Sacred Cow Slayer

It was thought that one of the advantages that Boomers brought to society was the slaying of sacred cows, "questioning authority" (until they become the authority). It was hoped that by discarding the artificial constructs of their elders they could get to some sort of essential ordering of society.

But the Boomers, as Visionaries, as Idealists, impose their own contrived visions upon us. For example, Republicans want to legislate everyone into heaven, and Democrats want to legislate heaven on earth.

Growing up in the ideological, moral and emotional chaos in the wake of the Boomers, Generation X has developed a very practical way of life, not seeking to cure the world of its ills but seeking to take care of the immediate problems around them. Boomers have concerts to raise awareness to stop world hunger, Xers go to the neighborhood soup kitchen.

But in their very practicality Xers are the more serious and dangerous (for Boomer idealogues) Sacred Cow Slayers. Thomas Woods is one of the most prolific and articulate of these. As the reviwer in The American Thinker describes him and his work:

[W]hen you stumble upon an objective historian, with pronounced analytical skills, who can write with clarity, panache, and precision then the "good American" must read his work. One such historian is Tom Woods.

Woods' books include The Politically Incorrect Guide to American History and now 33 Questions About American History You're Not Supposed To Ask. Here's a good Cow Slaying Quote from the Introduction:

This book...poses 33 questions about American historyfor which the typical answers are either misleading, grossly unsatisfactory, or clearly and demonstrably wrong. Worse than the standard answers to these questions is that many of them are simply never raised in the first place, since they may give rise to forbidden thoughts that run counter to established opinion.

As the review in The American Thinker continues:

Tom Woods's book will disabuse those Americans who are naïve enough to think that they live under the protections guaranteed in the old Constitution. Those protections are long gone, replaced by a pernicious democratic socialism that more closely reflects the dystopian horror of George Orwell rather then the federated republic of George Washington.

Pragmatic Revolution, Gen X Style

From the Right Angle at Human Events: a great piece on generational differences between Boomers and Gen Xers. Two great quotes from the article:

My parent’s generation had grand visions of communal living and transcendental experiences. My generation embraces mass produced consumer goods and free trade economics. Remaking the world is not on our agenda. No, our anger is rooted in pragmatism. Our money is being taken from us to fuel entitlement programs that many of us expect to be bankrupted by the time we need them.

We want the ‘baby boom’ generation to stop sleeping at the wheel because it is our generation that is the roadside crew cleaning up the mess their idiocy is leaving behind.

If the Boomers are like the previous Idealist Generation, Xers are like the previous Reactive Generation, those youth of the Roaring 20s cynical of Wilsonian Idealism called the Lost Generation, the F. Scott Fitzgerald generation, who became the practical leaders through WWII -Patton, Ike, Bradley etc.

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...

Debt and Default are Inescapable Concepts

Gary North notes that we always owe debts -to our parents, to our children. He says:

Debt is inescapable. The question is this: Who owes you what, under which conditions? Find out now, before the debt comes due. Default is your enemy.

North then quotes David Walker, Comptroller General of the United States, in his appearance on 60 Minutes:

Walker says we have promised almost unlimited health care to senior citizens who never see the bills, and the government already is borrowing money to pay them. He says the system is unsustainable.
"It’s the number one fiscal challenge for the federal government, it’s the number one fiscal challenge for state governments and it’s the number one competitive challenge for American business. We’re gonna have to dramatically and fundamentally reform our health care system in installments over the next 20 years," Walker tells Kroft.
And if we don’t?
"And if we don’t, it could bankrupt America. . . ."

North continues:

We have therefore witnessed a massive creation of unfunded debt in the West. The magnitude of this unfunded liability is so large that the end is sure: default. The only question is the form this default will take.

I began with a statement: "Debt is an inescapable concept." To this, I now add a corollary: "Default is an inescapable concept."

We are a generation of slaves to the entitlement programs of our ancestors. Millenials and Generation X will be paying the bills when those who incurred the debt are pushing up daisies... or retired in Sedona.