(VitalNews.org) – A not-insignificant portion of the Generation Z population has been upending traditional expectations about “what the youth want.” Many in the group, born between the late 1990s and 2010, are either incapable or simply unwilling to even get a driver’s license or leave their parents’ homes!
And instead of bucking authority or “the system,” an alarming number of Gen Zers told the Cato Institute they’d like to be ruled more intrusively. A Cato survey of 2,000 Americans found that one-third of Gen Z respondents were in favor of government-installed cameras inside the private homes of Americans.
Overall, 75 percent of Americans across demographic groups strongly reject the notion, but the fact that even 25 percent approve of it will be cold comfort to civil libertarians. But Gen Z was the striking outlier, approving of government-controlled spying in private homes at a rate higher than any other group surveyed.
As Cato put it in a report on the survey, “Americans under 30” are much more comfortable with this level of government intrusion into what most Americans see as their private castle. The survey asked respondents if they favored or opposed government-installed surveillance cameras in homes if the purpose was to tamp down domestic abuse or crime.
Generation Z has long been observed to have a high number of members comfortable with, or even desiring, a level of nanny state oversight that most Americans traditionally find repellent and unacceptable. A recent Pew survey showed that 70 percent of Millennials and Gen Z respondents said the government should “do more to solve problems.”
In the Cato survey about in-home government cameras, 29 percent of respondents between the ages of 18 and 29 were in favor. But only 20 percent of those between the ages of 30 and 44 viewed the proposal positively.
The opinion starts dividing sharply at the age line that demarcates Generation X. The survey found 94 percent of people between 45 and 64 rejected in-home government surveillance.
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