The Government War on Young Enterprise
What do the London riots and the recent government crackdowns on Lemonade stands across America have in common? The answer is that in each case, government has done its best to control young people, to stop them engaging in enterprise. In Britain, the project is much more advanced. So if we want to know where the war on Lemonade selling ends up, we just have to look at the smashed windows and looted shops of Clapham Junction.
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[Government] kills enterprise by insisting on box-checking and standards, destroys self-reliance by ensuring people look to bureaucracy first, and erodes neighborhood by its layers of ever-remoter officialdom. Of course, the cry in response is that government protects us and our children. We see how well that worked in Britain.
The article also talks about the role of the minimum wage in this war. When the minimum wage is too high for employers to hire teenagers, the teens don't learn the skills to be able to cope in the workforce.
These are the years in which young people learn valuable skills and ethics that they will carry with them until they die. At work, they meet a great variety of people and have to learn to deal cooperatively with different temperaments and personalities. They learn how to do things they do not really want to do and they also discover the relationship between work and reward.
The article also mentions that the UK is importing labor to handle the service industries. Sounds like America, doesn't it?
The reason for this is clear: The young unemployed Britons not only have the wrong attitude to work, for example regarding fixed hours as a form of oppression, but they are also dramatically badly educated.
Why hire someone at $10/hr when they are not productive enough to earn it? You may as well hire an adult foreigner who can do what needs to be done.
The goal seems to be to bring up the next generation as dependent on government as they can.
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