“A millennial’s Rolling Stone rant offers up some tired old ‘solutions,'” Jonah Goldberg writes in his weekly L.A. Times column today. “A fashionably rebellious young writer revisits some ancient ideas: guaranteed work for everybody and communal ownership of property:”
“In America,” Oscar Wilde quipped, “the young are always ready to give to those who are older than themselves the full benefits of their inexperience.” And they often do it in the pages of Rolling Stone.
Last week, the magazine posted a mini-manifesto titled “Five Economic Reforms Millennials Should Be Fighting For.” After confirming it wasn’t a parody, conservative critics launched a brutal assault on its author, Jesse A. Myerson.
Myerson’s essay captures nearly everything the unconverted despise about left-wing youth culture, starting with the assumption that being authentically young requires being theatrically left wing.
Writing with unearned familiarity and embarrassingly glib confidence in the rightness of his positions, Myerson prattles on about how “unemployment blows” and therefore we need “guaranteed work for everybody.” He proceeds to report that jobs “blow” too, so we need guaranteed universal income. He has the same disdain for landlords, who “don’t really do anything to earn their money.” Which is why, Myerson writes, we need communal ownership of land, or something.
To borrow from Glenn Reynolds’ refrain whenever a warmist goes into “ban everything, but leave me my mansion and Gulfstream Jet” mode, I’ll believe Rolling Stone’s writers and editors are serious about their rhetoric when they form Occupy Jann Wenner’s Mansion and go full Bane on his estimated $700 million net worth. Otherwise they’re simply an updated version of the same fashionable poseurs an earlier generation of Rolling Stone railed against.
Come to think of that, that dovetails well Steve Green’s with another far left millenial’s new “journalism project,” which basically consists of finding someone willing to hand over $10 mil to the original socialist Juicebox Mafiaso:
If Ezra can get eight figures for a blog, it will serve as irrefutable proof that the Left is a billionaire-funded circle jerk.
— Stephen Green (@VodkaPundit) January 3, 2014
Why, it’s as if the left is just one Potemkin Village after another, or something.
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