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Millenials the Most Anti-Liberty Generation

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On many Objectivist and liberty blogs, it’s almost as if Charlie Sheen has been writing the narrative: individualism is decisively #winning. To those for whom hope truly does spring eternal, Obama and his evildoers are perpetually one scandal away from impeachment (surely the VA scandal will be the one to finally topple his house of cards). The American people, meanwhile, are just one election cycle shy from taking back their government in a Fifth Great Awakening for liberty.

 

Stark reality, however, tells a different story in a new report from the Brookings Institute. Based on surveys of thousands of individuals, the report concludes that millenials will bring to the workplace and political scene a major shift in attitudes and voting behavior toward progressive values. Millenials (born 1982-2003), if you believe the data, might very well be the most anti-liberty generation in American history. Reading their responses to questions on America’s culture, politics, and economy, one gets the distinct impression that the culture war has not only been long won by progressivism – it wasn’t even a close contest.

 

Particularly striking is the growing hostility toward business and for-profit activity generally:

 

“About two-thirds of the Millennials surveyed in 2012 also agreed that “businesses make too much profit,” which was the highest level of agreement among all generations. At the same time, less than half of Millennials thought “unions had too much power”; by contrast, a majority within all other generations agreed with that statement. Even more telling from a generation noted for its general lack of trust in institutions, 72 percent of Millennials, compared to only 61 percent of Xers and Boomers, agreed with the statement that “labor unions were necessary to protect the working person,” a level statistically significantly higher than that of older generations.”

 

Millenials are the generation most comfortable with regulation of private market activity, with roughly three quarters agreeing that the marketplace needs government regulation. Telling also is where millenials say they want to work: the CIA, FBI, and NSA were high-ranked across multiple surveys, with the State Department coming in second on one survey and government agencies placing second after high-tech companies like Google and Facebook.

 

Most troubling is the degradation of societal trust that has occurred across the generations:

 

In its latest study of the Millennial Generation, Millennials in Adulthood, the Pew Research Center found that America’s youngest adults were the least trusting of any generation. Only 19 percent of Millennials agreed with the statement that “most people can be trusted,” a percentage that was about half of all other older generations.

 

This is the millenial voter in a nutshell. You make too much profit, you can’t be trusted, and you need to be watched. Liberty has its work cut out for it.

 

http://thenewversailles.wordpress.com/2014/05/30/millenials-most-anti-liberty-generation/

 

Edited by Robert Baratheon
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With the portrait that is painted of the Millenials here, most of them would probably see Liberty as a statue, rather than having its work cut out. Even The Statue of Liberty deteriorates over time, and like liberty, requires proper human activity to keep it in good order. 

Edited by dream_weaver
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I don't know how to evaluate this data without knowing what kind of results the survey would produce from the same age group (11-32 year olds) in the past (20, 30 or 40 years ago).  People do change their thinking as they age.  

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"The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of patriots and tyrants." - Thomas Jefferson.

 

This is a dear price to pay, indeed. The Founding Fathers had a good grasp of history. Miss Rand understood that reason was the tool of peaceful dealings between rational men, and in the absence of reason, force is the only alternative. She also noted in "Capitalism, The Unknown Ideal," that "[p]roduction is the application of reason to the problem of survival." Similarly, I would say that liberty is the application of reason to the problem of politics. Ayn Rand's grasp of human nature sometimes came across as prescient in anticipating causal outcomes. If the Millennial trends you cite, which are akin to her observations cited in "America's Persecuted Minority: Big Business," Thomas Jefferson will probably come across prescient as well.

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Just ran across this article searching for news on objectivism. The author, Chris Redfield, was born in 1987. This looks like a Millennial that is seeking to put the pieces of the puzzle together.

 

My Turn: Don’t listen to them, Millennials! None of this is your fault

 

This, alas, is my final conclusion, that the world is in fact not coming to an end. The world still offers great opportunities to those who seek it and are willing to capitalize on it.

 

So why, my fellow Millennials, should I write this, and why should you care to read it? Because if we believe what is being said to us and about us, it will become a self-fulfilling prophecy.

 

Let us open our eyes! We are some of the smartest, hardest-working people in this economy. We are not helpless; we are positioned to be the best. We can and must save this world. We will clean up after our elders, and we will make the world better.

 

 

Edited to add:

 

One more small sampling of his writing style from earlier in the piece that I found simple and elegant and of pretty good wit. This is not as predominate in the conclusion as within the rest of the article.

How did we doom the world before we were born? Magic? Possibly, I do not pretend to know all the workings of our universe. How did we doom the economy before we entered it? By not joining the work force at six? Perhaps, though I thought there were laws against that.

Edited by dream_weaver
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From what I read, he should certainly concur with you on the baby boomers contribution to the national debt, leading to not to be trusted, and thus the need to be watched.

 

I also get a sense of hope, the potential of a bright future, and the desire to be a part of such. He seems to be saying the millennials have to take responsibility to make that happen.

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  • 2 years later...

Here is a post that fits this topics: http://deadstate.org/hashtag-designed-to-bash-millennials-get-hijacked-by-millennials-and-spits-truth/

I don't get the optimism some people have of the millenials, it seems that the millenials are just going to doom the economy even more... Remember "The Student Rebellion" essay in CTUI? Those kids had the same views as the kids today... they could've been even more left leaning...  Every generation knows that something went wrong with the previous generations  but they always turn around and blame the wrong people in those previous generations.  To fix the problems they just have the same anti-liberty solutions that the previous generations had. The millenials, most likely, are only going to exacerbate the problem for the next generation and then the cycle of blame will continue...  

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