Send this article to a friend:

November
02
2020

America Is a Dead Man Walking Because American Youth, or Their Minds,
Have Been Stolen
Paul Craig Roberts

The United States is a screwed-up country.  It this regard, the US has few rivals.

The legal voting age in the US is 18 years of age, which is also the age of female sexual consent and military enlistment.  So at 18 years of age youth can affect the governance of the country, get legally laid, kill and die in combat, but are considered too irresponsible to imbibe alcohol and purchase a pistol from a licensed dealer until three years later at age 21.

An 18 year old can be sent off to war armed to the teeth, but cannot legally purchase a pistol in a gun store.  He or she can influence how we are governed but cannot purchase a drink at a bar or restaurant.

What does an 18-year old know about politics, life, anything?  Except in very rare circumstances, nothing at all.

The anti-American, anti-Western civilization (dead white men), anti-white indoctrination (systemic racism) that is the main function of an American university education is filtering down into the high schools and elementary schools. The United States is perhaps the first country to use education to destroy its own future.  Most certainly, the US is the first country to make multicultural existence impossible.  The Identity Politics of the liberal-progressive-left splits the country into hostile Identity Groups, some of whom have successfully cultivated victim status, which they use to oppress those without it, primarily heterosexual white males.

The anti-American, anti-white liberal-progressive-left has succeeded in brainwashing large swaths of American youth.  In America the best students for the country are no longer the A students.  The best students are the C students who are turned off by the indoctrination and just want to get on with their lives.  

It is the A students who are receptive to the demonization of their country and themselves.  These students have been targeted by the Democrats for massive voter registration.  They have been refocused on overthrowing the “orange-haired racist/misogynist” in the White House.

It is unfortunate that the future of the United States depends on brainwashed, ignorant youth full of self-assertion and confidence that they know best.

But it does.  Therefore, the United States is doomed.

The Russians and Chinese are likely the future rulers, if they can free their minds from the propaganda that the United States is the Hegemonic and Indispensable Nation empowered to rule by the End of History.

Fortunately for the rest of us, both Russia and China have gone through despotic eras that, apparently, the ruling elites themselves are tired of and want no more of.  

Liberation often comes, not from those who speak its langauage, but from those who have suffered its absence.

Graduates of American schools need a decade to recover from the indoctrination.  I propose that the legal voting age in the US be legislated at 30 years of age.  Perhaps it would be best if the voting age was 40 years of age or even 50.  By then at least some people have learned lessons from life.  At 18 no lessons have been learned.  

To allow people judged too irresponsible to order a drink or to purchase a pistol to influence, even determine, the governance of a country is mindless.

Especially in America.

Hon. Paul Craig Roberts is the John M. Olin Fellow at the Institute for Political Economy, Senior Research Fellow at the Hoover Institution, Stanford University, and Research Fellow at the Independent Institute. A former editor and columnist for The Wall Street Journal and columnist for Business Week and the Scripps Howard News Service, he is a nationally syndicated columnist for Creators Syndicate in Los Angeles and a columnist for Investor's Business Daily. In 1992 he received the Warren Brookes Award for Excellence in Journalism. In 1993 the Forbes Media Guide ranked him as one of the top seven journalists.

He was Distinguished Fellow at the Cato Institute from 1993 to 1996. From 1982 through 1993, he held the William E. Simon Chair in Political Economy at the Center for Strategic and International Studies. During 1981-82 he served as Assistant Secretary of the Treasury for Economic Policy. President Reagan and Treasury Secretary Regan credited him with a major role in the Economic Recovery Tax Act of 1981, and he was awarded the Treasury Department's Meritorious Service Award for "his outstanding contributions to the formulation of United States economic policy." From 1975 to 1978, Dr. Roberts served on the congressional staff where he drafted the Kemp-Roth bill and played a leading role in developing bipartisan support for a supply-side economic policy.

In 1987 the French government recognized him as "the artisan of a renewal in economic science and policy after half a century of state interventionism" and inducted him into the Legion of Honor.

Dr. Roberts' latest books are The Tyranny of Good Intentions, co-authored with IPE Fellow Lawrence Stratton, and published by Prima Publishing in May 2000, and Chile: Two Visions - The Allende-Pinochet Era, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen Araujo, and published in Spanish by Universidad Nacional Andres Bello in Santiago, Chile, in November 2000. The Capitalist Revolution in Latin America, co-authored with IPE Fellow Karen LaFollette Araujo, was published by Oxford University Press in 1997. A Spanish language edition was published by Oxford in 1999. The New Colorline: How Quotas and Privilege Destroy Democracy, co-authored with Lawrence Stratton, was published by Regnery in 1995. A paperback edition was published in 1997. Meltdown: Inside the Soviet Economy, co-authored with Karen LaFollette, was published by the Cato Institute in 1990. Harvard University Press published his book, The Supply-Side Revolution, in 1984. Widely reviewed and favorably received, the book was praised by Forbes as "a timely masterpiece that will have real impact on economic thinking in the years ahead." Dr. Roberts is the author of Alienation and the Soviet Economy, published in 1971 and republished in 1990. He is the author of Marx's Theory of Exchange, Alienation and Crisis, published in 1973 and republished in 1983. A Spanish language edition was published in 1974.

Dr. Roberts has held numerous academic appointments. He has contributed chapters to numerous books and has published many articles in journals of scholarship, including the Journal of Political Economy, Oxford Economic Papers, Journal of Law and Economics, Studies in Banking and Finance, Journal of Monetary Economics, Public Finance Quarterly, Public Choice, Classica et Mediaevalia, Ethics, Slavic Review, Soviet Studies, Rivista de Political Economica, and Zeitschrift fur Wirtschafspolitik. He has entries in the McGraw-Hill Encyclopedia of Economics and the New Palgrave Dictionary of Money and Finance. He has contributed to Commentary, The Public Interest, The National Interest, Harper's, the New York Times, The Washington Post, The Los Angeles Times, Fortune, London Times, The Financial Times, TLS, The Spectator, Il Sole 24 Ore, Le Figaro, Liberation, and the Nihon Keizai Shimbun. He has testified before committees of Congress on 30 occasions.

Dr. Roberts was educated at the Georgia Institute of Technology (B.S.), the University of Virginia (Ph.D.), the University of California at Berkeley and Oxford University where he was a member of Merton College.

He is listed in Who's Who in America, Who's Who in the World, The Dictionary of International Biography, Outstanding People of the Twentieth Century, and 1000 Leaders of World Influence. His latest book, HOW THE ECONOMY WAS LOST, has just been published by CounterPunch/AK Press. He can be reached at: [email protected]

Please Donate

I listen to my readers. In March 2010, I terminated my syndicated column. Thousands of you protested. So persuasive were your emails asking me to reconsider and to continue writing that, two months later, I began writing again.

In order to create a coherent uncensored and unedited archive of my writings, The Institute For Political Economy, a non-profit organization that supports research, writing and books, has established this site, thus gratifying readers' demands that I continue to provide analyses of events in our time.

In order to stay up, this site needs to pay for itself.

www.paulcraigroberts.org