The Poor Suffering Millennials

Michael Barone seems to have opened a hornet's nest with his recent blog about Millennials. All he did was indulge in a mild dig at the ObamaCare provision to force health insurance to cover children up to age 26.

[C]hildren... should not be encouraged to remain dependent on parents for extended periods.

Maybe, he suggested, the ObamaCare bureaucrats should add some modest "terms and conditions" for 21-26 year-olds in the area of "late night activities" and "substantial alcohol consumption."

Millennials were not amused, and the outrage spilled onto Glenn Reynold's Instapundit.

As a baby boomer, I think millennials have a right to be upset. But think up millennials! What do you expect? The political system is bound to screw you guys. That's what politics is all about. It is a conspiracy of the old and well-connected against the young and inexperienced. As in:

Compulsory education. What would you do if you wanted to make youngsters tractable and demoralized? You'd lock them up in custodial facilities for their entire childhood and adolescence.

Academic education. Most people, studies show, learn by doing. So let's structure education to benefit kids that learn from listening to teacher and from books.

Child labor. Let's keep kids out of the labor force so they can't learn any practical skills.

Minimum wage. Let's make it really hard for people without skills to get a job. (But unpaid internships for the rich kids are OK).

Regulated labor market. Kill the common law "employment at will" concept, and tangle up the labor market with all kinds of laws to prevent employers from hiring and firing without cause. You wouldn't want an employer to take a risk on hiring some young uncredentialed nobody.

Mandated benefits. One way to keep inexperienced young people from competing in the labor market is to mandate all kinds of benefits from health insurance to unemployment to retirement. These are things that young people don't need and shouldn't have to pay for. They just make it more expensive to hire young people.

I could go on. We could discuss Fannie and Freddie, which crank up housing prices, making it hard for young people without family means to buy houses, and then devastate the economy with a credit crisis. But let's not get into that.

Let's just point out that the more power you give government the more it will discriminate against young people. That is simply because young people haven't had time to organize into special interests like older adults.

But, of course, the whole point of older adults supervising the education and indoctrination of young people is to make it hard for young people to fight their way out of their oppression. By the time that young people have figured it all out they are well into their 30s and they are getting ready to screw the next generation of young people.

Now you know why we baby boomers made such a fuss about overthrowing the "system." We didn't overthrow it, of course. We just made it worse.

Here's a concept for you, millennials. Join conservatives in smashing the cruel, corrupt, unjust, wasteful, and deluded welfare state that liberals have created over the last century to empower the educated elite and to oppress the young and the poor.

You won't regret it.