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My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down. > Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” ha

My primary critique of this article is that it sets up a strawman in the first sentence to tear down. > Everyone who writes about aging “Boomers”—how “they” have ruined “our” society, and so on, ad nauseum—should be required to memorize Lewis Carroll’s “You Are Old, Father William” (from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland) and recite it aloud before an audience of men and women age seventy or older. There are proper arguments to show how the Boomers were a significant part of dismantling many of the governmental programs and social structures that they themselves benefited from, and then blamed the subsequent generations (GenX, Millennial) for struggling. The key pieces are the comparative cost of housing and education compared to the aforementioned generations, the removal of pensions, and the devolution of health care. While these were set into motion by the generation before them (Reagan, Bush), they were unwilling to put political pressure to change its course. None of this has to do with dismissing the life experience of the Boomer generation, but rather the simple acknowledgement that their political and social policies didn't work, and it's time to fix that.

OliverJones 8y ago
Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess. We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought. We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation. And, fossil carbon release. We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good. We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war. What's going for us? What do we have to offer? We think in decades, not years. We made it to the moon. We invented the internet. We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horsest like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_How_He_Gained_Them https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_... Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.
- isoskeles 8y ago
  > It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike. The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism. I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want). The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability. So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. "Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes," as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter. PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)
  - apocalypstyx 8y ago
    >The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism. While true, there seems to me to be some merit to the argument that there was a subtle change in the nature of such discourse during this period and (mainly) among a large section of the members of this generation (that many members of subsequent generations have accepted as de facto and default) and that is integration of taxation/government with market-based thinking, that is, that paying taxes is something the individual does to get an individual return, in the same way a person walks in McDonalds and expects to put money on the counter and get their happy meal and not, instead, that the homeless guy in the corner gets a happy meal.
whatshisface 8y ago
What fraction of the policy changes of your lifetime did you have a part in or even support? Irrespective of the answer, you can expect to be blamed for them via memes 40 years from now. ;)

OliverJones 8y ago

Yeh, I'm one of those boomers. It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. That has made a terrible mess. We were born before the invention (1959-1960) of pharma birth control, and were teenagers when it took hold in society. It was the biggest change in human history (I'm not exaggerating). We, generalizing, did an awful job of starting to sort out the moral / ethical / social changes birth control brought. We lived through the Summer of Love (see the previous paragraph) and some of us didn't get it. To misquote Spiderman, "with great freedom comes great responsibility." Some of us missed that. Hence DJT 45, hence the abuses of celibate clergy, among other notorious members of my generation. And, fossil carbon release. We did make the US stop the Vietnam war. That was good. We made the US get rid of the military draft. That, in hindsight, was bad. Politicians think twice if they have to raise taxes and conscript young women and men before they go to war. What's going for us? What do we have to offer? We think in decades, not years. We made it to the moon. We invented the internet. We helped cure the world of sanctimonious horsest like the poem Lewis Carroll parodied: https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_How_He_Gained_Them https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/The_Old_Man%27s_Comforts_and_... Maybe it's self-delusion, but I hope we're not finished doing some good.

isoskeles 8y ago
> It was our generation who cooked up the whole "taxation is theft" trope. I'm sorry but considering the US hasn't existed for very long, and income taxes in the US haven't existed for very long, I don't see what your point is other than to knock down something you dislike. The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism. I'm not going to blame Boomers for the current situation because there are so many assumptions I have to make about the current situation for such blame to be effective. I think one has already been thrown around in this thread, something about education costs, where such complaints make big assumptions about the value of education in the status quo or what the entire point of an education is (e.g. being a productive part of the workforce vs. having critical thinking skills vs. knowing the value of learning about being able to discipline yourself into doing it when you want). The worst thing is, blaming Boomers for our problems makes the assumption that there is something uniquely special about that generation that allowed them to set society on the wrong path, as if every generation before and after has also been uniquely special in not having that ability. So I find your comment particularly underhanded in taking this hatred for Boomers and lobbing some pet-dislike you have for a certain ideology. "Oh yeah, us Boomers suck, we ruined everything especially because we don't like taxes," as if Boomers have a monolithic opinion about taxation or anything for that matter. PS: You may have stopped the Vietnam war, but what do you think paid for it? (Answer: Taxes.)
- apocalypstyx 8y ago
  >The idea of taxation being "theft" wasn't an invention of Boomers nor is it a particularly unnatural (or original) thought for any individual to have when encountered with collectivism. While true, there seems to me to be some merit to the argument that there was a subtle change in the nature of such discourse during this period and (mainly) among a large section of the members of this generation (that many members of subsequent generations have accepted as de facto and default) and that is integration of taxation/government with market-based thinking, that is, that paying taxes is something the individual does to get an individual return, in the same way a person walks in McDonalds and expects to put money on the counter and get their happy meal and not, instead, that the homeless guy in the corner gets a happy meal.

whatshisface 8y ago

What fraction of the policy changes of your lifetime did you have a part in or even support? Irrespective of the answer, you can expect to be blamed for them via memes 40 years from now. ;)