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Concern over climate change among millennials is so prevalent, according to a recent article in Market Watch, titled Young People Blame Climate Change for Their Small 401(k) Balances, that it is leading a generation to not save money for retirement. The rationale of today’s brilliant 18-35 year olds? Well, there is no point in saving for a future that is not going to exist.
Yes, as preposterous as that sounds, in the twisted logic of many of today’s best and brightest university graduates, climate change poses such a dire threat, with extreme weather, flooding, fires, tropical storms, tornadoes, and hurricanes, that there is no point in saving for a retirement 40 or 50 or 60 years down the road, that they are never going to live to see because the planet will not exist or will not be inhabitable.
Just a generation ago, this type of thinking would have been handily dismissed by all but a handful of radical environmentalists and socialists. Today, it is increasingly a mainstream worldview.
Just look at two rising stars in the Democratic Party: Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez and Beto O’Rourke.
At a Martin Luther King Day event earlier this year, AOC had this to say on the subject of climate change: “Millennials and people, you know, Gen Z and all these folks that will come after us are looking up and we’re like: The world is going to end in 12 years if we don’t address climate change and your biggest issue is how are we gonna pay for it? This is the war — this is our World War II.”
And Beto O’Rourke had further apocalyptic warnings at a recent campaign stop: “This is our final chance. The scientists are absolutely unanimous on this. That we have no more than 12 years to take incredibly bold action on this crisis.”
Beto (aka Francis) O’Rourke’s questionable claim forced the Associated Press (hardly known as a bastion of far-right wing conservatism) to do a fact check on the topic.
Here is what they had to say: “There is no scientific consensus, much less unanimity, that the planet only has 12 years to fix the problem.”
Ooops! (Don’t expect AOC or Beto to suffer the consequences, though. The mainstream media is far more interested in drilling down into the details of the Russia investigation, despite Mueller’s conclusive statement that there was absolutely no evidence of collusion between the Trump campaign and Russia.)
When two of the politicians who are most popular with millennials are spreading, word for word, the entirely false claim that our existence as a human race on planet earth is imminently imperiled, it isn’t difficult to see why people in the 18-35 age bracket are susceptible to the kind of thinking that says…”Well, shucks, I don’t need to save for a retirement at 67 when I’m 27, because human beings won’t be around in 40 years because we will have destroyed the planet by then.”
They are also increasingly assessing another fundamental life decision: having children.
Let’s listen to leading Democratic intellect AOC one more time, to hear what she has to say on the subject.
“It’s basically like, there’s a scientific consensus that the lives of children are going to be very difficult, and it does lead, I think, young people to have a legitimate question, you know, ‘Is it okay to still have children?’ ”
There may, however, be a silver lining in all this. If AOC is successful in encouraging people who subscribe to her beliefs to not have children, then she is doing a great service to the United States and the world.
Socialists and Marxists are completely fine if they want to live their own lives, and do their own thing. If they want to set up their own commune, based on socialist principles, where voluntary action is the key motivator, I have no problem with that. There are numerous organizations in existence today in Israel: they are called “kibbutzes.” Bernie Sanders lived in Israel and worked on one as a young man.
The problem is that is not what Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Beto O’Rourke and friends want to do. They want to do tell us what to do with our lives, our time, our money, our land, our families, and our businesses, to the nth degree. They want to tell us how we have to fund our retirement (Social Security)…they want to tell us what healthcare we can buy (ObamaCare)…they want to tell us what schools we have to fund (the nation’s crumbling public education system), they want to tell us (Department of Housing and Urban Development).
There is nothing “voluntary” about Sanders and Warren and AOC and their vision of socialism. It is socialist tyranny, pure and simple. It is entirely unconstitutional, as the federal government does not have any authority to order us to save for retirement, or to buy the healthcare plan that they tell us to buy, or to fund the schools that they establish, or to fund urban projects as they see fit.
In the meantime, climate change hysteria is likely to increase with respect to the 18-35 year old population. In 2030, if the world is uninhabitable, we may discover that they were right: saving for retirement is a fool’s errand, when you aren’t going to be alive to be able to spend any money in retirement.
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