So much did millennials believe in hope and change and the promise of smart government, they voted Barack Obama into the Oval Office — twice.
Now that they are getting a first-hand taste of what smart government means in real life, they seem to be changing their tune.
If a Reason-Rupe survey about millennial attitudes toward government is any indication, though millennials are hardly Republicans they may not be as far apart on some issues as previously assumed.
In some senses, the poll results offer a mixed message. On the general role of government, more than two-thirds believe the public sector has a responsibility to provide food, housing and a living wage. The same majority wants to hike taxes on the wealthy.
But when it comes to what government delivers, millennials sound like Milton Friedman.
Two-thirds of millennials agree that “when something is funded by the government, it is usually inefficient and wasteful.” Large majorities have a positive view of competition and profit, and 55 percent say they’d like to start a business one day.
More interesting is how millennial attitudes change as they either learn more or are more personally involved in the issue. Opposition to income redistribution, for example, rises with income.
Millennials who pay for their health insurance oppose paying more for the uninsured, and when they learn they may get back less from Social Security than they put into it, a majority favors private retirement accounts.
And surprise, surprise! Millennials become “more Republican as they buy homes and get married.”
Some call these responses incoherent, and indeed some of them are. The survey also notes that millennials are much more socially liberal than the GOP, another reason they tend to side with Democrats and President Obama.
Even so, the most striking aspect of this survey is that it refutes what was received wisdom after the 2008 elections: that the era of smart government was upon us, and liberals had a lifetime lock on the young vote.
Six years later, rather than finding their hopes for smart government vindicated, 58 percent of millennials believe “government agencies generally abuse their power” — against only 25 percent who think they “generally do the right thing.”
Just because they have lost faith in Obama-style government doesn’t mean, of course, that millennials have gone to the GOP. That’s why the title of the survey is “Millennials: The Politically Unclaimed Generation.”
But plainly, millennials are ripe for someone willing to reach out to them to help explain why free-market solutions are almost always better than Big Government.