The challenging state of government welfare entitlement programs may make the best recruitment tools yet for young people who are either detached from politics or completely sold to the Democrats. Take Social Security, for example.

Social Security is a trust fund whereby the current generation of workers pays the retired generation, with the promise and expectation that they, too, shall receive pay upon retirement. It is simple at the core, but the stark reality is, paying off early investors with funds taken from later investors is defined as a Ponzi scheme. Its sort of what Bernie Madoff was doing, until the money ran out. So, Bill Frezza over at RealClearMarkets recently asked:

Why do kids put up with this? Last time I checked they were old enough to vote. An entire generation is being systematically robbed by their parents with nary a peep. Why aren’t they marching in the streets like we did? When they do show up at the polls like sheep ready to be shorn, they pull the lever for kumbaya politicians promising to stick them with the bill for an ever-expanding menu of unfunded middle class entitlements.

And that’s the biggest reason why Social Security is going bankrupt, and much sooner than people think. The “trust fund” has run out of trust because it is raided on a daily basis to pay for hundreds of other entitlement programs that have nothing to do with retirement but would end if it weren’t for Social Security.

At any rate, Frezza concludes the kids aren’t marching because their baby-boomer parents failed to raise Gen-X to maturity, and their kids are basically unaware of the impending disaster being thrown upon them by their parents. Perhaps. But perhaps their parents also failed to instill a sense of social outrage to match an ability to think clearly. (Just who was matching and protesting in the 60s, anyway?)

Taking over where the parents left off, Democrats are extremely successful in recruiting young people as party servants. Go to any polling place on election day, and one is bound to find teens holding Democrat campaign signs nearby. Republicans have failed to attract youth members, and that’s partly why the party rolls are declining precipitiously. So, what makes the Democrats so appealing to the youth? There are two reasons.

First, there is an active outreach to welcome young people and engage them in party activities. Young people are recruited for social engagements, and those who choose to be active participants are rewarded with accolades, recognition, and responsibility.

Second, the Democrats appeal to youthful idealism. They successfully invoke community, activitism, group participation, and social justice. As a political entity, they promise to help people and make the world a better place, which is attractive to young people in their late teens and early 20s, who themselves are starting to live independently but feel a need for external help and a place to belong.

Naturally, the Democrat propaganda is just that: they lure young people into their machine with idealism just long enough to have some sort of investment in the system: a political career in the nitty-gritty powerhouse, or just clinging to the hope that a better world is just around the corner if only Democrats win the next election and finally make all those promises come true.

For Republicans to even think about success in the 21st century, they had better take a cue from the Democrats and appeal directly to a class of voters who are alive now and (we hope) will have a longer and fuller life than the previous generations.

There is no reason Republicans cannot seize the mantle of youthful idealism and social justice, and perhaps the best way to do it is to appeal to simple logic. Ask a (very) young person to consider the following:

• What if the government has a social program that helps poor people?
• What if that program relies on tax money to keep it active, so it continues to help the needy?
• Now, what if the government spends so much money on other things, there’s not enough left to help the poor?
• What if the government tries to raise taxes to get more money, but it makes businesses close and the unemployed workers become poor?
• What happens when these people and others like them need help from that program?
• How much longer before you and your friends will be asking for help from that program, but its been closed because there’s no more money in it?

Ultimately, you’re asking young people to wonder what good a comprehensive socialized system will do anyone when it fails.

Like social security will.

The philosophical difference between Republicans and Democrats should not be whether the government should be helping people, but rather how those people are being helped. For the Democrats, a top-down command-authority is clearly their solution for society’s woes. Thomas More’s Isle of Utopia was a dictatorship, after all.

Republicans should rather encourage youth to employ their unique individualism to solving communal problems, to recognize the individual as the source of community strength, and that “people power” is actually practiced and embraced by the party of Lincoln, the same who freed the slaves on the basis of equality and liberty.

For Republicans to end the Democrat domination of the young voter, clear principles will not just need to be advertised, they will need to be highlighted, promoted, and most importantly, put into practice!