Teach Your Children Well

There is no shortage of bad news when it comes to life in America these days.  We have too much food to eat, too many HD TVs to sell too cheaply ( Best Buy, the latest Free Market Victim ) and our $100K liberal arts degree didn’t make us millionaires. Now I am not usually confused with an optimist; instead I am told rather regularly that I am excessively cynical.  While I have been working on toning down what can be a pretty useful trait in the age of bullshit, I certainly have not evolved into the “glass half full” antithesis just yet.  So why for the first time ever might you call me the optimist when discussing the socioeconomic situation?  Because the sensational narrative told by most media outlets has reached the absurd tone of bad reality TV.  The local news channels, the 24 hour news-a-thon networks, the local papers, the global news feeds and websites, all constantly bombard us with stories of how bad things are.  They develop touching stories that take the real life examples of unlucky working class saps that are complete slaves to a crumbling society that only favors the super wealthy.  The story goes something like the following. “Joe Smith, 22, borrowed over 100k to go to a local liberal arts college.  ‘I was told hard work and good morals were all you needed to land career or entrepreneurial success. I was lied to…etc, etc.’ Mr. Smith cleans prison toilets with his bare hands for $7.50 an hour.’”Such a story caught my eye last week in my area’s Sunday tradition, the Philadelphia Inquirer.  Sunday’s edition included a touching story much like the approximation in the paragraph above; an empathetic tale about the millennial generation and their unique economic challenges and certain doom. (Philadelphia Inquirer Saga) While I do not want to downplay the very real struggles of many, especially from a perspective of gainful employment, I am cautious to fall into the psychological trap that the world has irreversibly gone to shit. As I alluded to above, this is a very new position for me to take. I am usually the one sounding the alarm stubbornly believing the worst is about to happen, not the one that steps in and says, “Hey it’s not so bad, relax everyone.”  But that’s what the media has done.  They have turned a sour naysayer like me into the voice of hope. Good luck to us.This latest doom and gloom piece that inspired me to write this rant was a meandering 4 page saga in the massive Sunday issue that I had the rare delight of actually reading in hard copy.   I must admit that pieces like this are intriguing.  There is something about these sad stories of desperation that really suck you in.  It’s exciting noting ourselves as tragic historical figures whose struggles have nothing to do with our decisions, but of some far off evil we have little defense against. This is the danger of these pieces. The emotional tug at your soul, how irrational it may be, is easily perceived as quite a force of “truth.”  Everyone is looking for reasons to their problems, particularly for reasons that exclude themselves or reality.  “Why don’t I own a 2500 sq foot home yet?” “How come they get to go on vacation every year?”  “Why does my kitchen have the same linoleum floors from the 80’s?” “Why am I still living at home, I thought I was out of here 5 years ago?”  These stories feed that subconscious desire which is fine in literature.  Media, however, shouldn’t take such artistic license. Their narrative takes on its own truth and reality is somewhat transformed into the hopeless perception they selfishly portray.I don’t disagree with this article, or series of articles, entirely. Its points are valid and concerning.  The millennials or Gen Y’ers (18-34 year olds) have some generational baggage; highest student debt in US history, highest unemployment rate, lower paying jobs in real dollars than their parents, and an income disparity with the ultra wealthy that seems to have skyrocketed in the past 35 years . The story began with some lazy facts and figures about income levels, school debt levels, Federal Grant decreases etc, and then delved right into the emotional tale of some local victims where the piece starts to get a bit annoying.  "We had faith, even from a puppet” is the introduction to the first victim’s tale; a sad “lied to” 29 year old. It is a reference to Big Bird and his failure in teaching her that life can suck. This victim owes over $100k in loans for 2 BA degrees and a master’s in Public Administration.  The article doesn’t mention what her 2 undergraduate degrees were and to me this is a red flag. I have a hard time believing their content was for the most demanded skill sets in the labor market.  Her master’s degree in public administration also doesn’t seem like the smartest decision in a competitive job market and an economy that will almost assuredly require government reduction.  Now I am not saying that this is what this girl deserves, but these facts are relevant and downplaying them in this story because they don’t make the empathetic appeal that such media sagas exploit is downright irresponsible journalism. This is particularly so in article that is part of series which touts an “About the Series” statement that claims its noble aim as: “Struggling for Work: Broken Dreams of a New Generation,” The Inquirer goes behind the unemployment rates and high college debt to describe the struggles young people are facing and detail what needs changing to help them.”If “Detailing what needs changing to help them” is this series goal, I’m afraid pathetic appeal is not only a poor tool, but also a deceptive one. What people need more than an excuse or a touching tale is a good kick in the pants.  The story that was passed down to the high school version of me was that College was all that mattered.  It didn’t matter what I borrowed, what I majored in, which one I attended just that I went to one that offered bachelor’s degrees and finished. This is terrible advice and if we are to save the next generation and the younger portion of the millenials from the pitfalls of the older ones, we need to stop lying to them.  Taking out an irresponsible amount of debt is a bad idea. Sure, it can be a good idea if you are investing in a well sought and highly rewarded skill set, or if you have the financial means to explore your passions, but for the vague promise of a job you can’t define or to kill time between adolescents and adulthood, it is economic roulette.  You can’t expect your 100K + sociology BA to land you a job making 60k+ a year in the near future if ever.  