Daily writing prompt

What is something you wish you could tell your 20-year-old self?

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How a Country Shifts Toward More Government Control — For People Who Actually Work for a Living

I’ve been thinking a lot about why so many young people today drift toward socialism. And the more I look at it, the more I realize it’s not because they’re lazy or entitled. It’s because the world they’re growing up in is nothing like the world I grew up in. The path that built my life doesn’t exist for them anymore.

When I was young, opportunity wasn’t behind a locked door. You didn’t need permission to get started. You didn’t need a license to have ambition. You didn’t need insurance to mow a lawn or a lawyer to hang a kitchen cabinet. You saw a job, you did the job, and you learned something along the way.

I picked things out of the trash, fixed them, and resold them. That wasn’t “illegal.” That was hustle. If I did that now the way I did it back then — driving around, loading up the truck, flipping stuff every week — I’d probably get pulled over and asked what I was doing. Today they’d tell you that you need a resale certificate, a business license, a tax ID, and probably a fire inspection just to plug in a drill. When the simplest form of entrepreneurship is treated like suspicious activity, young people don’t think “I should work harder.” They think “The system is rigged — someone needs to fix it.” And that’s exactly how they drift toward socialism.

I worked for people who didn’t have licenses or insurance. Nobody cared. You showed up, worked hard, and earned your money. I cut grass as a minor. I rehabbed buildings without a permit. I learned plumbing, electrical, carpentry, and problem‑solving by doing it. Today you need a permit to sneeze near a wall. Young people never got the chance to learn the way we did. They never got the chance to build confidence through doing. The system boxed them out before they even started.

And look, I’m not pretending the whole country is like this. There are still plenty of places — small towns, rural counties, wide‑open parts of America — where a kid can still hustle the way I did. Places where people fix their own stuff, help their neighbors, and don’t need a permit to change a lightbulb. The problem is the population isn’t in those places anymore. The population is packed into cities and dense suburbs where regulation is the culture and government is involved in everything. And in a country where the majority rules, once more than 50% of voters start leaning toward more government, more control, more “protections,” the whole nation shifts with them. That’s how civilizations change direction — slowly, quietly, and by sheer numbers.

And the truth is, this shift didn’t happen by accident. It happened one layer at a time. Every time a problem popped up, someone added a rule. Every time a lawsuit hit the news, someone added another rule. And behind the scenes, lobbyists were pushing for even more rules — not to protect the public, but to protect big companies from competition. The more complicated the system got, the more power those companies had, because they were the only ones who could afford the lawyers, the compliance departments, the insurance, and the paperwork. Regular people like us got buried under layers of regulation we never asked for. Stack enough layers on a society and people start believing the only way to survive is with more government help.

And I’m seeing this play out in my own business right now. Mom‑and‑pop landlords — the people who kept neighborhoods stable, who fixed their own properties, who worked with tenants, who actually cared — they’re retiring and selling out. Not because they want to, but because the regulations, inspections, fees, insurance, and legal exposure have made it impossible to stay in the game. And who’s buying everything up? Big corporations and foreign investment groups with deep pockets and legal teams. They love regulation because it wipes out the small operators. And if people think rents are high now, just wait until every property is owned by a corporation that doesn’t know your name and doesn’t care about your situation. When the little guys are gone, the prices don’t just go up — the humanity goes down.

My generation didn’t push back on the lawyers, the bureaucrats, the politicians, or the corporations who quietly built this maze of rules. Not because we were weak, but because we were busy. We were working. We were raising families. We were building the country while other people were building the rulebook.

So when people ask why young folks today lean toward big‑government thinking, the answer is simple: they grew up in a world where the government already controls everything. They’ve never seen what real freedom looks like. They’ve never experienced the satisfaction of solving a problem with their own hands. They’ve never had the chance to hustle their way into a better life. The ladder we climbed has been pulled up, and they’re standing at the bottom staring at a wall of paperwork.

I’m grateful I grew up when I did. I’m grateful I had the chance to hustle, to learn, to fail, to figure things out on my own. But I’d be lying if I said I wasn’t worried. Because if a kid today tried to live the way I lived, the government would shut him down before he even got started. And that’s not progress. That’s a slow, quiet tragedy.