The Dawn of the Entitlements - When America Took the Low Road

The other night, I was preparing for a discussion over at Blog Talk Radio and I decided to look at the details of the U.S. Federal Budget - I wanted to actually see where our taxes were going. I entered the forbidden zone of a massive pdf file and discovered over 200 pages of the biggest maze I've ever seen. I'm not exactly the dullest knife in the drawer and I felt like I was looking at engineering blueprints for a new rocket but what was familiar was the dozens and dozens and dozens of agencies listed ...all with huge dollar figures listed next to them. What I was literally seeing for the first time was what exactly is going out of our pockets into the myriad of subsections of Medicare, Medicaid, WIC, etc. It was astounding to me, the bureaucracy levels was mind numbing.

Well, this article at Family Security Matters does a masterful job of describing a time in America when we were all virgins ... the perversion of "entitlements" in America was just about to begin in the early 1960's and what I like about this author's rendition is the emotional toll of this new monster being loosed on the American people. And the effects of giving people "stuff" is documented here.

There's an old saying...."nothing in life is free." And what that means in this case is that when an American is simply given a handout of money or things, that money or stuff is not free. It costs him or her. It might not cost him his labor or anything of materialistic value but what it costs him is his dignity. When a human being is given stuff at the cost of others, it creates a vortex of guilt and degradation in the recipient. Now, those in America in the entitlement class won't tell you that those are the emotions that they feel but their behavior tells the truth - have you ever noticed that the recipients of social programs are the least happy in this society? Have you ever noticed that those that display the most anger here are those that exist on the toils of others?

I ask you to take a test. As you sit there reading this, take a moment to stop and look around you in your home. Look at the furniture, the television, the items on the wall or book case. Ask yourself how you would feel if you had not earned those things but had simply been given them. Would they really be YOURS?

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My childhood was spent in the hardscrabble world of Pennsylvania’s coal towns, where hard-working anthracite miners drove the economy. As my awareness of the world around me grew, from the 1950s into the early 1960s, I was struck again and again by the pride of the men who worked underground in a dangerous profession: Those who avoided work were considered a blot on the community, and being forced onto “the dole” for any reason humiliated not only the immediate family involved, but even distant relations. Men expected to earn their way, taking pride in maintaining their simple “company” houses as best they could, and dressing their wives and children anew each Easter.

Ours was no ideal society (beware anyone who tells you an ideal society can be fabricated from human material). It was, by and large, a dirty blue-collar world, dangerous below ground and rough-edged above. But those miners had a pride and shared a comradeship I only encountered again when I served in our military. When troubles came, family members aided one another. When the need was too great for blood kin to relieve, communities pulled together. The question in every mind regarding an injured miner was, “When will he be able to go back to work?” As brutal as it was, the coal man’s work let him stand up straight and look any man in the eye.

An incident that shocked me then only seems quaint today, given the collapse of our social values: I was, perhaps, eight. The year would have been 1960. My mother and aunt were visiting in Lehighton, and I had been dragged along, barricaded into the backseat behind parapets of comic books. A summer evening softened the harshness of a hillside street lined with row houses. Jingling and trailing exhaust, an ice-cream truck appeared, conjuring shrieking children from every side. We stood in line, I got my chocolate cone (vanilla was for sissies), and my mother opened her purse to pay. Just then, a boy of about my age, wearing a hand-me-down t-shirt, sidled up to my mother and asked, “Lady, would you buy me an ice-cream cone?” My mother got him one, but we all were shocked. The boy had begged. It simply wasn’t done. My mother’s family first enjoyed indoor plumbing when the boys came home from the Second World War with money in hand, and a family of twelve had crammed into a two-bedroom house—but no one begged for anything, not ever. You went hungry first.

Then came the well-intentioned, disastrous programs of The Great Society. By the end of the 1960s, the miner’s pride lay shattered and the dream of the able-bodied blue-collar worker back home was to qualify for “total disability,” while retaining sufficient health to do some illicit work on the side (for cash payment) to supplement the beer budget. Lawsuits came into fashion, too. The Great Society’s message was “You’re entitled.”

It was the most-seductive, most-destructive and most-pernicious message our government had sent since the Dred Scott case prolonged slavery. Instead of giving us a more-equitable society, it destroyed the urban-black family; erected dependency walls around ghettos, barrios and rust-belt company towns; vanquished the blue-collar work ethic in innumerable communities; and put us on the road to our present state of whining, demanding, parasitic, morbid obesity. Congratulations.

