To The American Dreamers

Entrepreneurs are an endangered species, according to the Wall Street Journal, particularly among young adults. Do these young adults need a lecture from their Baby-Boomer parents' generation about work ethic and enterprise and thrift and risk-taking? Why have they turned from the pat answers of the past? Is there some defect of character in this rising generation? Or do their choices reflect a demise of incentive?



Perhaps they have discerned that it won't matter if they work hard and if they have indomitable resolve and if they have a revolutionary idea or service or product and if they have patents and trademarks and copyrights and if they have exclusive international supplier and distributor and consumer channels and if they have optimal invested capital and if they have an Ivy-League or graduate education and an abundance of industry experience and expertise and model employees--if the intellectual or physical property they create does not have the clear protection of immutable, egalitarian laws (ie. the Constitution). All their pain and labor might birth a state-sponsored abortion. Or, they might become a surrogate mother without any consideration ("you didn't birth it--it takes a village"). Or, they might subsist--breast feeding their baby for years until it is finally desiccated by a state demand for what was essential to its existence. Perhaps many surmise that government IS the risk to entrepreneurship and hence to the economy (do state-sponsored laundry inspection services constitute an economy?)--a risk that can only be mitigated by avoiding the responsibilities entrepreneurs assume--private responsibilities that are magnified daily by government--even as burgeoning government commonly breaches contracts of its own creation.



Like Cuba and Venezuela before her, America has arrived at a point where prosperity is political. Expressions of ideology are rewarded and punished economically. The cheese is moving and mice must follow. So, suspend your humanity. Censor yourself. And obey your rodent-like instincts. Your cheese depends on it.



To prosper, young Americans should seek experience in state-sanctioned (socialist) activism and enterprises. To prosper, they should promote revolutionary redistribution of wealth and influence. Only a principled pauper would resist this current--move in with his conservative parents--to confront anew notions of a bygone but longed-for America. So why are so many young adults choosing this anguished course? And waiting on the world, unsustainable as it is, to change for the better? From their refusal to be reconciled to our mad and maddening cheese chase--a chase that will end in a trap unless we consider its course--we, their seniors, might learn something about responsibility.