Over at the Lew Rockwell blog I came upon this Forbes piece by pollster John Zogby on a development most of the media have failed to notice:

Young people are leaning heavily to the libertarian side of the ledger.

That should hardly be surprising. Any kid with a brain has to know that we in the older generation intend to leave the young with a huge debt and no means to pay it off.

That's why Ron Paul has done so well among young people in his campaign for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination.

Here's what Zogby has to say about the political views of the voters between 18 and 29 he calls "first globals:"

This is actually some pretty radical stuff.

The rest of the media remain convinced the kids are falling for the standard liberal line about how big government will protect both their income and their environment. But the kids themselves don't seem to agree.

That finding on climate change is especially surprising - and especially bad news for Obama. He long ago made a calculation to throw in with the radical environmentalists of the Al Gore stripe. The point of that calculation was to capture the youth vote.

Looks like bad math all around. As I've noted before, the anthropogenic global-warming fad is a remnant of an era when the economy was so hot it seemed it would boil over. In a cold economy, warming will not be a priority - especially for kids carrying a hundred grand in student loans.

Obama will still win the youth vote despite this trend. The question is what Mitt Romney will do to minimize the Obama vote. And that depends how he treats Ron Paul at the convention this summer.

AND WHILE WE'RE on the subject of how bad fiscal policy can ruin a nation, check this article on the possibility Greece will be kicked out of the Eurozone. Our major-party leaders have an it-can't-happen-here attitude toward this sort of thing. But it can, as Ron Paul warns.

If Greece goes back on the drachma it will actually be a good thing. All of those inflated pensions the Greek public workers voted themselves will deflate quickly when they're denominated in drachmas. Meanwhile prices will plummet and Greece will become a much bigger atrraction for tourism.

Best of all, the Greek leftists will have no one to whine to about austerity. The austerity will be self-imposed.

Here my old friend Ambrose Evans-Pritchard makes the same point about the value of a return to the drachma: