Fresh out of college and full of ideals, young Americans are finding that, in this economy, the American Dream comes at a steep cost. Just ask Michelle Holshue:
At 30 years old, Holshue exemplifies a key tenet of the American dream: exceeding one’s parents’ education and income.
Uncontrolled public debt threatens to rupture society, says Niall Ferguson, as the older generation thrives at the expense of the young.
In his Reflections on the Revolution in France (1790), Edmund Burke wrote that the real social contract is not Jean-Jacques Rousseau’s contract between the sovereign and the people or “general will”, but the “partnership” between the generations. He writes: “SOCIETY is indeed a contract… The state … is … a partnership not only between those who are living, but between those who are living, those who are dead, and those who are to be born.” In the enormous intergenerational transfers implied by current fiscal policies we see a shocking and perhaps unparalleled breach of precisely that partnership, so brilliantly described by Burke.
