We Should Probably Raise The Voting Age
About seven minutes of cringe-worthy television notable in that it somehow didn’t include the student spokeschild asking Cavuto to check his white male privilege.
But are we surprised that the intellectual basis for the Million Student March is this stunningly vapid? This is the social media generation, after all, which gets its news from smirking comedians and internet memes.
Maybe we should raise the voting age. I’m only partially joking.
[mks_pullquote align=”right” width=”300″ size=”24″ bg_color=”#ffffff” txt_color=”#000000″]These are the wages of decades worth of grossly misguided higher education policy. A generation of whiners who don’t want to pay their student loans, who don’t want to start out at the bottom of the wage ladder, and who cannot stand to have their strongly held emotions about halloween costumes or race relations confronted with any dissenting viewpoints.[/mks_pullquote]
We set the age of majority at eighteen because that’s an age when we, as a society, felt that most children have reached adulthood and are ready to take on adult responsibilities. Like entering into contracts, military service, and voting.
Except these days we prolong adolescence far beyond the age of 18. Millions upon millions of American students attend university as a way to prolong the high school experience and postpone adulthood. With the government having turned college attendance into a de facto entitlement, not to mention mandating insurance coverage for these adult children into their mid-20’s (thanks, Obamacare!), why wouldn’t the output be a bunch of kids in their 20’s railing against the sober realities of, say, debt repayment?
These are the wages of decades worth of grossly misguided higher education policy. A generation of whiners who don’t want to pay their student loans, who don’t want to start out at the bottom of the wage ladder, and who cannot stand to have their strongly held emotions about halloween costumes or race relations confronted with any dissenting viewpoints. And they’re not above throwing violent tantrums, and weaponizing safe spaces, to get their way.
So let’s acknowledge that this stuff cuts both ways. With adult responsibilities come adult privileges. If this generation of college-aged toddlers want to shirk their responsibilities to pay for their debts and tolerate diverse opinions then perhaps we should acknowledge that they are, in fact, children and treat them as such.
We don’t let children vote in elections because we recognize they are not capable of grasping the issues. I would argue that a group of people who think the government can wave its magic wand dismiss more than $1 trillion in student loan are operating at a childish intellectual level.
So maybe they shouldn’t be voting.
Of course, that would be fantastically unfair to the millions of young adults in America who are mature, and who do act responsibly, and so we probably shouldn’t do it even if it were politically possible.
But I have to say, watching what’s happening on campuses across the country, it’s a tempting position to take.
