9 February 2013 –
I have been struggling with the impending disaster that
is our Social Security system and generous government programs such as food
stamps, Medicare/Medicaid, and unemployment benefits. The numbers
that derive from a shrinking pool of young workers and a swelling pool of
nonworkers—because of age, disability, or laziness—tell me that such benefits
have to be cut or delayed and payroll taxes for Medicaid/Medicare and Social
Security have to go up dramatically. To sustain such reform, however, the sense
of entitlement to such support, which has long been engendered by our
government, has to drastically change as well. If not, our society
has no chance of restoring fiscal sanity to the federal government.
The fiscal emergency we face today is in our
entitlement programs, not in our defense budget or in our foreign aid. The
multi-trillion-dollar-a-year emergency is caused by politicians who prolong or
increase payouts of such programs to assuage voters in difficult times,
regardless of how fiscally unbalanced such actions are. The bad,
unintended consequences of such policies—and there always are bad, unintended
consequences in anything the government does—spring from the very definition of
entitlement. To be entitled with the right to receive money, goods,
or services from government programs cripples one’s desire to work and to fend
for one’s sustenance. The only way a transfer of money, goods, or
services between parties ennobles either party is when it is a contract based
on equal effort or equity exchange by both parties. When transfers
of entitlement money are not based on such a contract, both the government and
the recipient of government largesse are corrupted by the exchange. Politicians
use such programs to amass corrupt power. Many of the recipients use
the programs to avoid work—Hey! Who wouldn’t? This
corrupt process also enables many people to continue to make the
irresponsible life-style decisions that got them into their present
situation. It is as if the government hands out free booze to people
with a drinking problem and praises it as an entitlement. Why would
one change behavior if there is no contract to complete except to wait for a
monthly check?
The first step the government must take is to
change the lexicon. No more should we stress the idea of
entitlement. The message should be that one may indeed have a legal
right to receive certain government monies, goods, and services, but such
rights come with individual responsibilities. The fulfillment of
personal responsibilities to care for one’s self and one’s own, is what makes a
good citizen and a productive member of society. It is not one’s
exploitation of personal rights. The only way for the change
to happen among normal people is certainly not to make it easy for them to live
without sustained, personal effort.
Alas, it is difficult to abandon this entitlement
lexicon when we have been softened by receiving trophies no matter where our
little league team finishes in the standings, by our getting passing grades for
shoddy scholarship, and by our assuming and receiving coerced respect no matter
our irresponsible actions. No matter. The government should
get out of the business of giving a helping hand and leave it to society’s
private, religious, and local organizations. They can demand and
receive a more ennobling social contract from a recipient. The
government should stick to what it is required to provide under the
Constitution and muddle through that as best it can. The entitlement
expansion has made corrupt people everywhere.
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