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Is
there a Baby Boomer so dim in this land of rackets and swindles who thinks
that he or she will escape the wrath of the Millennials
rising? The developing story is so obvious that only an academic economist
could fail to notice. Here's how it will go: some months from now, as the
financial unwind worsens, and the mirage of gainful employment shimmers away
to nothing, and the technocrats of Europe meet nervously by some Swiss
lakeside (and are seen glumly shaking their heads), and Romney and Obama try
to out-do each other peddling miracle cures for the tanking national
self-esteem - a dangerous meme will go forth across the internet, and this
meme will say: Millennials, renounce your college
loans and set yourselves free!
And
then something truly marvelous will happen. They will at once disempower the
swindling generation of their fathers, teachers, loan officers, and overlords
and quite possibly bring on, at long last, the epochal collision of pervasive
American control fraud with the hard hand of reality.
I
think this will happen, and I would venture even to set the meme loose here
and now and watch it go viral. The college loan racket has been an even more
cynical enterprise than the mortgage racket was because so many people who
ought to have known better, people of supposed intelligence such as college
deans, cabinet secretaries, and think-tank Yodas,
all colluded to support the false promise that the gigantic cargo cult of
higher ed would keep churning out fresh careers
forever - when the truth was that the entire groaning vessel of hopes and
dreams was already under water and sinking into the eternal darkness.
And
is there a Millennial so dim who believes that the promised package of
lifetime goodies once called "a job with benefits" waits like a
liveried servant to conduct them without friction through the ceremonies of
career and family according to premises and promises of an obsolete American
Dream? Dreams do die hard. As dreams go it was a pretty good one while it
lasted, but like all dreams, it has vanished in the mists of a new morning
leaving the dreamers half-sick, anxious, and drained. They have nothing to
lose but their fears of the re-po man and the
simulated dudgeon of telephone robot debt-collectors.
This
idea should catch on as the election season heats up. Like the anti-war youth
of August, 1968, burning their draft cards in the streets of Chicago, the Millennials should flock to Charlotte and Tampa this
summer and fill the parking lots (there are no streets in these places) with
the smoke of their burning loan contracts - and then proceed with the loud
repudiation of party politics in its two current useless, lying, craven,
feckless factions. The effrontery of these rogues, promising a hundred years
of shale gas, and jobs, jobs, jobs, and a personal relationship with Jesus!
Send them packing into the bowels of history, then go home and make it work
locally, where it will have to happen in any case because the arc of events
has a velocity of its own now and that is our certain destination.
The
colleges themselves will, of course, implode shortly, along with everything
else currently organized on the super-gigantic scale. They are no more
prepared for what is about to happen to them than the chiselers in
government, banking, medicine, and global corporate enterprise. We will
wonder in retrospect how they ever managed to winkle 50-grand a year for
their absurd promises, and how we permitted young people with undeveloped
powers of judgment to sign their financial lives away on terms even more stringent
than their parents' mortgages. When the universities do go down, tossing
their employees overboard in the process, it will be interesting to see the
former faculty chairpersons and distinguished professors of econometric
modeling learn how to plant kale and care for chickens
side-by-side with their formerly-indentured students. I can imagine a period
of turmoil in America even harsher than, say, the
Cultural Revolution of the 1960s in China where officials, professors, and
authorities of all kinds were paraded through the angry mobs wearing dunce
caps. Weird things happen
history.
The
college loan money will not be paid back anyway, so Millennial youth ought to
seize the golden opportunity to make the deliberate point that the years of
swindling are officially over now. This strange jubilee could, and should,
change everything.
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My
books are available at all the usual places.
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