Selling Our Children into Slavery...

Sacred cow smashing Baby Boomer Justin Raimondo writes (emphasis ours):

As Ron Paul tirelessly points out, the American welfare-warfare state is built on the shifting sands of an economic pump-priming perpetual motion machine, i.e., government debt. We are selling our children into slavery and bankrupting the nation: this is the price of empire, at least in purely economic terms.

Raimondo continues:

We defend Japan and South Korea, allowing them to shelter under our military umbrella while they export finished goods to the American market – and lend us the money to build an empire of bases around the world.

Both parties in power, Democratic and Republican, will crusading visionary Baby Boomers in the lead, be it Bush or either Clinton, are selling out our future for their grandiose visions of utopia. If it is welfare or warfare both Right and Left are selling out the youth and the future.

Remember the old joke about why kids and grandparents get along so well? Because they have the same enemies. Maybe Gen X and the Millenials should ally with the avuncular Congressman Ron Paul, who is from the Silent Generation and who is ringing the alarm bell that the Baby Boomers in charge are going to bankrupt the future for the young...

Creating a Trembling Generation of Weaklings

According to Strauss and Howe, the current gurus of looking at history in terms of Generational Cycles, there are four types of generations that have cycled through U.S. history. They are the Idealist type (e.g. Baby-Boomers), Reactionary (e.g Gen-X), Civic (e.g. G.I.s and Millenials) and Adaptives. The Silent Generation is the adaptive generation born between the G.I.s and the Baby-Boomers. Similarly those born after the Millenials are the new Adaptives, starting roughly in 2001.
Now the poor Silent Generation was born too late to "save the world from evil" and too early to live a "politics of meaning". They may even be the first generation in American history to not have a member become president. By being overprotected in their youth during fearful times of Depression and War, and being overshadowed by their elders who "saved the world from evil" and went on to build the American economic dynamo after the war, the Silent generation could only tweak the structures built by the G.I.s and egg on the younger Boomers with folk music and beat poetry. They were miserably overshadowed and simperingly rebelled by being the first generation to start divorcing at a high rate in order to experience the liberation of the sexual revolution that the younger Boomers were enjoying. And they spawned the first wave of bitter Gen-Xers who grew up in the chaos of their sexual escapades.
The new Adaptives look to be shaping up as a similar bunch of wimps as their Boomer parents overprotect them. If only kids could breathe through bubble wrap I'm sure neurotic parents would use it. Not only are there evil terrorists around every corner and contagious diseases on every flight, but every box of kids' cereal contains "obesity fascism" seeking to destroy a kid's chance of becoming thin and famous! Kellogg:

The company said it won't promote foods in TV, radio, print or Web site ads that
reach audiences at least half of whom are under age 12 unless a single serving
of the product meets these standards:

—No more than 200 calories.
—No trans fat
and no more than 2 grams of
saturated fat.
—No more than 230 milligrams of
sodium, except for Eggo
frozen waffles.
—No more than 12 grams of sugar, not counting sugar from
fruit, dairy and vegetables.Kellogg said it would reformulate products to meet
these criteria or stop marketing them to children under 12 by the end of
2008.

Do kids start smoking just because they don't buy into the idea that this flesh is all there is? It is one thing to say that the body is a temple, it is quite another to treat it like a museum and not disturb, touch, enjoy, any of the exhibits. Stasis is not living, but maybe Boomers think that by trying to induce stasis in the body and the culture Woodstock will always live and the Beatles will always be germaine...

The Opposite of Sanity

Yesterday, I heard Baby Boomer tool Trent Lott on the radio suggesting that the Senate should just pack up and go home if they couldn't vote on certain legislation.
We should be so lucky! This from a guy who titled his book on a life in politics Herding Cats. It's so cute and funny trying to get everyone on the same page to spend their descendants into poverty. What anecdotes he must have about the pork barrel. How's your pension Trent?
But good news! They are going about "the people's business" and gave themselves a higher debt ceiling. I'd love to legislate my own credit increases and then pass off the payment obligation to others after living a life high on the fat. From NPR:

Like many cash-strapped Americans who have maxed-out credit cards, the federal government has hit its limit for borrowing funds to keep operating. If the limit isn't raised, the government likely will run out of borrowing authority within days, risking a shutdown.

Can I have my tax refund in Euros please?

