Repudiation

Guest post by Robert Gore at Straight Line Logic

The youngsters are starting to ask questions.

You can find quotes from antiquity on down in which elders of the age disparage younger generations. Our age is filled with them. There are far fewer quotes from the past or present in which elders acknowledge their generations’ role in younger generations’ upbringing and education and consequently, some responsibility for outcomes. Perhaps my generation (I’m 66) should behold the beam in our own eyes before we pontificate further about the motes in our children’s and grandchildren’s eyes. This may cushion the shock for what’s coming—one of history’s most dramatic intergenerational repudiations.

Start with an inevitable repudiation: debt. One can go to the U.S. Debt Clock for the national debt numbers, but several conclusions are inescapable. Exponential growth function graphs have a characteristic course. They gently rise for a time, hit an inflection point, then shoot upwards. U.S. government debt is well past the inflection point.

Another trillion dollars gets added every 100 days to the government’s debt, approaching $35 trillion, and that interval is shrinking. Hemingway noted bankruptcy happens slowly at first, then quickly. Interest on the debt is already the third largest expense in the federal budget. It will grow inexorably until it’s the largest, overwhelming the rest of the budget and the economy. Projections tend to assume stable interest rates. They will rise—the price credit markets extract from the improvident government—bringing the scary projections forward.

The faltering U.S. economy is feeling the pinch of rising debt service, the buttoned collar of a too small shirt on a man running to fat. In Obese Nation, nothing is more morbidly so than the debt, the beam in the eye of the generations that incurred it. Posterity won’t pay it because they can’t pay it. They’re already contending with the ball-and-chain economy’s shrinking prospects, which will vanish altogether as debt implodes.

Broke governments are rapacious, stealing all they can through taxes, inflation, and outright confiscation. It’s never enough. Biden offers select members of the younger generations a vote-buying shell game. The government will destroy the economy, but it will forgive student loans. Educated in socialist schools, many of the borrowers really believe that it’s the government, not the economy, that provides. They’ll be disabused of that notion soon enough.

Consequences will administer some harsh lessons. Socialism doesn’t work; something for nothing doesn’t work; fiat debt and currency don’t work; empire doesn’t work, and government as a constellation of rackets doesn’t work. Does anybody really expect the younger generations to accept debt and tax slavery to fund what the older generations have bestowed upon themselves? Gobsmacked by reality, the youngsters are going to say to the oldsters: No economy, no jobs, and no future for us, no taxes, no debt service, no pensions or medical care for you. In a word, repudiation, an intergenerational middle finger.

The younger generations may say: let’s give freedom a try. It wouldn’t be the first time younger generations have pulled a 180 on older ones. It looks like it’s already happened in Argentina. Freedom will be all the youngsters can afford. Libertarianism has a lot of virtues, not the least of which is that it’s cheap; small government is frugal government. The Great Depression, New Deal, World War II, and the national security state that followed were frontal assaults on small government and its supporting ideology. Their ultimate consequences—a Greater Depression, government bankruptcy, financial collapse, and widespread chaos and misery—will be frontal assaults on big government and its supporting ideology.

When everyone is poor, everyone must pull their own weight. There will still be those crying for handouts, but grim reality will prompt a rejection of the pernicious notion that the unproductive are owed a living from the productive. Only immigrants who can support themselves will have any chance of being welcomed. Armies of useless bureaucrats will be given their walking papers, as Milei is doing in Argentina right now. It’s amazing the expenses you can cut when you can’t afford them.

If the productive are to keep their honest day’s pay for their honest day’s work, it stands to reason that the money they receive should be honest as well. Honest central banking is a contradiction in terms, a lesson the younger generations are already learning. Whatever its flaws, Bitcoin is teaching them that private monetary arrangements can be superior to government fiat-based ones. The lesson will only be reinforced with the introduction of central bank digital currency abomination. In the throes of the Greater Depression, the younger generation will be quite receptive to “conspiracy theories” that blame their misery on central banks, the banking cartel, and phony money―actual conspiracies. They may well decide that crypto and precious metals are the way to go.

The younger generations will train a gimlet eye on the expensive warfare state—the empire and its military-industrial-intelligence racket. Trillions of dollars have been wasted on a string of losing wars, military bases around the world, and weaponry that’s inferior to Russia’s and China’s, produced at a fraction of what our government pays. It’s an intolerable situation when times are relatively good; there’s no way it survives the Greater Depression and government bankruptcy. That includes the racket’s multitude of spooks and goons we’re paying to spy on us, censor us, hoover up our data, destroy our freedom, and feed us unremitting propaganda that it’s good for us.

The youngsters got a wake up call with COVID. Many of them lost their jobs and were locked down. Sure, they got some money from the government, but that money’s been spent or gambled away on meme stocks. Many of those who held on to their jobs were forced to take the jab, which didn’t protect them from a virus that posed little danger to them, but which did inflict a host of maladies, including sudden death. Now the government is admitting that its scare tactics against Ivermectin, Hydroxychloroquine, and other effective remedies might possibly have been in error. Deadly mistakes were made, but so far no apologies, restitution, or trials.

It will take more wake up calls, but eventually the younger generations are going to realize that, “I’m from the government, and I’m here to help” really are the nine most terrifying words in the English language. They are getting another wake up call from the government’s response to the campus protests in support of Palestine: We’re from the government, and we’re here to help Israel and the Jewish lobby.

Four years ago, the establishment tolerated and in many cases encouraged the “mostly peaceful protestors” who rioted and looted in response to George Floyd’s death. They even got a pass on the COVID strictures. Violence and the destruction of property were perfectly acceptable during the summer of hate.

