One Of The Worst People In The World

I tried to stay away but my god, the horror!

Now that America has sat by and watched its wealth get sucked up by the 1%, increasing inequality and poverty, we have reached the next stage in this wholesale theft that we allowed.

The shaming.

That's what people do to victims. They try to shame the victims so the latter will crawl away and die, the way losers are supposed to do. Nobody wants to look on the face of their victims. It's annoying. The victims are supposed to just accept their defeat and shut up about it. As the bard says, there's just winners and losers and you don't want to get caught on the wrong side of that line.

And because Megan McArdle is one of the worst people in the world, she eagerly takes up this task for her masters, who are always around to pay such a willing, clever and lucrative sycophant. The victims of our once and future financial crises include students caught paying enormous tuition bills, the unemployed, the underemployed and economic stability, so naturally they are the real felons, not the banksters.

Mrs. Megan McArdle wants you to know that everything is your fault. Yes, you are to blame because individuals have 100% responsibility over their own lives, unless they are a corporation, in which case maybe not. True, you may not have 100% control over your life but that is just too bad. Corporations don't have to obey laws; individuals do.

In Millennials Skip The Ring And Mortgage, McArdle informs us that while high un-and under-employment are not good the economy will get better eventually, tra la la. Her example is 1938, the darkness before the dawn of  better economic times. She does not mention why the economy improved, namely government war spending, because she does not believe it happened.

One reason why Megan McArdle is one of the worst people in the world is because she considers her chosen fields to be extensions of her ideology. She stupidly ignores facts and logic so she can continue to suck up wingnut welfare and think of herself as an intellectual. After confidently stating that lack of employment isn't the important issue, McArdle busies herself with her real mission, providing red meat to conservatives who use their ideology to attack their supposed and imaginary enemies.

But cultural norm shifts can take on a life of their own, especially when children are involved. In many communities, a generation is being raised expecting that fathers will be around intermittently, that adult relationships will be unstable. They will carry that expectation into their own adult lives. They will also carry economic and psychological handicaps, because kids raised in these unstable families will have fewer emotional and financial resources invested in their upbringing and education. 

Unfortunately, we have a lot more tools to fight the joblessness than the arguably more important cultural changes. Even more unfortunately, our tools to fight the joblessness aren’t really that great, either.

Sure, these jobless times are hard but the real problem with the younger generation is single mothers. Not all single mothers, of course. McArdle's readers know the statistics as well as she (half-assed and half-wrong). The real problem today is Those People and all their little bastards, who grow up poor because their mothers dropped out of school to have babies instead of going to prep school like Megan McArdle.

So this Lost Generation of workers and minds, victims of economic rape that was cheered on by Megan McArdle with all of her meager skills and might, is really the fault of unwed mothers, who evidently are to blame for the theft. They were asking for it, the sluts.

But McArdle is not all shame and blame. She perkily advises millennials how to make the most of their poverty while living in their parents' basement. Which brings us to another reason why Megan McArdle is one of the worst people in the world; she is an omnivorous hypocrite. Everything is grist for her mill, and what was once a humiliating experience for her is now a giggle and a lark.

As my readers know, I graduated from my MBA program straight into my parents’ spare bedroom, which is where I lived for the next three years as I tried to figure out what the heck I was going to do for the rest of my life. This did not do wonders for my self-esteem. And yet, believe it or not, I look back on the experience with fondness.

Actually, this is how she looked back on it:

But that doesn't mean I don't understand how awful and terrifying it is to have expected a certain life, and have it stolen away from you by a fate you do not very well control. In June 2001 when I graduated from business school, I had a management consulting gig that was scheduled to pay over $100,000 a year and had just moved back to New York. Two months later, two planes crashed into the World Trade Center, killing a number of people I knew and leaving the rest of us traumatized. Four days after that, I was working at the World Trade Center disaster recovery site, trying to come to grips with what had happened. Four months after that, the consulting firm, having pushed back my start date twice, called my associate class and told all of us that our services would not be required.  

For the next eighteen months, I struggled to find a job, in the teeth of a recession that kicked MBAs especially hard. It was awful in a way that is difficult to describe to anyone who hasn't been unemployed long term; the thing makes you question everything about your life. I remember going to see Avenue Q on a date, and writhing in humiliation, thinking that my date must be identifying me with the aimless failures on stage. I was 29 years old, and living at home. I had money--I always managed to work. But as far as I could tell, I had no future.

One minute she is writhing in humiliation, the next minute she is giving the memory a loving little pat on the head. Ah, those sweet memories of youth! What times! Or what humiliation! It depends on what she is being paid to say. Can you call someone a hypocrite if they believe in nothing?