Cheating the Prophet

G.K. Chesterton, in the early 20th Century, described the humorous tendency of men to predict the future based upon current trends. (Most people believing in linear "Progress" or "Cycles") In the first chapter of his great novel, The Napoleon of Notting Hill, he wrote:

The human race, to which so many of my readers belong, has been playing at children's games from the beginning, and will probably do it till the end, which is a nuisance for the few people who grow up. And one of the games to which it is most attached is called, "Keep to-morrow dark," and which is also named (by the rustics in Shropshire, I have no doubt) "Cheat the Prophet." The players listen very carefully and respectfully to all that the clever men have to say about what is to happen in the next generation. The players then wait until all the clever men are dead, and bury them nicely. They then go and do something else. That is all. For a race of simple tastes, however, it is great fun...

... But the way the prophets of the twentieth century went to work was this. They took something or other that was certainly going on in their time, and then said that it would go on more and more until something extraordinary happened. And very often they added that in some odd place that extraordinary thing had happened, and that it showed the signs of the times.

Paul Craig Roberts pokes a similar hole in some of our economic prophets:

Economists are governed by the illusion that America's post-World War II prosperity is based on free trade. It is not. America's postwar prosperity was based on the destruction of the economic capability of the rest of the world by World War II and communism-socialism. America was prosperous in its trade because no one else could produce anything.

Now the spoiled scions of that unique monopolistic moment in history for the United States to get rich, the Baby Boomers, are steering the ship of state assuming, with all the sagacity of adolescents who know everything, that trends will continue and they can mortgage our inheritance on their foolish visions of a temporal utopia.

Generations at Work

Major corporations are taking seriously the different attitudes that generations have towards work and the place of work has in life. From Deloitte:

Baby Boomers in general really wanted to climb up the “corporate ladder” as high as they could; such ambition was seen as a key measure of business/career as well as personal success. Later generations are redefining what ambition and success mean to them. Increasingly these definitions don’t include trying to climb very far up this ladder much less all the way to the top...

... Gen X and Gen Y favor family and personal time over the rewards that usually accompany increased job responsibility. Today’s men and women are working hard but are often not willing to work harder. They are wary of the perceived costliness of trade-offs they would have to make by advancing into jobs with more responsibility.

Boomers won't get out of the way for Gen Xers to rise up anyway so we might as well focus on our families, creating communities. But Boomers were similarly thwarted by the "institutionalized" generations -Silent and G.I.- those drones of the big corporations of the past like GM and IBM.
Boomers began operating outside of those constrained corporate cultures -inventing "junk bonds" (a derisive term coined by stodgy elders) and personal computers...
Generation X is likewise stepping out of the Boomers corporate model and charting it's own path...

From the Latin Word for Slave...

Instead of the subtle oligarchy of dark business suits, Democratic Candidate for President John Edwards has come right out and said it, overtly revealing Boomers' oligarchical tendencies. As if the enslavement of the youth to pay for their narcissistic and self-serving programs, wars, and entitlements weren't enough, Boomers are now advocating mandatory enslavement for their Government programs. Said Edwards in N.H.

One of the things we ought to be thinking about is some level of mandatory service to our country, so that everybody in America -- not just the poor kids who get sent to war -- are serving this country.

We've heard about National Service before during Boomer-par-excellence Clinton's term. It's always couched in the kindest do-gooder terms of "service". But the word serve comes from the Latin word servus. And servus means slave.

Millenials and Gen-Xers do plenty of service, on their own, in small ways, in their communities. Voluntarily.

If they want slaves they may get Spartacus...

So True

Came across this quote from P.J O'Rourke:

Social Security is a government program with a constituency made up of the old, the near old and those who hope or fear to grow old. After 215 years of trying, we have finally discovered a special interest that includes 100 percent of the population. Now we can vote ourselves rich.

which reminded us of Frederic Bastiat's great line:

Government is the great fiction through which everybody endeavors to live at the expense of everybody else.

It took the efficiencies and foresight of the politicians of the 20th Century to live at the expense of the future and one's descendents...

Slaying Sacred Cows

One of the distinctive marks of the Baby Boomers in their youth was their disdain for tradition. They readily broke with old taboos to forge ahead into a new Age of Aquarius. Although, as Tom Wolfe notes in The Great Relearning, the Boomers found out that some of those old taboos had been there for a reason and the hippies in Haight Ashbury soon found themselves suffering from many hygiene-related diseases.

In 1968, in San Francisco, I came across a curious footnote to the psychedelic movement. At the Haight Ashbury Free Clinic there were doctors who were treating diseases no living doctor had ever encountered before, diseases that had disappeared so long ago they had never even picked up Latin names, diseases such as the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot. And how was it that they had now returned? ... The hippies, as they became known, sought nothing less than to sweep aside all codes and restraints of the past and start out from zero... And now , in 1968, they were relearning... the laws of hygiene... by getting the mange, the grunge, the itch, the twitch, the thrush, the scroff, the rot.

