Millennials are disgruntled, and it’s no wonder. In 2008 they turned out in record numbers in support of a presidential candidate who used the most leftish-sounding rhetoric of any Democratic candidate since McGovern. This president came into office with a seemingly filibuster-proof Democratic majority, by the largest Democratic majority since LBJ beat Goldwater. He came into office faced with the biggest meltdown since FDR was inaugurated in 1933, and could have mustered overwhelming support for radical change. Instead he governed as a moderate Republican, continuing the Paulson TARP program with a few cosmetic modifications, bailing out the largest “too big to fail” industrial corporation in America, and implementing a national healthcare “reform” first proposed by Richard Nixon and implemented in Massachusetts by Mitt Romney. In the meantime, twenty-somethings face a situation much like that of Japan’s “Lost Generation” after the ’90s meltdown. About half of recent college graduates are unemployed or underemployed, and a similar portion have moved back in with their parents. Not surprisingly, this generation is completely disillusioned about the system — representative democracy, capitalism, the American Dream — that was sold to them. After sweeping Obama into office in 2008, they stayed home in droves in 2010 — the main factor behind the GOP sweep of Congress. They were the backbone of the Occupy movement, a movement founded on the assumption that representative democracy and the political process were worthless, and the only alternative was to build a new system outside the existing one. In polls, this demographic is split three ways between those who would prefer what they call a “socialist system,” those who prefer capitalism, and those who aren’t sure. The reforms I propose below are all free market libertarian reforms, but they’re also essentially socialist or anti-capitalist in that they shift wealth from rentier classes to the people who actually produce it, break the power of giant corporations, and create a fairer system with a more egalitarian distribution of wealth.
Posted on: Thu, 09 Oct 2014 06:25:38 +0000
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