LETTER FROM THE EDITOR
And kids are busy being young – so it’s your time that has to be spent making the world nicer... For them. The greedy little bastards. Young people were thinking these same sweetly selfish thoughts back in the 1960s, during my salad days (tossed green cannabis buds). Young people probably have been thinking these thoughts since the concept of being a “young person” was invented. That would have been in the 19th century – during America’s first “Progressive Era” – when mechanization liberated kids from onerous farm chores and child labor laws let them escape from dark satanic mills. This gave young people the leisure to sit around noticing that the world isn’t nice and daydreaming about how it could be made nicer with the time, effort, and money of grown-ups. I’m all for sending them back to the factories or, at least, the barn. If I hear any socialist noise from my kids, I’m going to make them get up at 4 a.m. to milk the cows. And this will be an extra-onerous farm chore because we don’t have any cows, and they’ll have to search for miles all over the countryside to find some. They’ve got it coming. Young people are not only penniless and powerless, they’re also ignorant as hell. They think of wealth as something that’s limited, like the number of Hostess Ding Dongs on the 7-Eleven shelf. They think rich people got to the 7-Eleven first and gobbled all the Ding
Dongs, leaving poor people to lick the plastic wrappers. Young people don’t know that more Ding Dongs can be produced. They don’t know how or why more Ding Dong production is possible. And they certainly don’t know how to get the cream filling inside. Young people think that the way to obtain more wealth is to take it away from rich people. You can’t do it. Well... you can do it. But you can only do it once. You can take the Ding Dongs from the rich people... But once you’ve eaten them, you can’t go back to the rich people and take more. They’re out of Ding Dongs. Or, if they’re not out of Ding Dongs, the rich people aren’t there. They’ve taken what they had left and moved someplace, like Singapore, where they can enjoy their Ding Dongs in peace. The reason that young people are so ignorant about wealth (they think it’s limited to what arrives at the 7-Eleven with the Hostess deliveryman) is that young people are still in school... or have been recently. School, while not without its benefits, carries the risk of dangerous over-exposure to intellectual elites. And intellectual elites, when it comes to understanding economic realities, might as well be Hostess Ding Dongs. The 19th century spawning of idle, dreamy, feckless young people arrived just in time for the Marxist intellectual fad. And Marxist thinking among intellectuals is a fashion trend that has never gone away. Intellectuals like Marxism because Karl Marx
8 October 2018
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