I think you’re right about the chronological sequence of kids as “naive liberals” to adults as conservative (more so than the kids, anyway), but not about the rationale. Positioning oneself on the contrarian hierarchy is about showing off that your intellect is greater than the people below you on it. It’s the rare adult who feels a need to explicitly demonstrate their intellectual superiority to children—but the common adult who has a job and pays taxes and actually ever thinks about the cost of things, as opposed to the kids, who don’t need to.
In short, adults don’t oppose free medicine etc. to be contrary to the position of naive children; they oppose it because they’re the ones who’d have to pay for it.
I think you’re right about the chronological sequence of kids as “naive liberals” to adults as conservative (more so than the kids, anyway), but not about the rationale. Positioning oneself on the contrarian hierarchy is about showing off that your intellect is greater than the people below you on it. It’s the rare adult who feels a need to explicitly demonstrate their intellectual superiority to children—but the common adult who has a job and pays taxes and actually ever thinks about the cost of things, as opposed to the kids, who don’t need to.
In short, adults don’t oppose free medicine etc. to be contrary to the position of naive children; they oppose it because they’re the ones who’d have to pay for it.