Yes people do actually think like that. Liberal people:
The next “golden age” of Canada’s public service will be led by millennials, says Treasury Board President Scott Brison, and that means the federal workplace must change to attract highly valued workers under age 35.
“We are really well-served by an excellent public service, but we have a lot of work to do in engaging millennials more fully, in terms of transforming our public service to be open, more accountable, more transparent and less partisan,” said Brison.
Canada’s aging population poses challenges for the federal government to ensure it employs enough skilled people of all ages. The public service is emerging from an era of spending restraints and cuts with a smaller, older workforce of employees 18 to 65-plus.
In briefing books for Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, who is also the minister of youth, bureaucrats say the average age of new hires is now 37 and warn not enough young people are being hired permanently. In fact, in the final years of the Tory tenure, the number and proportion of permanent employers under age 35 decreased.
I had always thought that keeping the young (or youngish) people off the dole was a good thing. Scott Brison apparently disagrees and wants to begin flooding the Public Service with the under 35 demographic. As the article goes onto explain young people are more "innovative" than the old. That's code for saying that old people are useless and should just go and die already. I exaggerate slightly.
That's the first unspoken assumption of the minister's screed: Old bad, young good. Of course he'd never say that openly, those Canadians of a certain age do much of the voting so flipping them the bird must be done discretely. Far worse is the assumption that governments should "innovate." Why would a government need to innovate? The job of government is pretty straightforward: See that fellow over there violating the rights of his fellow Canadians? Lock up him. Honestly an idiot could do government work and idiots often do.
This is the genius of the classical liberal state, an idea so simple and straight forward it pretty much runs itself. This allows the productive elements in society to get on with living. To the classical liberal the state is merely a means to a regrettable ends, the punishment of the violent and fraudulent. If mankind were to ever reach a level of enlightenment where force and fraud was non-existent, the state could wither away as it does in the fables of Marxism. Until that glorious day arrives we will have to continue with the fairly routine business of punishing the genuinely wicked and dangerous.
For classical liberals the state is merely the plumbing. For modern liberals the state is the whole house, everyone who lives there and the entire neighbourhood as well. An expansive vision that will consider no object too small, no issue too trivial to be beyond its remit. This is why grown men can speak of "government innovation" and a "golden age" for the public service. They cannot separate their vision of society from their vision of government. They speak of government the way a normal man might speak of a great passion or a long sought for dream. Striped of all its flowery image the the truth of government is far less glorious: The modern state is a gun perpetually pointed at the common people of Canada.
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