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Culture War Roundup for the week of May 18, 2026

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Well, there is also credit being issued to the young - the very young, that is. We don't ask 0-to-20-year-olds to work to earn their daily bread, indeed we actively prohibit them from doing so. So the debt does exist - your 30-year-old self owes society his labor in exchange for it guaranteeing you a childhood where you didn't have to work in a Dickensian coal mine, or on a farm.

No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do. The parents need the credit from society, and parents-aged people can't get it. Therefore we have a low fertility crisis and people who are too old to be parents trying to have babies. It's unhealthy to have 35 and 45 year old new parents versus 25 year old new parents.

however, we distribute the rewards on the time-honored principle of "half in advance, half when the job's done": 20 years of easy street from birth to graduation, then 40 years of toil, then 20 years of comfortable retirement in your golden years.

It definitely does not work like this. My parents paid for everything during the first 20 years while society only got in the way and demanding they pay more and I make less money. So, from my point of view as a married man who would like to become a father now: I am responsible for paying for my children, and society is not producing the credit for that that it should. It is paying me $150,000 less than my equivalent who is 15 years older, but that equivalent is not a suitable new father and his children should be capable of earning income by that age, or almost, because he should have had children 15+ years ago. As my children grow up, not only do I pay for them, society starts demanding that they and I do things which are disadvantageous and unnatural. Economically, they mainly serve as economic redistribution to all sorts of strange guilds, which we as a family don't owe. There is some sort of half-baked argument covering for this about this being good for my family, the economy, and the nation, which don't really hold water when examined. And the tab here is years of life and hundreds of thousands of lost dollars per family. And then when they are done with all of these things and I'm holding the tab, my children will be systematically underpaid and forced to pay for stranger old people's lifestyles, who have done nothing but steal from us as I have raised them, instead of having more money to use for my grandchildren and myself.

Above all these common-sense considerations, though, there is the even more basic point that most people like having something forward to in their future.

Nature provides for that plenty without this monstrosity of a redistribution system.

Reducing this incredibly fundamental fact of human psychology to a servile desire for a carrot-and-stick model is bizarre and misanthropic

People need to look forward to the end of economic theft from themselves and the beginning of their OAP instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding? That's misanthropic.

Obviously I would rather be promised a few decades of comfort at the end of the road, than believe that nothing but pain and destitution awaits me once I'm no longer deemed to be useful.

No, you should actually earn it, not have it promised by the government.

How you can get out of bed in the morning believing the latter baffles me.

I live my life now and have already accepted the terribleness of old age and death. It seems like others are still in denial about these as adults and would simply like to argue with and negotiate with Mother Nature.

No. Society does not pay for childhood, parents do.

Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?

instead of looking forward to their children and grandchildren and personal plans unfolding

To enjoy any those things aged 70, you need to be able to afford a comfortable living without having to work anymore. But more to the point, you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.

Your parents, who will be old later, and to whom you will therefore owe a pension. What's your point?

When they die I inherit? I actually owe them while I don't owe strangers? They won't nickle-and-dime me like strangers will at the expense of their grandchildren?

you seem to be flip-flopping back and forth as rhetorically necessary between "actually, old people don't need pensions to enjoy comfortable idleness in retirement" and "actually, old people's comfort doesn't matter, screw them, as soon as you're out of the labor force you might as well croak". It is the latter I primarily take issue with.

I believe both. Old people can be comfortable if they earn it, but unless they're my family I'm not willing to make the comfortable at my expense. All they did is take from me and my family.

I believe both. Old people can be comfortable if they earn it, but unless they're my family I'm not willing to make the comfortable at my expense.

Except you also say old people who worked and saved ("earned it") should be "cleared out." So you don't want them to be given anything, and you don't want them to keep anything they earned, you basically just want everyone but your parents put on an ice floe once they can no longer work?

Old people can be comfortable if they earn it,

What do you mean by "earn it"? If you mean "earn it morally by contributing to society while they were able", sure. If you mean "literally personally earn the money they'll live off of in their elder years", we have a problem. There are plenty of working-class people who can work hard every day of their adult life, but for whom making enough savings to make a decent living on in their golden years is simply not a realistic outcome. Have these people "earned" a few decades of retirement? I say yes. I say society needs to offer them some guarantee of it if it wants young men to go into those lines of work, and they are necessary work. But that's going to look like a pension system.

(No, "get married and have kids" doesn't square this circle. Odds are their children will be living paycheck-to-paycheck too, the last thing Junior needs is another mouth to feed on his minimum wage.)

No they have not earned that retirement and I'd expect in the next decade or two of social spending reform that the expectation the boomers have for 20 years of unearned luxury communism will be adjusted until the elderly of 2060 will only get 5-10 years unless AGI ushers in luxury communism for all.