Immoral burden

Published on 24/09/2012 00:00

My OLD student friend Joyce 
McMillan resents charges that our generation has bankrupted the nation (Perspective, 21 September). True, the state pension is not enough to live on, and Joyce’s bus pass isn’t going to break the bank. The trouble is that there are millions of our baby-boom generation, who like us got not just our university fees but also our subsistence paid for, and who are now all claiming their pensions and bus passes and free health and social care – and claiming them for longer as we outlive all previous generations. And many a mickle has broken the bank.

But the problem is more subtle than Joyce suggests. We have voted ourselves education, welfare, healthcare and pension rights in perpetuity, without ever counting the cost. These obligations now tot up to six times more than the official national debt – which at £16,578 per person is scary enough. But who is brave enough to tell their contemporaries that these were unaffordable promises, and cut them back? The expectation that our kids can foot the bill because they will probably be richer than we are is wholly immoral. We have no right to force a single penny from the pockets of our children to pay for our mistakes.

Money can’t buy you “comradeship, self-respect and love”, but you certainly need it to pay for the groceries. And by not counting the cost of our promises to ourselves, our generation has simply run out of cash. Stating that fact is not a “campaign against a whole generation” but merely a frank admission of our own profligacy, and of our immorality in sticking our children with a huge debt as their share of our failure.

Eamonn Butler

Director

Adam Smith Institute

Great Smith Street, London