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.