures, Clinton and the Bush’s, and most notably and recent, Trump. And then you voted him out.
I realize that you had some hardships that us boomers didn’t have to manage. Of course, real spending power stagnated during your lifetime while the one percenters took off – and some of you benefited from that, but looking at one primary disadvantage, the cost of your college education and your student debt; you may want to think long and hard about who actually foisted that on you. Maybe the universities that grew costs far in excess of the rate of inflation should shoulder some blame, the ones that at the same time taught you the economic fallacies that a significant number of your generation now embrace with apparent abandon.
What you probably did learn in school or will is for some of your teachers to claim that socialism actually will work if it’s just tried their way rather than the ways that it has always failed before and then you’re going to learn a far harder lesson than the one you are presently learning.
Your generation needs a revolution alright, the opposite of the one that you’ve been goaded into by AOC, Bernie Sanders, Elizabeth Warren, et al. If there are any of you out there actually reading this, read up on the revolutionary, Ronald Reagan. He was at one time totally in your camp and turned around to become the architect of the greatest economic turnaround of the 20th century, from the economic condition similar to what we’re now falling into. If your generation doesn’t discover fiscal restraint, conservatism, and personal responsibility, (no matter how oppressed you’re told that you are), I can guarantee that neither you nor your children will know the privilege you had – and yes it will seem like privilege once you experience the poverty that awaits you if Bidenomics prevails.