Yet if I were a young American today, occupying Wall St. would not be my objective. Just reflect for a minute on the unbridled economic mayhem that would ensue if the protesters actually succeeded. The headline “Goldman Sachs Under Control of Hip Teenage Revolutionaries” would be the last straw for an already fragile economic recovery.

Now ask yourself what the financial crisis really means for today’s 15- to 24-year-olds. Not only has it raised the probability that they will be unemployed after graduation. More seriously, it has massively increased the debt that they will have to service when they do get jobs.

Never in the history of intergenerational transfers has one generation left such a mountain of IOUs to another as the baby boomers are leaving to their grandchildren…

Of these harsh realities the occupiers of Wall Street seem blissfully unaware. Fixated on the idea that they somehow represent the 99 percent of people who scrape by on 80 percent of total income, they fail to see that the real distributional conflict of our time is not between percentiles, much less classes, but between generations. And no generation has a keener interest in slashing future spending on entitlements than today’s teens and 20-somethings.