Now that the rich have safely shafted the poor, McArdle gives the poor some pointers for enjoying their new subterranean life with dear Mom and Dad. Of course one has a good relationship with one's parents and can happily move back with the loving old duffers, because Megan McArdle says most people are on good terms with their parents.

We’ve been reading a lot of stories lately about millennials who feel stuck in their parents’ basement. To those of you who find yourself in that position, I’m not arguing that you’re lucky to be underemployed and unable to afford your own place. I am arguing that you should make the most of the time you spend at home with your parents, because this is the last time you’re going to get to spend this much time with the people who raised you.

Those stupid millennials and their whining complaints about no work, independence or self-respect. Why don't they just turn lemons in lemonade?

My dad lives in Boston now, and I’ve moved to Washington. Although we talk on the phone, I only get to see him once or twice a year. I miss watching the Sunday news shows with him or going for a drive around New York City and having him tell me about the places that we’re seeing. I wish I’d done even more of it when I was living at home -- and I wish that I’d paid more attention to how special it was that I got to do it.

No wonder she thinks she has a great relationship with her father. She only sees him at Christmas and Thanksgiving.

So for those of you who are living at home, here’s a list of a few things you should do to make the most of these last moments you have with your parents. To be sure, I’m assuming that you, like me, are lucky enough to have great parents with whom you get along. If you don’t … well, I’m sorry. But most of us basically like our families, because that’s heredity for you. If that describes you, here’s how to make the most of your time back in the familial manse.

Heredity determines whether or not you like your parents, not your parents' actual behavior. Therefore if you can't get along with your parents you are going against nature! And what if it's not the familial manse, but rather the familial trailer or overfull apartment or abusive suburban split level? Too bad, sucker! I mean, enjoy your new dependence!

But just to make sure you understand that it was your own fault that you ended up with no job, here are a few condescending, obliviously obvious rules handed down to you from your good friend, Megan McArdle, excerpted:

1."Act like an adult." This includes contributing for expenses.

2.Do stuff with your parents before they are dead.

3."Learn to make your favorite childhood dishes. My mother is the pie baker in my family. As a result, I almost never make pie crust -- which means I’m nowhere near as good at doing it as I’d like to be. While you’re home, this is a great time to actually learn to make all the stuff that you’re going to wish you could make when they retire to Boca."

Something that you, you lucky millennial, will never be able to do!

(This little tidbit confirms my suspicion that McArdle does not have the faintest idea how to cook. Thousands of dollars of kitchen equipment yet she can't even rustle up something that is simple as...you know.)

4."If your parents got hit by a bus tomorrow, what would you want to know about your ancestral lore? Find out now."

5."Save money. Even if you’re not making much, your expenses are probably a lot lower than they’re going to be when you’re moving out. Pile up money for an apartment deposit, a downpayment, or enough to buy a car in cash. This may shorten the time you spend at home -- or give you a running start when you leave."

So not only are you responsible for enjoying your dependence, you are responsible for saving your pennies as well. McArdle tells us in a later post:

Barely 15 percent of young people have six months' worth of expenses saved, and the overall average is less than a quarter. Why can’t Americans save? No, don’t tell me that everything has gotten more expensive since 1970 while wages have stagnated. For one thing, incomes haven’t stagnated since 1970 -- no, not even in the middle or bottom. For another, things haven’t just gotten more expensive; we’re buying more expensive things.

Yes, the unemployed and underemployed are broke because they are spending all their imaginary money on expensive cars and houses. Now, McArdle says that because the number of single mothers has risen and single mothers are poorer than married women, the millennials' real long term problem is unwed mothers, not lack of jobs.

So the millennials are broke because they aren't getting married, and they are not buying a house. But they are also spending all their money on expensive houses and cars instead of building a log cabin in the Wisconsin forests, where Pa can shoot a bear and there'll be meat for winter. It's all their own fault that they are broke and the titans of the financial industry are very, very, very rich.

And some of these millennial unwed mother single women people are also demanding birth control paid for by the government, despite the fact they are obviously not buying birth control at all, are they? Yet McArdle says, "overall we are talking about a transfer worth dollars a month to young, single women." A third reason that Megan McArdle is one of the worst people in the world is that she only pretends to be a journalist. Obviously married women also take birth control but it doesn't excite the slut shamers to point out that their wives are probably on employer-provided birth control and McArdle knows how to play to her audience.

Yes, incoherence, not Jennifer, is McArdle's middle name. But that's not what's important. What's important is that you should feel ashamed for being broke and dependent, because one day, when someone will pay you hundreds of thousands of dollars to tell the poor how fortunate they are, you will look back on that time with a smile on your lips and a Williams-Sonoma catalogue on your screen.