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Burning down the village

By Gavriel Brown

 

Intro
Recently I had the privilege of talking to a guy who formerly worked for U.S intelligence. This afternoon was particularly boring and so I typically strike conversations with who ever comes in the shop. The Man and I talked a little about life and eventually got into the topic of the politics of Generation Z in relation to the Baby Boomer. He asked me a simple question of

 

“Why is your generation the way it is? and How did it get this bad?”

 

I thought about the question for a minute. How to answer it to the fullest and honest response to a man, who at this point had shown no bad faith towards me. I think about this question every time I hear a boomer on Mainstream news or Social media. Most of them just don’t really get it. In my childhood, I heard of a couple of proverbs about the importance of society and the impact of loneliness. The two short proverbs are

"it takes a village to raise a child" &
“A child that is not embraced by the village will burn it down to feel its warmth.”

 

These two African proverbs show us the importance of a society and warns us of the consequences. In this article, I aim to explain to those, who are in good faith and an open heart, why is it as bad as it is now. I will detail aspects of this from the economy, failure of institutions, and total social divide.
 

The Economy

To the Baby Boomer and/or the Gen X’er, I have a question.

How many people did you know who did college,
or did a side hustle with a full time job,
or invest in stocks,
or ran their own business?

 

When I ask this question to those demographics they often respond no one or at best a few people. It seems to me when I talk to people my age, that they have at least one if not two going for them. Heck, I’ve seen people my age have a legitimate bachelors degree, work a full time job, have an official business as a side hustle, invest in stocks and bonds, and are just completely financially literate. They live with their parents so as to not get an apartment, didn’t buy a sports-car, bring home cook meals to work, everything! You know what is their benefit for doing everything right and following the textbook way to success. They get to work the same 9-5 service industry job that I work. Even the people who have an apartment or house they are one bad paycheck from ruin.

If you bring up this reality to the older generations, they mock you for you struggle and will try to find anything to discount you experience and/or find something to hand wave you legitimately not really having a reason to fail.
They will go on about how you have a “BS” degree (even if you get legitimate degrees like psychology for being a therapist in one of the biggest mental health crisis recorded in history and Business for either making your own or being an advisor in businesses.),
or how your job is a dead end (example of this is for those who complain about the service industry even thought that is the most dominate industry in the U.S.),
or how you splurge (as if eating out or going to the movie once a month is the deal breaker, also most hobbies have now been monetized by younger people through social media or online business.)

 

Even if the person perfected the art of financial literacy, there is an ugly truth when it comes to life that most don’t like to acknowledge. That sometimes people fail even when doing the right thing. The issue currently isn’t that people are failing but rather too many people failing despite doing the right thing. Most of this derives from following what previous generations told them to do from parents and grandparents to teachers and advisors. Most of us growing up were told that,

 

“if you just work hard and get done with high school, get a college degree, work full time, and invest a little that you could pull yourself up by the bootstrap and be successful.”

 

This advice not only sold to us as the only way to succeed but that you could never fail. This advice worked when you had the booming economy from the 60’s to 80’s. Especially because those who did this advice in those days had a competitive edge over others in contrast to the fact that everyone is doing that nowadays. But gone are those days because other vital middle class industry like manufacturing, mining, and farming/agriculture as either they are being done elsewhere or being choked out by regulations. When you pair this with the unrestricted immigration since the 1965’s Immigration and Nationality Act and the rise of AI automating many jobs now, it spells economic disaster. With immigration you have lower wages (because they are almost always wiling to take less than an American for the same job) and higher cost of living standard (there is less supply and more demand which always equals higher cost). Now with AI you start to see job decline accelerate as more numerical based jobs are under threat. This paints a gruesome picture as we import more and more our own competition to fight for the few and fewer remaining jobs in a given area.

 

When it comes to solutions both the Republican and Democratic party platform has nothing to really address these concerns.

 

Democrats are purely reactionary in economic matters and just believe that if we install a 15 dollar minimum wage (most jobs now pay $14-16 hr with the exception of salesman who make their money from commission and waitresses who make their money from non taxed tips), Universal Healthcare (which would only work in a society that is actively striving to be healthy), and free college education (for degrees that lose power daily), and price control (that would just cause shortages) paid by “taxing the rich” that somehow everything would be fixed. For they believe that their reactionary policy would suffice rather than proactive measures.

 

For the Republicans it ain’t much better. They believe that all we need to do is deport the illegals (when H1Bs are the biggest problem in term of immigration) and tell people to go into the trades (which is starting to get over saturated by immigrants and by just so many people going into the same few trades of wielding, electrician, and plumber) that magically all issues will be solved.

 

What we need to understand is that truth is we need major reformations in our economic policy. As crass as it sounds we first need to get rid of the competition by ending the H1B visa program and mass deporting immigrants(both legal and illegal). It would be simple deport illegals regardless and deport any immigrants who either committed violent crimes or committed serious crimes (sexual harassment, theft, DUI, burglary, fraud, reckless driving). Another important aspect is we need to enforce our anti-monopoly laws and break up companies that have a practical monopoly. From major examples like Blackrock and Vanguard, to Amazon and Walmart, to Microsoft and Apple, to Meta and Alphabet(Google) these companies have such an iron grip on our lives and are desperately needed to be broken up. These are real improvements could be done if we just enforce our actual laws. The economic consequences while initially put our economy in shock is what is needed if we are hoping for long term improvements. The greatest crime that is being committed in our time is that everyday people are getting punished for doing the right thing where they’re are others who go unpunished.

 

 

This will be a 3 part seris where I cover my thoughts on what is the answer.