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Notes -
Anti-old policies have a greater issue than just morals for unknown vulnerable strangers. Basically everyone has someone old in their life they love (I have both parents and an aunt) who are still independent right now but might not be in the next decade or two and it's something I really am having to plan for.
But beyond even that, while younger folk like me might want to deny it we are all aware we will get old as well. Voting in anti old policies is moronic then, it's literally voting against my future self. Euthanasia at 75 means I die at 75, and that's assuming the number doesn't ratchet down.
Sure my adult children might be able to care for me but more and more people don't like that, they don't like being independent on their kids and I don't like the idea either. Funding it through taxes on everyone essentially does the same thing, my kids pay a little for every senior and all the other kids will pay a little for me.
Really the bigger answer is automation and zoning reform. We can raise our overall quality of life despite shrinking and aging populations because robots do the labor (as automation has already been doing for a few centuries now) and zoning reform can help create accessible nice homes for the old to move to so young people with kids can have an actual house.
The issue with this is that elder care-related consumption is reaching a relative share of all expenses that it's starting to eat up all the headroom for robotics or general investment in productive capital. And in that sense, anti-old policies need not be moronic, even for someone who is well aware that they're going to be old one day too. It's better to cut down expenses now and focus them into the things that will ensure the continued ability of the economy to produce goods and services at a sufficient level well into the future where I want to retire too at some point, than to feed the seed corn to the gerontocracy utility monster that we've collectively built in the West and watch society come crashing down as a consequence.
Case in point: here in Germany, even though state spending as a total share of GDP has grown quite slowly in past decades, inside that state spending welfare has greatly displaced capital investment, and while a tiny share of that change is related to stuff like migration and a general propensity towards ever greater gibs, it's basically 100% down to our aging society. It's no coincidence that we have collapsing bridges in major cities, but pensions continually increase above inflation even as the share of pensioners increases.
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