Within the pages of the National Post, a spat has erupted between writers David Cravit, John Moore and Barbara Kay. In light of the Quebec student protests, Moore attested that millennials (people born between 1977 and 1995) are facing bleak prospects due to oldsters greedily emptying the public piggy bank of entitlements. Cravit, who is vice president of ZoomerMedia, responded with data showing the Boomer generation is still providing a significant amount financial assistance to their children. Kay conceded that while boomers are willing to fight the battle of the ballot box to maintain their benefits, today’s youth are desperately out of touch with how the real world operates.
As a millennial, I can say all three make valid points but miss the mark entirely. Yes, a portion of today’s youth sincerely believe they are deserving of a good paying job that requires little effort after a four- to five-year stint at university. And yes, the Boomers have voted themselves plenty of government pork over the decades for which the tab must inevitably be paid. Both are guilty of shameless extravagance and self-delusion. Both show little opposition to feeding at the public trough.
But what is the actual source of this corrupting influence? Nineteenth century political theorist and former U.S. congressman John C. Calhoun once wrote, “…the necessary result, then, of the unequal fiscal action of the government is to divide the community into two great classes… to divide it into tax-payers and tax-consumers.”
Throughout history, this is precisely how the dynamic between government and the people has played out. Politicians make careers out of redistributing wealth. Persistent inflation and the running up of public debt have proven that governments are incapable of spending within their means. Retaining elected office hinges too much upon buying votes.
With the post-war boom years came increasing amounts of tax revenues. This was all too enticing for politicians to pass up. Entitlement programs were created to ensure a steady supply of votes. Mr. Moore is correct in alleging that younger generations were thrown to the wolves for these promised benefits as they had no say in the matter and are now forced to foot the bill.
At the same time, millennials themselves have been fooled through years of pervasive government and nanny-state decrees into not only expecting entitlements but also misunderstanding the value of prudence. Living standards only rise when the majority of the public produces more than it consumes. This age-old lesson has been slowly forgotten with years of the expansionary welfare state and popular economic theories which favour consumption. When youth are made to believe the most important rule in all economics is “in the long run we are all dead,” is it any surprise when financial discretion takes a back seat to overindulgence?
What has had an equally devastating effect on the ability of all generations to save for the future is that government, by its very nature, is a net consumer of resources. When Austrian economist Ludwig von Mises stated that “the total complex of the financial policies of the federal government, the states, and the municipalities tends toward capital consumption,” he referred to the fact that government itself only operates on what it forcefully expropriates from the private sector. There is little incentive for public officials to spend tax money diligently when it hasn’t been painstakingly earned through the sweat of their own labour. Almost a century’s worth of escalating government spending has decimated whatever saved capital existed before Leviathan’s growth.
Rather than exploitation, free markets require social co-operation in order to function. The so-called “generational war” between millennials and Baby Boomers is really just a tug-of-war between which generation is better mobilized to soak one another at the voting booth. It is the existence of the state which doles out special monetary privileges that introduces this class conflict.
The real culprit for decaying societal norms and prosperousness is not one generation or another but the small minority who occupy political office. Arguing over whether the Boomers are deserving of entitlement programs or millennials are short-sighted, spoiled brats only avoids recognition of the true guilty party.
To my fellow millennials, here are a few words of advice. The college or university degree for which you gave up almost half a decade of income means little. It is irrelevant how hard you worked or how many hours you spent with your nose crammed in a textbook to get it. The decision we must now make is what new path we will take individually to triumph over adverse circumstances. This means further development of specialized skills, entrepreneurship and learning life’s lessons through experience rather than in the classroom.
The bill of goods we were sold was not the same given the previous generation. Is it fair? No, but neither is life. We may be living in a world passed down by to us by the Boomers and their profligate government but we can still choose to give our children a better opportunity. The key lies in not looking to our neighbour for what we think we deserve but realizing what it takes to serve our fellow man and earn our own way.
The cycle of entitlement can end with us.
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