Aging & Wisdom Quote by B. Carroll Reece

A politician’s complaint about “youth today” is rarely just about youth; it’s a proxy war over what kind of country gets built next. Reece frames the issue as pedagogy - what we “teach” - but the real target is the post-Depression, postwar turn toward the welfare state and managed capitalism. “Independence, energy, and enterprise” are not neutral virtues here. They’re coded endorsements of private risk-taking, business primacy, and a moral hierarchy where self-reliance signals worthiness. By contrast, “security” is cast as an emotional crutch, a soft seduction that drains national vigor.

The line works rhetorically because it turns an economic argument into a character argument. If the debate is about programs, budgets, and labor protections, you can haggle. If it’s about whether schools are raising strivers or dependents, compromise starts to look like capitulation. Reece also carefully relocates responsibility: not employers, not markets, not policy shocks, but educators and cultural elites are allegedly programming dependency. That move keeps the “enterprise” side clean and the “security” side suspect.

Context matters: Reece was a conservative Republican voice during the era when the New Deal order still shaped American life and Cold War anxieties rewarded ideological clarity. “Security” could mean Social Security, unions, federal employment, even the idea of economic rights. The subtext is a warning: if the next generation expects guarantees, they’ll vote for them - and the old architecture of power will have to share.