very day, as I drive to work at the university, I see college students darting across the road, or standing in the middle of the street, with traffic whizzing past them at 45 miles per hour, oblivious to the fact that a single careless lane change by any driver would leave that student crippled for life, or worse. The students don't think of themselves as kids, of course, and they get angry if you call them that, but someday they will look back in horror as I do and shiver to think how easy it would have been back when they were kids for one slip in judgment to create an irreversible catastrophe.

Last week, for example, a twenty-something co-ed audaciously walked out right in front of me, glaring at me as if daring me to run over her. If I hadn't slammed on my brakes I would have done so. This is the audacity of youth. They believe, as kids have always done, that they will live forever, that their country and the economy are indestructible, and they are unable to imagine that one slip will get them killed or get their country conquered or make everyone poor. The girl's friends, more sensible, and more conservative, stayed on the curb, and, I like to think, quite probably defriended her the next day on her Facebook page.

A few years ago, when I was living in Texas, large groups of black teenagers would audaciously ride their bikes on the street at night, wearing dark clothes, with no lights or reflectors on their bicycles. In this city, like many cities in Texas, there are few streetlights. The kids were literally impossible to see—the only way to know of their presence was to drive with your window open in the 96 degree heat and hope that you could hear them before it was too late.

Yet these same kids would have been filled with rage and indignation if they had been struck and killed, as if they had a right to be idiots and not suffer the consequences. They were poor and uneducated, but they had the exact same audacity of stupidity that the middle-class college kids had. They would have bitterly resented being yanked out of their cocoon of privileged innocence and dragged into the real, cold world. They would rather blame somebody else and make somebody else pay than admit being wrong.

The white and Hispanic teenagers in Houston were the same, driving around in their pickup trucks, having fun by drinking beer and urinating out the side window, unaware of the concrete overpass approaching them at 100 miles per hour. The abutment did not care that the kids were just being cool. True, their audacious act of hope and bravado led to a brief moment of fame on the Ten O'clock News, and gave them an immortality, of sorts, that lasted until the City finished scraping the last remnants of their brains off the concrete.

Science tells us that biology makes young people this way: the frontal cortex, which controls judgment, is not fully developed until the mid-twenties, and of course biology makes sure they are mainly concerned with having fun and having sex with each other. Biology has its wisdom, to be sure, but physics is an intolerant bastard. When biology runs up against physics, biology loses.

So it is with money. To anyone with common sense, the idea that we can all sponge off the rich and live off free stuff that the government taxed away from the bad white people would have been revealed as obvious racist nonsense by the example of Greece, which has already had one EU-mandated coup, and will almost certainly suffer a few more before before sliding into Middle Eastern-style chaos and most probably civil war. Most kids never heard of the economic collapse in Argentina and its terrible human cost, and our politicians, with cynical statists like Paul Krugman egging them on, just tell them everything's the white man's fault, and we can just print money, eat candy all day, tax and spend, like spoiled rich kids with their parents' credit card.

But to coin a phrase, macroeconomics is the new physics. When the bill comes due, we Old Ones, the ones who put your ancestors on the Moon and invented the computer and the Internet and fought to rid the world of gulags, will be gone. Our generation, and eleven generations before us, fought, each in our own way, and many of us died so you could know what it felt like to be free in a free country. We never dreamed you'd just throw it away.

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