What’s not acceptable now is questioning or peacefully protesting Israel’s slaughter of Palestinians in Gaza. The students are demonstrating against U.S. support of Israel. They’re demanding a ceasefire and that their institutions divest investments in the companies profiting from the carnage. Unlike the George Floyd riots, the protests have been mostly peaceful, with the bulk of the scattered violence directed against the students.

They are learning who really runs America, a lesson far more valuable than much of the garbage taught in their classrooms. A study of Israel and the Jewish lobby’s influence on American politics would fill a multi-volume set, but until now it’s been the Voldemort whose name couldn’t be mentioned in acceptable, Overton-window discourse and debate. The window has shattered, and the hysterical reaction to the protests only intensifies the repudiation of the government’s see-hear-speak-no-evil stance towards Israel.

Higher education’s catechism of collectivist and cultural drivel had been endorsed and funded by Jewish liberals. Yesterday’s heroes—the university communities who embraced liberal dogma, woke weirdness, censorship, and cancel culture—have become today’s villains. Allow students to hold up signs, set up tents, hoist Palestinian flags, and otherwise challenge the orthodoxy, and the support vanishes. Send in the cops! Send in the National Guard! Stop the checks! Defund the endowments! Fire university presidents! Expel the brats! Blacklist them with employers! Question their motives! Question their affiliations! Question their funding! They’re the new Nazis! It’s another holocaust! Antisemitism! Antisemitism! Antisemitism!

That the students are willing to risk the adverse personal consequences undercuts the questioning of their motives and sincerity. Yes, you can find inconsistencies, hypocrisy, hidden agendas, and looniness in these protests, just like you can in any mass movement. J. Edgar Hoover went looking and did indeed discover communists among those protesting the Vietnam War and racism. It didn’t invalidate the protests. The calculus then and now is for the uproar about the protestors to divert attention from what they’re protesting against, a diversion the mainstream media aids and abets.

Congress is going to teach those youthful miscreants a lesson. Where are the brats getting all this unapproved malinformation—true information they don’t like—the galvanizing images, videos, and stories from Gaza that graphically detail the horrors? The “Protecting Americas from Foreign Adversary Controlled Applications Act,” aka the “TikTok ban,” signed into law April 24, is an attempt to shut the popular social media site at the forefront of the malinformation flow. The law grants the president vast new powers to force the sale of “a website, desktop application, mobile application, or augmented or immersive technology application” that is deemed to be owned by a “foreign adversary,” which is anyone the bureaucrats decide is a foreign adversary.

The second legislative assault on freedom this past month comes in the form of the “Anti-Semitism Awareness Act.” This act, now working its way through Congress, instructs federal bureaucrats to adopt an extremely broad definition of anti-Semitism and to use that definition to “vigorously” enforce federal prohibitions of “discrimination” as found in the 1964 Civil Rights Act. This new broad definition of anti-Semitism equates criticism of the State of Israel with criticism of all Jews and the legislation could easily be read to define New Testament texts like the Gospel of John as “anti-Semitism.” After all, John’s gospel repeatedly refers to “the Jews” as the enemies of Jesus—that is, the enemies of God.

Ryan McMaken, “War Hysteria Fuels New Attacks on Free Speech,” 5/14/24, mises.org

The legislation is squarely aimed at colleges and universities that receive federal funds, which is just about all of them. What goes around comes around. Higher education hasn’t been a bastion of free speech protection. Cancel culture has been nourished in academia and now it’s academia that’s getting canceled. If “micro-aggressions” and hurt feelings justify censorship, some Jewish students have been micro-aggressed and had their feelings hurt. (Some Jewish students have joined the protests, belying the “antisemitism” smear.) It’s likely that some of the students now complaining that their right to peacefully protest has been abridged have shouted down or otherwise prevented speakers with views they didn’t like from speaking on campus.

There’s more than enough hypocrisy to go around. Conservatives in Congress who have wailed long and loud about censorship of conservative views in the mainstream media and censorious collusion between social media and the Democrats have signed on to the legislation. Criticize Israel or Jewish influence in America politics and they’ll censor with relish. The First Amendment—what’s that?

The gerontocracy’s bought-and-paid-for (or blackmail-induced) devotion to Israel and attempted repression of information and criticism are being repudiated by the younger generations. America Firsters among them will ask: What the hell has Israel ever done for the U.S.? We ship them money and weapons, from them we get? Stolen nuclear weapons technology. The USS Liberty. Cheerleading for our disastrous military and intelligence involvement in the Middle East. (Benjamin Netanyahu told the George W. Bush administration “If you take out Saddam, Saddam’s regime, I guarantee you that it will have enormous positive reverberations on the region.”) Encouragement for more of the disastrous same in Iran. Complicity in the Gaza slaughter, for which we’re lumped in with them in the torrent of global condemnation. Puppets in American politics. Much of the surveillance technology with which U.S. and Israeli intelligence spies on us. With friends like Israel . . .

The impending economic and financial catastrophe will be the downfall of large, complex institutions, including governments, and the death of many people. Insurrection and secession are strong possibilities. Broke, the survivors will live self-sufficient lives, on a smaller scale. Most of them will be from the younger generations. After a few years of carving out this new existence, they’ll realize that they don’t need the government that was the totem for prior generations and the author of so many of their woes. They don’t need the endless taxes, wars, laws, arrogance, theft, and corruption. They’ll wonder why they tolerated immiseration for so long, and they’ll vow never to tolerate it again.

The repudiation will be complete.

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