The Kids Might Be Alright

I was recently invited to a University careers expo to talk about my brilliant career; a career that looks better on paper than it does in real life.

I was standing at a table waiting for wide-eyed, highly strung kids to come up to me and ask about what it’s like to BS for a living… I mean, what it’s like to work in marketing and media. There I was, on display like some kind of active mannequin dispensing nuggets of Google-able information.

Within three seconds the meaty cheesy grazing table resembled a Tragedy of the Commons™. Before too long, my tired old hounds were barking. To soothe them, I retreated to a nearby balcony. A few students were sitting down and contemplating their fifteenth drink for the night, thanks to a very open bar.

Exchanging a few pleasantries, I had to ask: “What’s the political mood at uni like these days?”

It wasn’t a representative sample: most were private-school educated, tutored-from-birth, walking returns on familial investment. I felt compelled to press them, nonetheless.

One broccoli haired kid ventured an answer, “We hate the 1%,” he said. “Yeah, that’s about it.”

He said it without a trace of irony – he’s attending an organisation set up specifically to groom an elite class.

Er, what does that even mean?

Being in Victoria, I dropped a few names to gauge their reactions. I expected fawning after anything watermelon coloured. Jacinta Allan caused revulsion; Daniel Andrews inspired fury. Jeff Kennett inspired some kind of generational nostalgia; they never felt the deregulated glory days, but they sure did know about them. As Commerce students, they weren’t particularly impressed with Grim Jim’s budget.

“I don’t know how it’s going to improve housing affordability,” said one kid who’d gathered a semester’s worth of economic wisdom under his belt and the over-confidence to match. “I mean, what’s even the point of investing in shares now?”

With a capital gains tax minimum of 30% across the board, I don’t blame them.

If you’re a boomer and wondering how they do it, investing in shares is easy. Kids can either piss about in Call of Duty Mobile or trade ETFs during class. They share an equal degree of difficulty.

If they have such disdain for the 1%, I figured they must be supporters of Occupy and/or some flavour of socialist nonsense. “No, that definitely doesn’t work, but there shouldn’t be any billionaires,” said broccoli bonce.

I posed this hypothetical: would you rather voluntarily pay an entity for goods and services, or have someone take your money by force and give it to someone else? All chose the former. We’re off to a good start.

So, what if some person sold fifty cent wonder widgets to two billion people at one dollar a piece? At what point do we take his or her money away to prevent them becoming a billionaire? What if they refuse to give up their largesse? Is it fair to seize wealth from someone when two billion people got some kind of value in return? That the entire operation provided jobs for countless material harvesters, widget makers, marketing people, retail staff, posties? That’s if the venture succeeded; it may have failed.

As commerce students, they seemed to grasp the point.

“There’s so much propaganda and misinformation out there,” said a bad moustache wearing an expensive suit and school tie I didn’t recognise. “Like that David Pocock guy, saying we should tax gas exports.”

Revenue on gas exports, I corrected him.

“Yeah, revenue on gas exports. What does he know about tax? Isn’t he a rugby player or something?”

Yes, the rugby player LARPing as a politician, I said.

“What’s LARPing?” he replied.

It means live-action roleplaying. Pretending. Fed lines by a Greens-aligned think tank.

“Ohh,” he said. “That’s what LARPing means.”

Ugh, kids today.

Another kid brought up debt and how we’re never going to pay it off. I said that we live under the spectre of Modern Monetary Theory – we can just print more.

“Doesn’t that mean inflation?” a wobbly undergrad asked.

Yes, young padawan. Yes, it does. The idea is that the government creates money to pick up “slack” in an under-productive economy, to mobilise those resources. Inflation only happens after all the resources are tied up. That means some bureaucrat has to cook up what “slack” means – and as we found out during our COVID-19 lockdowns, almost no one is an “essential worker.”

Hell, if the government can print money, why should we pay taxes? A few bobble-heads nodded in approval.

“So, what’s the solution?” some kid out of sight asked.

There’s no such thing as a solution.

They inaudibly gasped.

“Everything is a trade-off,” I said. “Let’s say you have an exam tomorrow. You could hit the books, or you could play Arc Raiders for three hours. Which will help you more? There’s no immediate cost to doing either. As for ‘future you?’ Well, that’s a different story.

“You could have started a trade and saved half a house deposit by now, but you chose to go to university and study something that AI might take over in half a decade. The trade-off is 7am starts and mind-numbing repetition over opening up a laptop at 11am with coffee in hand and pyjamas still on searching for jobs against fifty thousand identical applicants,” pointing towards their peers.

“Or you use that same laptop to start a business selling hammers to those tradies.”

Those who remained sipped in silence before departing.

Just as I was shuffling out of the venue, one mushroom-headed beanpole tapped me on the arm and said, “Thanks for giving us your wisdom tonight,” he said, as I tried stifling a giggle. “Because no one ever tells it to us straight.”

They never do, do they?