Imagine the following scenario: It is the year 2038, and you are 68 years old. Three years ago, you were forcibly retired from your job as a senior manager at an insurance company, under a new law that instituted mandatory retirement ages across all white-collar occupations. This didn’t panic you because you had sacrificed, scrimped, and saved for years toward the day when you might have to retire. You even owned your home free and clear, having paid off the mortgage with just 24 years of hard, thrifty work. Consequently, while your future would not be luxurious, it would be secure.
But then other ominous things began happening: Shortly after being forced to retire, you were prevented from attending your local school board meeting by a new rule that prevented “a majority of gerontocrats in the audience.” The same thing happened at every other local government function you tried to attend afterward. Town, city, and state. You were barred from entry everywhere. And you started seeing that word — gerontocrats — everywhere you went: on TV, social media, the front page of newspapers.
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The day came when your state had a referendum on a new “project of intergenerational justice.” Under this policy, your property taxes would increase by 10% for every year you’d owned a property past the tenth year. You went to the polling place to vote against it, only to be confronted by a line of more than a thousand people. Voting had recently been made mandatory, and there were stiff penalties for missing the polls. You waited nine hours in a line of young people who made jokes about how they were going to take all your stuff and put you in a home. That evening, you saw that the new property tax measure had been passed. It was retroactive. You have lived in your home for 35 years, so your new property tax is 1,083% of what it was the previous year.
You calculate that you can stay in your home for four more years if you sell your remaining investments immediately. That’s when you discover that, as an investor over the age of 65, you will pay a 65% tax on all net gains, for the purposes of “intergenerational justice.” You sell your house to a venture capital firm for a pittance, since you are one of perhaps 2 million people in your state affected by the new law, and it is, to put it mildly, a buyer’s market. You cash out your shares, take the one-third of the money you’re allowed to keep, and move to an apartment owned by the same firm that bought your home. You calculate that you will be utterly destitute before your 72nd birthday. When you have a panic attack about this and go to the hospital, you will have to wait until everyone under the age of 55 is attended to, at which point the doctor will offer you “MaiD,” short for medical assistance in dying, short for state-provided painless suicide.
The above scenario isn’t science fiction. It reflects an agenda recently given a platform in the pages of Harper’s, the Atlantic, and the New York Times by Yale professor and residential head Samuel Moyn. Most of his previous books have disappeared into obscurity the moment they were released, covering such non-potboiler topics as the 1948 Declaration of Human Rights, the work of Emmanuel Levinas, and the political stances taken by Isaiah Berlin and Judith Shklar during the Cold War. The reader can be forgiven if he has never heard any of these names. Much of the liberal arts professorship business consists of writing grant-subsidized birdcage filler about the lives and work of other liberal arts professors and Marxist philosophers. The purpose of these books is not to be sold, read, or enjoyed. They are intended to “drive the discourse,” which is a fancy way of saying they “keep professors in their completely secure and undemanding six-figure jobs.”
Moyn’s latest book, by contrast, is receiving substantial and persistent national attention. Titled Gerontocracy In America: How the Old Are Hoarding Power and Wealth — And What to Do About It, it advocates a witches’ brew of horrifying actions to be taken against older Americans. To quote from Moyn’s recent guest essay in the New York Times:
“It is not ageist … to begin to save our democracy from gerontocracy. … It is not ageist … to impose policies to transfer jobs, houses and wealth down the generational chain … [we should] reinstitute mandatory retirement in those employment sectors (especially white-collar work) where generational renewal has been obstructed for years. In housing, besides circumventing the disproportionately high elder participation in town meetings where land-use decisions are made, I advocate a progressive tax on older homeowners to incentivize them to downsize rather than retain. The longer you stay, the more you should have to pay. The funds could allow for new construction and other projects of intergenerational justice.”
So, ageist policies or not actually ageist? Perhaps no one has told Moyn that, outside of an elementary-school squabble, asserting the opposite of the truth does not magically make it true. One gets the sense that Moyn only neglected to mention confiscating the gold teeth of the elderly because most of us are getting composite resin in our cavities nowadays.
What’s most notable is that Moyn’s book received a simultaneous triple-barrel promotion across three of the most influential left-wing publications in America. Gerontocracy in America won’t be published until mid-June, but that didn’t stop the New York Times, the Atlantic, and Harper’s from giving it a front-and-center airing in the space of a single week.
Instead of running a piece by Moyn or an excerpt from his book, as the New York Times and Harper’s did, the Atlantic was a little more shy. It had Harvard graduate Idrees Kahloon write a glowing review of Moyn’s ideas that grudgingly conceded, “This proposed social engineering is both harsh and vanishingly improbable,” before continuing as follows: “Curing gerontonomia would require redirecting some public funds from programs aimed at the elderly, such as Social Security, to family benefits, education, and infrastructure.”
So, yeah, it will be hard to confiscate all the old folks’ stuff and keep them out of the voting booth, but “curing gerontonomia” — a rather chilling neologism recently created by Tim Vlandas in the pages of the Political Quarterly — will require us to do it, so let’s figure it out, OK? Like it or not, we will apparently have to break a lot of older eggs to make the intergenerational justice omelet.
Unless Moyn has become a far more persuasive person, or has acquired a far more persuasive literary agent, than was the case with his previous books, it seems obvious that these three ultra-prestigious literary institutions have simultaneously glommed on to this idea of “intergenerational justice” because their individual and institutional preferences strongly accord with Moyn’s ideas about the elderly. And why not? In the New York Times, Moyn makes what he must surely think is an utterly airtight case against the continued existence of the gerontocracy: “Older Americans favor restrictions on immigration most, even when they need immigrant caregivers most. Likewise, there is a correlation between age and resistance to policies to halt the overheating of the planet or raise funds for education and other civic purposes.”
This, finally, is where we find the true reason for Moyn’s anti-elderly activism and its enthusiastic reception in the national paper of record: Old people are voting all wrong! They are refusing to pull the lever for increased immigration and draconian “climate action”! If we can’t trust older people to vote, as the New York Times and the Atlantic insist, can we really trust them with things such as houses and money?
MAGAZINE: THE ONLY EV THAT EVER MATTERED
If the programs suggested by Moyn, and eagerly seconded by these legacy media dinosaurs, seem vaguely familiar to you, it might be because they are very far from new. There’s a phrase for legislation that removes the right to own property, possess wealth, and participate in the political process from individuals: bill of attainder. To be “attainted” is to lose one’s civil rights and forfeit one’s property to the Crown.
You might think that a bill of attainder is a notably un-American idea, and in this, the Founders would agree with you. The Constitution explicitly prohibits them. Perhaps Samuel Moyn can be forgiven for being both historically ignorant and openly tyrannical. Such is the privilege of Ivy League tenure. It is more worrisome to have his dangerous and discriminatory ideas openly espoused on the national stage. The Atlantic traces its founding to 1857, the New York Times to 1851, and Harper’s to 1850. These institutions should possess more than a passing familiarity with American values. Since they do not, they could always ask the nearest “gerontocrat” for an education on the topic — without, it is to be hoped, attempting to steal their stuff.
Jack Baruth was born in Brooklyn, New York, and lives in Ohio. He is a pro-am race car driver, a former columnist for Road and Track and Hagerty magazines, and writer of the Avoidable Contact Forever newsletter.