As important to life as the discipline may be, it rarely rewards its members lucrative pay days, especially without further and much more expensive education.  This debt burden will stifle most people’s modest attempts at getting ahead and this needs to be understood by naïve 18 year olds who think they are buying a guaranteed future.The most disappointing misstep in this and many articles like it is the cause and effect discussion.  Many times throughout the article the author attempts to lob some soft explanations like “decreased union participation” or “manufacturing migration” as to the causes of Gen Y’s woes, but they all stop short of anything substantive. What he does do is mention a sort of timeline quite a bit.  At least three times in the article the 70’s are alluded to as the sort of “turning point” for the middle class.  He talks about the decrease in corporate training, the growing income disparity, the loss in real wages, etc since this time but again, offers no causal information.  This pivotal point is commonly themed in most pieces of this ilk, but rarely, if ever, is it accurately explored beyond the “disappearing unions” argument.  But disappearing unions may be a more a result than cause of such a shift. So what happened in the 70’s?  Did people just become bigger jerks?  Did companies finally see that they could pay people less overseas for menial tasks?  This is an important piece of the puzzle.  I am no expert and have little training or time in researching all the little factors that a thorough investigation would require, but something very drastic did happen in the 70s that no one in the mainstream seems ready to discuss. It may not have been THE reason for the evident reversal of fortune in the last 40 years because despite the efforts of many authors and journalists, no such social shift can be boiled down to one specific event or action. This event’s role in the current predicament, however, cannot be ignored.What happened in those crucial years was a massive power and wealth grab by the Federal government.  The only remaining remnants of a gold standard, a sort of pseudo gold standard that really relied ultimately on faith as well, was abolished and the US government no longer held itself accountable for redeeming gold at fixed dollar rates.  This is what is meant by the more recognizably known phrase “closing the gold window” in 1971.  While its claim as a “gold standard” is questionable it was at least a nominal constraint on the unchecked possibilities of a total “fiat” (faith based) standard. Without getting too jargony and boring, here is essentially what went down.  Based on years of increasing Federal power, the gold standard (meaning US dollars redeemable in gold) was modified away into an almost fiat standard (meaning your dollar is redeemable in the good faith of the US government and its banking cartel the Federal Reserve) in the 1944 Bretton Woods agreement.  At the time of tricky Dick Nixon’s reign, these last remnants of hard money (a term used to describe actual money, ie gold) proved an annoying little hurdle for the uncontrollable deficit spending needed to fund grandiose promises and perpetual wars (particularly Vietnam).   Without much ado, the Nixon administration ended the gold promise and the fixed exchange rate of US dollars to gold ($35 an ounce) was gone.The Federal Government could now spend without the annoying shackles of actually raising the revenue and the Federal Reserve was granted unlimited money printing power. What has followed those drastic, unconstitutional measures has been years of mal investment, wealth redistribution, inflation and government waste that have left us (well about 99% of us) just a little poorer.  The decades since this massive monetary change have been riddled with an almost unmanageable cycle of booms and busts, fueled mainly by monetary manipulation.  These are very real factors in American life.  They have laid the ground work for the soft economy that now relies almost 50% on government spending and an incalculable percentage on inflationary monetary policy. It has enabled irresponsible deficit spending that gives flighty politicians an out from making the real decisions that might cost them a cushy job in DC.  Most importantly, it has enabled massive inflation that only seems like real wealth, and serves to bolster our financial institutions more than the producers they were meant to fund.Facts like this should be explored by our trusted media sources, not hidden behind some emotional meme that distorts reality and sells more papers.  I know that printed media is struggling to make a buck, but some investigative reporting wouldn’t kill them.  Maybe the true exploration would bore some people 2 pages into the piece, but at least it wouldn’t give them the sense that it’s all out of their hands and create angry mobs of people who aren’t sure what they are angry at.  On a personal note, this sort of victimized reporting used to feed my own desire to blame the world for the 100k debt I racked up getting a “quality” albeit undergraduate education. I loved going around blaming the vague “system” for all its evils, but no system forced $100,000 down my throat.  It was my immature understanding of post secondary education and what trusted advisors called “good debt” that put me in that predicament.  Lucky for me I did realize that studying my passions wouldn’t pay it back and I pursued a degree that seemed to have one of the most lucrative career prospects for an undergrad.  This is what people, especially young adults, need to understand.  The world has changed and it will continue to do so.  Comparing the millenials to the baby boomers is a fun and educational exercise, but it shouldn’t be turned into a tragic tale that gives us an out and creates the perception of a hopeless reality.  For a while, it was enough to just be American, but now we need to be productive, educated members of the larger human community.  That’s not tragedy, that’s life.Take the reins America; we are not hopeless victims of circumstance.  We are a free people that can make our own way if we don’t get caught up in the media created drama.  It may not be easy, but the promise that it was supposed to be was an outright lie.Receive access to ALL of our EXCLUSIVE bonus audio content – including “Conspiracy Corner”, “Degenerate Gamblers” and the “League of Liberty Podcast” by joining the Lions of Liberty Pride and supporting us on Patreon!