Entitlements
Entitlement is a slippery sort of word. It means different things to different people depending on a lot of twisted reasoning.
If you buy a ticket to an event, you feel like you are entitled to attend the event. If you receive more votes than your opponent in an election you feel you are entitled to the office. Sounds reasonable and straight-forward, doesn’t it?
For some reason an awful lot of people don’t think that you should receive the benefits you were promised after paying for those benefits for four decades or more. They don’t think you are entitled to them, although many of those same people think they are entitled to be paid by the Treasury and receive health insurance as the result of a election.
There seems to be a lot of confusion about the purpose of government, which is surprising given that the people who wrote the Constitution seemed to be pretty clear:
We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defense, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America.
The government isn’t about you or me, it’s about us. It isn’t about the individual, it’s about everyone. Government is about making it possible to form a society.
Mustang Bobby wrote Stars vs. Actors with reference to the former governor of Alaska, but a lot of politicians believe they are entitled to be taken seriously because they won an election. They don’t think they need to actually study anything, because winning an election was enough to endow them with wisdom. Many actually revel in their ignorance.
This the same attitude that gave us the Shrubbery and Evan Bayh, people who think they are entitled to hold office without learning anything or doing any work.
In The Pace is to Blame, Athenae writes about a guy at the New York Times who felt entitled to use other people’s work because he was busy and he worked for the Times.
In Political Correctness Run Amok, Athenae writes about people who are annoyed because society no longer allows them to be bigots in public. These people feel they are entitled to be obnoxious. They should save it for CPAC conventions.
All of this gets around to a point NTodd made in his post, General Welfare. We have a President who thinks that the people who nearly caused a melt-down of the global economy are entitled to millions of dollars in compensation, but he has to form a commission to recommend screwing over people who have followed the rules and paid their dues for decades, because they aren’t entitled to any returns on their investment.
I knew Obama was a Republican in January of 2008, but it would have been nice if he weren’t so far to the right of Richard Nixon.
7 comments
President Obama will learn a great deal if he persists in encouraging GOPers in their plans to undermine Social Security and undercut Medicare. Most of all, he’ll learn just how much damage a large number of old geezers can do with muskets and pitchforks. Because I do not intend to take the theft of my more than 40 years of contribution into the contract-across-generations lightly. And even my commitment to nonviolence has its limits.
Barack… STFU about compromising my entitlements. I paid for ’em, they’re mine. Just… STFU.
That’s affirmative, Steve. I watched these low-lifes steal benefits and change the rules for veterans, and now they want to do it to all working people.
The deficit disappears if they create jobs and tax the people who were given the Social Security surplus by the Shrubbery.
I wasn’t at all happy to find out “my sentence” was increased by year to 66, because Congress refused to do the right thing and raise the cap on Fica. The should just eliminate the cap and then there won’t be a problem.
tap, tap… is this thing on?
[i think your spaminator has been hating on me again]
yeah, pretty amazing to be a lefty and look back with fondness and longing on the nixon presidency.
With the recent run of Presidents, Tricky Dick keeps moving up in the ratings. It’s rather pathetic when you can’t do better than that.
[ot: e-mail me when it happens and I’ll try to figure out why?]
[it was late last night, commenting on one if the yukon quest posts, i should have been asleep anyway instead of surfing the web]
one of the reasons i liked hillary clinton for president more than obama was that i thought those on the left who liked her were the kind who would speak up after the election and start making demands that she keep some of her promises and others on the left who hated her [the obama fans] would immediately start making demands that she move to the left [and she would have started out to the left of obama] and it looked to me like we could have something on the order of nixon giving us the epa.
I was never a supporter of “give him time” or “just wait”, but then I already knew he was a DINO, and a Blue Dog was as far to the left as he was apt to get. All you had to do was look at his votes, which his supporters refused to do.
Even if he totally swung to the left, I wouldn’t vote for him, as a second term would be even worse than the first.