There is yet another new survey of millennials out. Like previous ones, this one shows that — surprise! — young people tend to be liberal.
This was also true of previous generations, spawning the saying that “If you’re not a liberal at 20 you have no heart, if you’re not a conservative at 40 you have no brain.” That saying has been attributed to some old white guy most millennials probably haven’t heard of, thanks to our pitiful schools and universities. All that guy did was save Western civilization, which is demonized these days in those same pitiful schools.
The new survey was conducted by Harstad Strategic Research, Inc. They work for Democrats. Their survey of millennials found that most millennials like lots and lots of government.
That’s a depressing set of graphs, as I’ll explain on the next page.
The overriding message of those graphs is that the left’s propaganda is working on the young. The rich already pay more than their fair share in taxes, yet millennials want them to pay more. Progs have been demonizing the rich for years, and it’s paying off for them. Progs never speak of trade-offs. There are always trade-offs. A policy that sounds good, such as “protecting the environment,” can and often does mean hurting the economy, raising taxes, and building new gold-plated government bureaucracies empowered to build up their own militarized police forces and pick away at your privacy. Forcing the rich to pay more in taxes will probably result in the rich investing less in the economy, which kills jobs.
Most of the questions answered in the graphs have to do with government activism, and millennials tend to want more and more of that, according to the Harstad research.
It’s a pity that the millennials are seldom shown the consequences of all that government activism.
One of those consequences is a loss of personal freedom. The more power you give to government, the more power you take away from yourself and your own generation. The more power you send to Washington, the less power you keep in your neighborhood, your city and your state. Once you give power away, it’s very very hard to get it back.
Another consequence is a loss of your own money, supposing that you have any. The progressive worldview sounds good until you ask one question: “Who is paying for all of this?”
Millennials will find out that they are paying for it, eventually. They are paying for the excesses of academia right now, with its overpaid deans and arrogant tenured professors who haven’t set foot in the real world since the Carter administration, in those expensive student loans in useless disciplines that they can’t pay off. They are paying for excessive government power right now, in the form of those jobs that Obamacare is killing, and those jobs that are being strangled to death by high taxes and energy prices, jobs that are now not available to millennials. Raising the minimum wage will only make entry-level jobs more scarce.
In the long term, millennials will end up paying for the unaffordable and unsustainable largess that government activist hero Barack Obama and his merry band of generational thieves are racking up right now. His generosity with other people’s money today is a bill that millennials will be stuck with tomorrow.
Maybe by the age of 40, after a couple decades of terrible stagnation, millennials will see the shine wear off the progressive pipe dream.
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