Over at American Greatness Ned Ryan sympathizes a little with the Wokies that are having such a great time ripping up downtown all over liberal America in "The Misdirected Rage of Young Rioters."
Problem is, he says, that they have been taught all their lives that they are special, that they are winners, and they aren't. Most of them are just average.
Then they get shipped off to
indoctrination centers of higher learning where they are spoon-fed all these lies about how evil our country is, that this place is rotten to the core, and that it should just be burned to the ground.
No wonder they are angry.
They can’t find jobs, so they rage against the system they’ve been indoctrinated to believe is the source of all their troubles: that evil, free-market capitalist system that has betrayed them. They’re blaming the wrong system.
Instead, they ought to be blaming the indoctrination centers and the flawed parenting methodology according to which they were raised up to believe these lies.
Well, allow me to disagree. The young'uns ought to be angry, but not for this reason. Indeed the foulest injustices have been committed against them. But it is not the fault of systemic racism or eevil capitalists.
No indeed. It's all the fault of the liberal educated Gentry that has run things for the last century. What else could it be?
Nothing remarkable here. Government is force; there is no such thing as justice, only injustice. So you would expect that after a particular ruling class had been in power for a while the result of its governance would be an accumulation of injustice. I am not saying that the injustice was deliberate. Mostly it is just the result of "unanticipated consequences" of government action.
But you would also expect that they young sprouts, while feeling the chill, would not really know enough to figure out where the arctic blast was coming from.
Here kids, let me help you. Here is what you should be mad about.
Government education. If you are half paying attention, you might notice that the union ladies that currently run the government schools don't want to open school this fall. But they still want to be paid. It is a profound injustice that your parents do not get to send you to the school of their choice, or, even better, club together in their neighborhoods to set up mini-schools that can cost a mere $5,000 per year per student. And, when the government runs the schools it is not going to tell you that it makes a dog's breakfast of education. Hey kid! The clients of government education are not parents, not children, but union teacher ladies.
College for All. Back in the day youngsters got their start in life through an apprenticeship. Sometimes, the apprenticeship amounted to "indentured servitude," where the apprentice was the virtual slave of his master. But once you had served your time you were now a "journeyman" and free and clear of educational expense. Not like today where college is "free" or funded by a student loan that is not dischargeable in bankruptcy and may hang around your head for decades. Hey kid! Do you realize how unjust the current university system is? And how it screws you and benefits the professors and administrators?
Immigration. The labor market is simple: supply and demand. The more immigration, the lower the wages for everyone, including native-born Americans. Moreover, the benign neglect of illegal immigration encourages under-the-table "informal" employment which also undercuts wage rates, if you are an employer that doesn't mind not paying taxes on your employees. Hey kids! Don't you realize that immigrants are your direct competitors in the labor market?
Home mortgages. Ever since the 1930s, the government has subsidized home mortgages in various ways, including providing a secondary market in mortgages, particularly 30-year mortgages. It also encourages low down payments. The result is to allow more people to bid for houses. Back in the day you couldn't get a loan with more than a 10-year term, and you couldn't often get away with less than 50 percent down. Do you see how the old system helped frugal savers and the new system allows everyone to bid up the price of houses? Of course, the current system has benefited the World War II and Baby Boomer generations because they bought their houses before prices really took off. Hey kids! Wouldn't it be cool if the OK Boomers experienced a 30 percent drop in their over-priced homes and you could afford to buy?
Social Security. The way Social Security works is you pay a tax on your earnings for 40 years and then the government gives you a pension based on political considerations. Suppose instead you saved your own money and kept it at Fidelity or Vanguard. Then you could use the money to start a business or send the kids to college, and finally you could retire whenever you had accumulated enough and the SPY and QQQ had grown your savings enough. Instead, the government sequesters your money in a so-called "trust fund." I wonder what the government does with that money? Build highways that grow the economy? Or bike paths that don't. Hey kids! Do you realize what it would mean if you could save your own money instead of the government taking it, in your own best interest?
Medicare. Actually, Medicare is probably not too much of a problem, because most of its funding comes from the federal income tax which means that most of the money comes from rich people. But, no doubt, Medicare rules tend to make the health care system more expensive and less responsive to the needs of ordinary people. Hey kids! Government health care means that you are not the client: Big Health and Big Drug and the Medicare bureaucracy set the rules!
Welfare. Welfare is not all that expensive, at least, not compared to the expense of Social Security and Medicare, but there is the little problem that welfare encourages poor women to have babies without fathers. Something like 70 percent of Black babies don't have fathers around. You think that might have something to do with the fact that over 50 percent of murders are committed by Black men? That's what the experts say when they are not writing for The New York Times. Hey kids! How about the biggest systemic racial injustice of them all: to deprive Black kids of fathers?
Economic Regulation. The science is clear on this. Economic regulation of business does not work, as first pointed out by George Stigler, because "regulatory capture." This means that all regulatory agencies eventually become "captured" by the industries they regulate.Think railroads and trucking, back in the day. Think doctors and lawyers right now. Think environmental regulation. Hey kids! Don't believe the activists promising to protect you from Big Business. All they do is make it impossible for Little Business to compete.
Gentry Activism. The higher orders of our society are full of ideas to "benefit mankind." Mostly, these ideas do not benefit mankind, but they do make the educated Gentry feel good about itself. And our economy is riddled with ideas that some Gentry-funded and Gentry-staffed NGO has advocated. An easy example is ethanol in gasoline. It makes cars more expensive; it tends to corrode engine parts; it makes cars less efficient; it benefits Big Ag; it increases the price of corn which hurts poor people; it puts more land under the plow. There are thousands of regulatory interventions like this that well-meaning activists have introduced into our economy. And the trouble is that, according to Chantrill's law, it is nearly impossible to walk these programs back. Hey kids! Do you realize how much goody-goody regulation costs you?
Race Politics. I wonder how much of the present rage is due to the straight-up racial and sexual discrimination against young white males, the youngsters we call beta-males and soyboys. We made discrimination illegal half a century ago. We said, if you discriminate on the basis of race or sex it is criminal. But that wasn't enough for our moralists. They had to go to work to change the effects of discrimination with quotas and Affirmative Action and Diversity and Inclusion. I agree, morally, that we ought to have a society where every race and group is properly represented in the structure of power in every walk of life. But should we use the apparatus of force to do that? And would it make things better? See, it is one thing to say: hey, you discriminated in this instance on the basis of race. It is another thing to say, well, we should put a thumb on the scale for a while until this or that classification of human is no longer "underrepresented."
The problem with all populist explosions is that while the people are rightly angry, they usually have no clue about why things are all screwed up.
And when you are the ruling class, the fact that people do not know what is screwing them over is not a bug, it is a feature.
And so, the angry kids lash out, not knowing who is really screwing them over. If only they could listen to people like me!
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