From Woodstock to Wall Street

The creed of almost every ideological group contains beliefs that, to non-members, appear bizarre to the point of being funny. When it comes to conservatives, one of such memes is the conviction that all things wrong with our society today are a direct consequence of the destruction of traditional morals by the hippies. The newest incarnation of this belief blames flower children for the financial collapse of 2008. This appears to be one of the claims of a documentary titled "Generation Zero" made by Citizens United.

Now I haven't actually seen this movie, so I cannot say how important this connection is for its overall narrative. All I know about the film comes from what's been written about it, as well as two clips from a Sean Hannity special devoted to it. And from that, it's clear the filmmakers do indeed make this claim. They blame the financial crisis on culture, specifically on erosion of personal responsibility that has its roots in the Summer of Love (as one of the producers colorfully put it, personal responsibility has been "left in the mud of Woodstock"). Some other humorous claims made in the documentary are: the abandonment of ethics of personal responsibility caused the shift from partnerships to publicly trading companies; the dot-com bubble of 1995-2000 was caused not by the market's overconfidence in future profits of IT companies but by the fact that most members of the greatest generation have retired by mid-nineties, leaving the stock market in the hands of their irresponsible children; and, quoting from the above-linked Christian Science Monitor article:

Producer David Bossie (...) says generational narcissism, as represented by the 1969 Woodstock Festival, is responsible for the excessive spending, mortgage crisis, and recklessness on Wall Street. "The people who were at Woodstock turned into the yuppies of the '80s and the junk bond traders of the '90s and the Wall Street executives of the 2000s," he says. "They went from Woodstock to driving a Jaguar."

In addition to the obvious, two things Bossie says are baffling to me: What on Earth is so bad about yuppies or junk bonds?

(HT: Mark Thoma.)