Entitlement: Having the title is not having the car

(We could discuss at length the reasons why economic policies coming from our current governors are not working and are not going to work. Such an understanding is valuable, but there is a great deal of the population that is immune to and uninterested in such argument. Let us, rather, examine in brief the philosophy behind the policies issuing from the current powers:)

The word is entitlement. When entitlement takes centre stage, the law of the land becomes “Need is the great arbiter, and all else must bow to it. If a person stands in need, there shall be goods to supply his want.”

The idea that needs will be met ipso facto is absurd, of course. For example, if I find myself lost in an endless sea with nothing but a life preserver on hand, then I need fresh water, food, and shelter to survive; but fresh water, food, and shelter are simply not to be found. My need must go unsatisfied, even if I believe that I am entitled to life.

But the reader mustn’t think me entirely foolish for expecting to survive. After all, experience has taught me all my life that goods will come out of nowhere to supply my wants, if I cannot supply them myself. If I go to an ER and cannot pay my bill, I don’t have to, but I still get the lifesaving service. When gov’t-subsizidized financial entities decided that I was entitled to a house, they practiced reckless lending policies so that I could obtain one. (This pressed private financial institutions to practice similar foolish policies in order to stay in business.)

Our culture teaches us that poverty divests one of his fixation on worldly goods, so we might imagine people of poor backgrounds to be free of the fallacy of entitlement. However, in our society, it is the poor whom we most soundly indoctrinate with the error of entitlement. To wit, the less one produces himself, the more he is entitled to receive. The poorest of us do not pay taxes, yet they enjoy roads and schools and parks we did not pay for. Entitlements in some cases extend so far as to bring cheques from the rest of the taxpayers (e.g. unemployment, wellfare). This is not to say that by producing nothing we enjoy the best of everything but, rather, by producing nothing, more of what we have is given to us free of charge.

Thus production and wealth become disassociated. When voters or politicians afflicted with this distortion of reality (which others have imposed upon them by attending to their needs)—when they assume power, economy must crumble.

A Truly Alien Nation

We usually don’t think of the first wave of European immigrants as ‘immigration’; we call it ‘colonization’. But this wave of immigrants relates to the surge of immigration which we can expect several decades in the future.

In his book, The Next 100 Years, George Friedman paints a rather believable picture of immigration and the baby boomers in 2030: There will be a disproportionate population of aged, non-working citizens in the US, and the rising generation will not be enough to replace them in the workforce. Americans have been having fewer offspring, and they are living longer after retiring. This is not anomalous to the US; governments of all industrialized countries will work to induce foreign workers to immigrate.

With respect to waves of US immigration, we tend to reflect on the Irish, Eastern Europeans, and Chinese, on whom the natural-born Americans heaped considerable persecution. Said persecution was unbecoming of a decent people, but it had the effect of inducing the immigrants to become American-ized, at least. After all, when countries are divided into divergent cultures, we end up with Yugoslavia, a short-lived nation, ready to tear itself apart and unprepared or unwilling to unite for its own defense.

Treatment of immigrants is currently vastly different from what it was in olden days, and so shall it differ in future. Treatment of illegal immigrants, if given so heartlessly as to the legal immigrants of yesteryear, is popularly condemned, unenlightened, we would say.

Speaking again of the first wave of European immigrants to the present-day US, the Native Americans (Amerindians) did not require the first immigrating English and Scots to adopt the native culture or language. Doubtless they did not have the might to force the Europeans to assimilate, but regardless, as a consequence of their failure to do so, the Native Americans became outnumbered in remarkably short time. Their culture, languages, and race were in short order nearly wiped from the land.

Ere the reader insist that the Europeans only effaced the Native Americans because of the former’s superior arsenal, recall that our immigrants will have access to the only weapons they’ll need: the candidate’s soapbox and the voting booth. (Recall furthermore, the US’s history of disseminating its military technology, witness Iran in the 80’s.)

Now I am a native American. I already pay my government to print its documents in a foreign language. I have lived in neighbourhoods where my language was scarcely spoken. I have seen the disparity of culture. I have seen firsthand that immigration does not lead to integration, not without a sizeable population of natives to immerse the immigrants and, furthermore, strong social incentives (such as persecution).

When the immigrants come to replace the baby boomers in the workforce, the face of the American population will change dramatically. When the baby boomers die out, it will change again. And then we may find ourselves in a foreign land.

Homosexuality: A Cause to Believe In

It is not difficult to accept that sexuality of any persuasion is not a choice, but it is quite a stretch to attribute it to genetics. It is socially accepted that pœdophiles do not choose to be attracted to young children, that homosexuals do not choose to be attracted to persons of their own gender, and straight men do not choose to be attracted to women.

HEREDITY

If homosexuality were genetic, I suggest, we should see a lot fewer homosexuals now than in the past. Hear me out before making the obvious contention that in the past, homosexuals lived under the necessity of closeting their deviant sexuality and therefore disguised their numbers:

In the past, regardless of sexuality, it was an economic necessity for men to marry women and produce many offspring. George Friedman offers a cogent explanation this in The Next 100 Years. He furthermore describes the current trend, in which childrearing is a great expense with no hope of any economic return for at least two decades, generally. Populations are declining or preparing to decline in industrialized countries, and in second- and third-tier nations, population growth is leveling off.

If homosexuality is genetic, we can derive two ideas from Friedman’s observations: homosexuals of ancient days should have been marrying and passing on their genes just as prolifically as heterosexuals of their time; whereas in present day (starting 20+ years ago), homosexuals’ incentive to engender children is removed; ergo the current and rising generations should contain a paucity of homosexuals.

An acceptable theory which uses heredity as an explanation for sexuality might say that the explosion of the homosexual population is attributable to mass mutation (and why not? from power lines to processed foods, people point at almost everything in the modern world as a mutagen). But it is more than a little far-fetched to expect such a global uniformity in an anomalous phenotype.

CULTURAL DOCTRINE

The primary source of homosexuality, I postulate, is our culture. There is no intelligent debate as to whether sexual beauty is primarily (and by a wide margin) determined by culture. It is accepted fact. There is nothing inherently superior about full, sensual lips, for instance; it’s only a matter of cultural indoctrination.

When homosexuality becomes socially permissible or even a mark of progressive-mindedness or perhaps a social earmark (relating to the entertainment industry, for instance), then culture is teaching people that to be sexually attracted to someone of the same gender is correct. (‘Correct’ does not mean moral nor ‘the only correct mode’; it just means ‘correct’.)

SEX

In a society in which sex is not tightly bound to procreation, the myopic tend to think that the purpose of sex is pleasure and that any other view is unnatural or worse: intolerant. “Well isn’t it?” some readers will ask. Yes, that’s all it is for many readers. But for others, it is an exclusive expression of real love and loyalty. That statement perhaps begs an essay to explain what real love is; this is not the place for that discussion.