New York Times: Old People Suck and We Should Take Their Stuff

The New York Times on old people: It is not ageist to ask whether older people should be required to give more to younger Americans… Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration… there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet… impose age ceilings on political offices… Older Americans own much of the most desirable real estate… It is not ageist, finally, to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain. Yale law professor Samuel Moyn, whom I interviewed once, always seemed generous and reasonable, even when our politics differed. But unless it’s an elaborate meta-joke, the above column and forthcoming book Gerontocracy in America: How the Old are Hoarding Wealth and Power in America advance some of the most intellectually vicious ideas I’ve ever seen. The Godwin’s Law factor alone is a shocker. Moyn observes that people of years have accumulated money and influence and contrives to end the “tyranny of the old” by having “the elderly divested of political power, wealth, and property,” because reasons. The title of the Times piece, “Older Americans Are Hoarding America’s Potential,” carries the obscene lefty connotation that no one really owns anything and the elderly, by dint of living too long to begin with, and having a generally shitty quality of life compared to the young, and voting incorrectly/selfishly (hilarious, in the context of open scheming to seize their savings) and wasting resources “playing for time” for “another day, month, or year among loved ones” makes them lousy stewards of what the author unironically calls “our inheritance,” i.e. their homes and bank accounts. Moyn cites the example of apes and chimpanzees who establish hierarchies based on “brute strength, and therefore physical vitality” and can “marginalize faltering alpha males” who then “sometimes go into exile, which means death.” Humans, by unpleasant contrast, traditionally value the wisdom of elders, so achieving “intergenerational equity” may require (here Moyn quotes the Succession character Shiv Roy) “a good old-fashioned dinosaur cull.” The piece doesn’t just seethe with collectivist bloodlust, it’s incorrect. Moyn confuses a handful of old politicians and billionaires with the wider category of “old people,” who far from being antisocial hoarders have been repeatedly victimized by public and private interests over the last twenty-plus years, always for the same offense: being good citizens. I’d say it’s astonishing that a Yale professor could not know this, but sadly it isn’t. As someone who had to cover the ripoffs, it’s lunacy: