Stephen Moore makes an interesting observation about what some might call the spoiled generation:
A few weeks ago I gave a talk on the state of the economy to a group of college students — almost all Barack Obama enthusiasts — who were griping about how downright awful things are in America today. As they sipped their Starbucks lattes and adjusted their designer sunglasses, they recited their grievances: The country is awash in debt “that we will have to pay off”; the middle class in shrinking; the polar ice caps are melting; and college is too expensive.
I’ve been speaking to groups like this one for more than 20 years, but I have never confronted such universal pessimism from a young audience. Its members acted as if the hardships of modern life are making it nearly impossible for them to get out of bed in the morning. So I conducted a survey of these grim youngsters. How many of you, I asked, own a laptop? A cellphone? An iPod, a DVD player, a flat-screen digital TV? To every question somewhere between two-thirds and all of the hands in the room rose. But they didn’t even get my point. “Well, duh,” one of them scoffed, “who doesn’t have an iPod these days?” I was way too embarrassed to tell them that I, for one, don’t. They thought that living without these products would be like going back to prehistoric times.
They seemed clueless that as recently as the early 1980s only the richest people in the world had cellphones and the quality of these products left much to be desired. Watch a movie from 20 years ago and you will laugh out loud seeing big clunky black machines that weighed as much as a brick, gave crackly service and cost $4,200. Now cellphones are practically free — even disposable. And the cost of making calls has dropped dramatically too.
So why the pessimism in what is clearly an age of abundance ? Part of it is just that people like this are just plain clueless about the way the world works, or about the way that things were even two decades ago. Leave everything the same but take away the cell phone, iPod, and laptop and they wouldn’t know what to do with themselves.
As Moore notes, though, the other problem is that there is an entire industry out there — the media — dedicated to highlighting the bad and their are politicians who tell them that things are worse now than they’ve ever been. They don’t know they’re being lied to because they don’t know history and if Barack says it, it must be true, right ?
And don’t even get me started about the mush that gets fed to them on a daily basis by the last refuge of the radical left, also known as the faculty of any major college or university.
Moore concludes:
After my lecture, one young woman walked up to me on her way out and huffed: “What I favor is a radical redistribution of wealth in America.” I tried to tell her that America’s greatness is a result of our focus on creating wealth, not redistributing it. But it was too late — she was already tuning in to her iPod.
I wonder if she’s in favor of redistributing her iPod ?
