Here is the subtitle of Mark Levin’s book Plunder and Deceit: “Big Government’s Exploitation of Young People and the Future.”
Here is the opening sentence: “Can we simultaneously love our children but betray their generation and generations yet born?”
In the next paragraph he answers that question in the affirmative by writing that while parents may “naturally and tenaciously guard their young children from threat and peril… many of these same parents wittingly and unwittingly” tolerate “disadvantageous and even grievous public policies that jeopardize not only their children’s future but the welfare of successive generations.”
What policies are Levin referring to?
Just what you’d expect. Government debt levels. Unfunded entitlement programs. Medicare and Obamacare. He dedicated chapters to each, along with education, immigration, the environment, the economy and national security.
The policies now in place, Levin writes, destroy “the whole original fabric of society,” leaving successive generations little knowledge of and respect for “the institutions of their forefathers.” Paraphrasing Edmund Burke, Levin writes that “society relies on an inter-generational continuum of the past, the living, and the unborn.”
Levin warns that these deleterious public policies will have a “calamitous” outcome. Our country is being degraded and disassembled: “In modern America, the unraveling of the civil society had been subtly persistent but is now intensifying.” Utopian statism is being embraced, guaranteeing that “the quality of life of future generations” will be diminished.
Many of us have seen the polling data Levin cites here: “Americans are registering record levels of anxiety about the opportunities available to younger generations and are pessimistic about the nation’s long term prospects.” According to Levin, most Americans direct their blame at elected leaders in Washington.
One of the biggest challenges is, as Levin notes, “younger people’s dearth of life experiences and their quixotic idealism make them especially vulnerable to simplistic appeals and emotional manipulation for utopia’s grandiosity and social causes.” These “are proclaimed achievable only through top-down governmental designs.”
Unfortunately for the dreamers, Levin writes, the “laws of economics, like the laws of science, are real, and unlike the utopian images and empty assurances of expedient and self-aggrandizing politicians and bureaucrats.”
Mark Levin’s Plunder and Deceit is a must read since “The time is urgent for the ruling generation and the rising generation—that is, parents and their progeny—to step up in defense of their joint interests and in opposition to their common foe—a government unmoored from its constitutional beginnings and spinning out of control.”
