Now by “kids,” I don’t mean very little kids… Every toddler has a firm understanding of property rights and private enterprise. Indeed, one of the first words spoken by toddlers is usually “Mine!”
The kids I’m referring to are defined by demographical experts as “Millennials,” born between the late 1980s and the mid-1990s, and “Generation Z,” born between the late 1990s and the early 2010s. Or – to give a less academic description of this age cohort – “Everybody who doesn’t know how to drive a stick shift.”
Of course, it’s a big fat over-generalization to say these kids don’t understand free markets… Some of the more open-eyed and entrepreneurial do. Just as some savvy youngsters can take Dad’s restored Corvette on a date and not come home needing a transmission rebuild and a clutch replacement.
But what’s the use of a puny little over-generalization when it comes to writing an editorial? An opinion that can’t stand exaggeration can’t stand the smell test. Blowing truth out of proportion can be entertaining… Blowing falsehood out of proportion can be January 6, 2021.
Anyway, you know the kids I mean. (Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, born 1989.) They think wealth comes from the top down… that wealth is distributed from above by benevolent government, by grudging multinational corporations, by random billionaires paying (not enough!) taxes, by philanthropic largesse, or – if the kids are lucky – by their parents.
They think everyone has more or less the same claim on this wealth… Descending as it does from the mysterious economic firmament, wealth should fall alike on the just and the unjust. Everyone ought to get drenched when it rains pennies from heaven.
The kids have no idea that wealth comes from the bottom up. Wealth is not distributed, wealth is made. And the process of making it is called work. Work consists in taking something of lower economic value (a shovel) and using it to create something of higher economic value (a ditch for the Keystone XL pipeline).
Except forget that example… The Keystone XL pipeline has been canceled – presumably by the same people who think that crude oil, like money, arrives magically from the sky....