Message to the Younglings

Well, some of you asked what I thought. That's a dangerous question to ask.

If I was running for office, what would I say to young Americans?

Here’s how I would answer that question:

Stop whining. It’s not a good look. And for God’s sake, don’t do it on TikTok. Have your cussing, slobbering, crying fit in private, if you must cuss, slobber and cry. It doesn’t make you look special; it makes you look unemployable, pathetic (and maybe a little unstable). America’s true uniqueness rests in our ability to overcome obstacles, so buckle up your chinstraps and get on with it.

So, stop bitching at Boomers. They had mortgages at 14%, car loans at 9%, an unemployment rate of over 7%, an OPEC oil embargo, gas shortages, inflation that peaked at 14% in 1980, three over the air TV stations (four if they were lucky), Internet speed (if you could get it) was measured in bits per second rather than megabits or gigabits. If you could get a mobile phone, it cost $5000, weighed about a thousand pounds and had the battery life slightly less than a mosquito. We suffered through a feckless government incompetent enough to botch the economy, energy policy, race relations, and a rescue of hostages taken by Iranian radicals, all at the same time.

And let’s not forget polyester leisure suits, Sansabelt slacks, the Gremlin, Vega, and Pinto, and, of course, disco. They’ve suffered enough already. Suck it up, every generation has some sacrifice to make and some work to do, now it is time for you to decide how to manage your own life.

My friends, if any candidate or sitting official promises to make your life better, cheaper or more rewarding and then they tell you about some bill, policy or government regulation they plan to introduce to do that, you should know right away they are lying, simply because government cannot do that. You will never get what they promised, it will cost ten times what they said, they will take the money from someone else or borrow it and you will have to pay it back. Government is not in the business of improving lives, because the only way to do that is for there to be less of it – and that’s not what government does. It can only make somebody’s life worse for you, so they can’t bring you up in any meaningful way, only bring others down – and if you become successful, you will be brought down as well. Only you have the power to improve your own life by finding your niche and that niche must be something that individuals or society needs, wants, or desires and for which they are willing to pay.

Prepare yourself to work – and it may be in a field you are not expecting. You may want to pursue your chosen career in art but if no employer or market needs art or artists, you will need to find another career to pay the bills. That is not society’s fault or responsibility. That is on you. It is better to be a plumber than a starving artist. Do art in your spare time, but you won’t have spare time because if you are a good plumber, you will be busy.

When somebody in government promises to cut your costs, they are lying as well. Government does not control the laws of economics, as Milton Friedman accurately said, only the government can create inflation by printing money. More money chasing fewer goods means prices will go up. It is called scarcity. Remember, the laws of economics are like the law of gravity, nobody can break them and they always apply. Government can reduce your tax burden by cutting government payrolls, wasteful programs, and fraud – but they won’t – because shrinking government is not in a politicians interests. Don’t trust them. Period.

Elected officials have no power over biology. If you are a man who believes he is a woman or a woman who wants to be a man, they can’t help you and promising to pay for your “transitioning” only abets changing you into a butchered male or female, not a biological female or male – and by they way, nobody but you should socially or financially pay a price for your decision to believe in impossibility.

Don’t listen to old, rich communists, radical Hamas-supporting podcasters, or nepo baby “revolutionaries”. Stop listening to insurgents in $5000 suits and losers who wear combat boots with shorts. Make them explain themselves.

Communism is not the solution for anything. Never has been, never will be. And it doesn’t matter if they call it socialism, Marxism, communism or some other trendy name, it all leads to the same endpoint, that of failing every single time it has been tried because it is structurally flawed. Voluntary collectivism does work, largely because only people who agree on methods and goals choose to participate. Communism is forced participation that involves taking from some to give to others whether they deserve it or not – and it is not the Boomers who built a mountain of public debt, it was 70 years of people cosplaying socialism, people who never met a domestic or foreign social program that was too dumb, ineffective or costly to staff and fund and Doomers, who, quite frankly, didn’t give a damn about being good stewards of taxpayer’s money. They are in the background calling for communism to hide the problems they caused and expecting you to pay for it.

Like the old saying goes, if you think things are expensive now, wait until it is free.

By any objective measure, we are undeniably the healthiest, most prosperous, most educated, most free and most mobile world that has ever existed (and those things are distributed more widely than ever before) and as such we are the best equipped population in the history of the world to understand, avoid and manage disasters of Malthusian proportions. Curing diseases that just decades ago were death sentences is commonplace. Our lives are longer and healthier than ever. We have fiber internet and Starlink. Food is plentiful and available. There are plenty of reasons to like what is happening in our world.

For some reason, some Americans have come to believe that whatever happens to us is the worst ever in history, it’s never happened before, we are uniquely damaged by those events, and America just sucks - and that’s just moronic. It seems to me that there are those who work hard to make the issues we face SEEM worse because we want to be special and believe that somehow, they are hurt more than any other population at any other time in history.

That’s just total crap.

Don’t forget that we are in the boat with you, so let’s get on with it.

Life may turn out differently than you planned, but you are going to be OK.