Again and again across the decades, I witnessed the narcotic, enslaving effects of a government-provided “free lunch” for able adults: Members of my own family wondered who they could sue for imagined injuries; obese military wives paralyzed health clinics by treating them as social hubs—dragging in their children for every minor affliction, since there was no cost to do so (a mere five-dollar-per-visit fee would have cleaned out those waiting rooms rapidly); and working-age folks back home employed their considerable reserves of ingenuity to beat the system any way they could.

In the historical blink of an eye, we went from a self-reliant and spirited society to a nation of cattle satisfied with a government-filled trough.

Another tragic aspect of this cancerous transformation was that the social reformers of the 1960s, as well as many professional leftists today, had and have humane, idealistic intentions: They sincerely want to do good to less-privileged citizens. The problems arise, first, because few of these elite do-gooders actually know any working men or women paid by the hour, and, second, a healthy society, like God, helps those who help themselves. The crusaders for “social justice” not only destroyed individual pride in work and the family’s longing for the community’s respect, but established something-for-nothing as the new societal norm. Utterly misunderstanding the nature of pride, they told themselves that “having” was the same as “earning.” But it is not.

Another transformative moment for me came when I was a captain in the Army. Stationed at Ft. Hood, I pursued a master’s degree on weekends and, when the all-too-short evenings were not consumed with studies or field duties, I worked on a novel about the Soviet military. I wrote it because I was frustrated by the dreary nature of our training manuals and the sleeping-pill briefings inflicted on our soldiers. I grasped that the only way to communicate Soviet organization and tactics effectively was to humanize them, to tell stories with human characters that would illustrate how Soviet doctrine was meant to work. It wasn’t much of a novel (although, to my astonishment, it would become a bestseller), but it was one hell of a training tool.

I considered donating the book to the Army for issue as a manual. Two things stopped me. First, I knew that so many bureaucratic mitts would be laid upon it that any value would quickly disappear from the red-ink-raped text. Second, and more important still, was my experience of soldiers. Given something for free—a training circular, for example—they placed no value on it and soon discarded it. But if they paid a few dollars (back then) for a paperback, they’d share it and hold on to it. Even a token charge assigned real value. So I published the book commercially, which resulted in it being taken seriously.

Meanwhile, our society underwent expectations creep as I marched along in uniform. Limited reforms in the 1990s trimmed some of the welfare system’s worst abuses, but the sense of entitlement on an increasing number of fronts crept upward from the Lumpenproletariat, through the blue-collar class, into white-collar realms. Simultaneously, we underwent a one-off economic expansion that permitted Congress to lavish money on select constituencies, while the medical world innovated and invented its way to stunning capabilities—and staggering costs. With disorienting speed, we went from a country that knew it had to pay its medical bills to one in which relatives believed it was their right to keep a comatose elder with no chance of recovery on life-support systems for weeks and months at a cost of hundreds of thousands, if not millions, of dollars. And why not? For that family, there were no trade-offs, no calculations of relative value. Health-care was already, essentially, free.

A society that doesn’t have to make choices, won’t make choices.

When the economic downturn arrived—as downturns inevitably do—we still imagined that we were a nation politically divided into give-it-all-away Democrats and spend-responsibly Republicans. That’s nonsense. The parties simply spend lavishly on different things (although, increasingly, their priorities overlap: see the trash loans at the heart of the housing crisis). A terrible hour of shame arrived for the Republican Party when its activists—desperate to derail the looming train-wreck of Obamacare—began howling about “death panels” and health-care rationing. Well, guess what? We can’t afford to keep every comatose granny alive indefinitely in an intensive-care ward. Nor can we afford to give every patient—even the currently insured—every expensive treatment indefinitely. This isn’t a matter of “should” any long, but of “can.” Call it what we might, we will have to ration health care—even without the peculiar injustices of Obamacare. The issue is how to ration it ethically and most usefully.

Both parties have fled from the idea of individual responsibility. During the health-care “debate” (a juvenile name-calling session), not one leading politician in either party risked uttering the O-word: Obesity. If end-of-life costs haunt hospital hallways today, our collective obesity is on track to destroy us financially in the longer-term. It’s not only the myriad problems associated with obesity itself, but the countless diseases and ailments attendant to it, from plague levels of diabetes, through heart disease, to the costs of joint replacements (ask a surgeon what it’s like to operate on a morbidly obese patient). And except for those with rare medical conditions, obesity is a choice.

Read the rest of the article here.