Nonetheless, this aspect of the Baby Boomer psyche, may have its upside for those of us who follow. They may slay many sacred cows, clear the decks of false pieties and decaying intellectual assumptions.
Think of Jon Stewart on the Daily Show or Stephen Colbert on The Colbert Report who are merciless in skewering the quasi-religious platitudes of modern politics.
The Onion is clearly a Gen-X phenomenon in its deep cynicism. May both work together in generational cooperation to unburden us from the civic institution worship of the 20th century.

Reinventing Middle Age

Daphne Merkin in the New York Times asks fellow Boomers, "How old are you anyway?"

Behind all this busy reinvention of the wheel of life, of course, sheer dread lies in wait: the fear that we’re fast gaining upon that demarcation line where you stop being young...

Are you kidding? Approaching the end of youth? No wonder Miata's still sell... Yes, you're getting old. Actually, you got old. Grow up and stop worrying about being "hip".
Merkin continues with the typically self-absorbed and entitled Boomer trope that they "do everything their own way".

Fueled by an increasing fear and demonization of Old Age, ours is a generation bred on the notion of doing it our way, right up to our method of retirement. Given this curious and entitled perspective, middle age becomes a life raft that we can’t afford to fall off.

You can't afford your retirement? Neither can we! Is the unique Boomer way to retire the establishment of entitlement programs for themselves funded by deficits to be paid off by future generations? Curious and entitled indeed.

And of course we couldn't finish the article without some Sour Grapes!

Being young was never as great as it’s made out to be and being middle-aged is not as bad as all that.

Too bad for us who are now young when being young isn't as great as it once was... like in the 60s.
Boomers would be well served to take up mentoring, it's the only thing that will get them out of themselves and in service to others. They have been so good at slaying sacred cows, of calling into question assumptions and traditions, maybe they can provide leadership and direction, a paradigm shift, instead of dwelling on their crows feet...

Baby Boomers in Charge

Because the baby-boomers never grew up they insist on treating everyone else like children, writes A.D. Lelong from New York. A more apt description of the vices of the boomers as self-centered authorities, both juvenile and patronising at the same time, I have not heard.

Imagine a world where all adults are put into a giant playpen, and guarded by adolescent babysitters. Welcome to the world of New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg. It is a world where all adults are treated like children. Where dangerous things are labeled, 'keep out of reach of children.' It is a world where they are not permitted to exercise responsibility. It is a world where only "experts" can be trusted.

Read the entire article.

Generational Warfare

The Washington Post's Book World has a review by Judy Budnitz of Christopher Buckley's satire Boomsday.

Here's the set-up: One Generation is pitted against another in the shadow of a Social Security crisis.... Incensed by the financial burden soon to be placed on her age bracket by baby-boomers approaching retirement, she [protagonist Cassandra Devine] proposes on her blog that boomers be encouraged to commit suicide.

Read the entire review.

This reminds us of the great, dark and cynical Gen-X satire from 1999 in the Onion that the Long-Awaited Baby Boomer Die-off To Begin Soon.

The selfishness that has been a hallmark of the Boomers will continue right up to the very end, as they force millions of younger Americans to devote an inordinate mount of time and resources to their care, bankrupting the Social Security system in the process," Clausewitz said. "In their old age, the Boomers will actually manage to take as much from the next generation as they did the previous one, which fought WWII so that their Boomer children could have Philco TVs and Davy Crockett air rifles.

Of course this is the vicious side of Gen-X cynically excoriating the vices of the boomers.

Making Kids Worthless...

...is an interesting study by Oskari Juurikkala of some of the economics underlying why the Baby-Boomers are going to bust Social Security, and why those of us left will pay the burden...

Here is one of the assumptions:

People will always have children,' assured Konrad Adenauer, the German Chancellor, in 1957. He was convinced that the future of the brave new pay-as-you-go social security system would not be undermined by demographic changes.

And here is an unintended consequence:

Instead of caring for their own parents and close relatives, those of working age are compelled by force of law and gun to pay for the retirement of everyone else. To put it plainly, social security replaces children and the family as the main support in old age by literally socializing the traditional duties of the family. Why have children when the state will take care of you in your old age?

Entire Article: Making Kids Worthless: Social Security's Contribution to the Fertility Crisis