The Entitlement Society US-style

We continue to enjoy watching Fareed Zacharia's GPS program each Sunday. Last week he featured an engaging interview with former Secretary of State James Baker. The man is brilliant and speaks with clarity, logic and to the point. His concepts convey a common sense that is both rare and compelling. Would that he could influence the current lot of politicians in Washington. The fighting and biting of the latter is becoming boring, boring, boring. America deserves better and I fear for our future. There is no hope on the horizon, in my mind, of improving politicians behavior short of a great civil or natural disaster.

Politics is just now preoccupied with the national budget, the national debt and the national trade deficit. Spending is out of control and political leaders uniformly seek dramatic spending cuts; in projects supported by the opposition of course. A major target is the multitude of social programs instituted over the years, often without foresight regarding sustainability, and the dependencies these programs have created. Time was in America when a sick person would have to be taken care of by himself, family or friends. In like manner, Americans used to blame themselves if they tripped and fell and sustained an injury as a result. Today, growing masses of people not only rely on, but insist that the state care for them and should they sustain an injury through carelessness, they want to immediately sue someone.

We are now ensconced in what is known here as entitlements. To the political right, such entitlements mean social security, health care programs, emergency care and a host of other programs aimed at minority or impoverished groups who are collectively supported by the Nanny State. I extend the concept of entitlement to include professionals who insist on increasing their fees, to entrepreneurs who insist on the right to place productivity over quality and to unions who feel entitled to protect there members at the expense of their quality of service. Entitlements are not a one way street, but are enjoyed and defended by rich and poor, educated and ignorant, bright and less bright and white and blue collar workers. And entitlements are fraught with inequities. Nobody in the USA is entitled to an astronomic salary, to free health care, to immigrate without documentation, to stand for office interminably. Yet, all of these practices are protected either by law or convention. To be sure it is illegal to immigrate without documentation, but once illegally here, one benefits by free health care, free education, free police protection, and even the right to produce a child who, by virtue of being born here, is an automatic citizen.

On top of all this, we are engaged in another war in Libya. The manner in which we are fighting this war, our role in its implementation, and asset commitments are all back burner issues just now owing to the budget crisis. The cost of fighting in Libya, however, is not a back burner issue. Nor is the prospect that we may be in for a much longer engagement than was previously thought. Will we ever learn our lesson? Remember when it was believed that the boys will be home by Christmas. Nobody expected Korea, Vietnam and Iraq to last for more than a few months. We even put a limit on our engagement in Afghanistan, but with conditions and those conditions are likely to extend our commitments for a much longer period of time. Now we enter Libya for a few weeks just to clean up a bit of untidiness regarding a corrupt and decaying dictator who cannot endure our military might. Right.

I have not been slack in my attention to current events in the UK. I quite agree with you that Dave is a hollow man. You said this, or words to that effect, from the beginning along with almost all the other pundits that I read in the Daily Telegraph. He screwed up on Pakistan, he screwed up in his statements about the failure of multiculturalism, he screwed up on his strategy for economic recovery and the list goes on. The evidence is strong that Dave, O , the Hausfrau and the Dwarf are, like other Western leaders, far less powerful than we believe. They are driven by events to be sure, but in a more sinister context, they are driven by their ideological and financial supporters and lobbyists representing big business. We know this, of course, yet why does the world press continue to dote on the personality and commentary of our leaders and ignore the forces behind them in day to day reporting?

I am very much afraid that our democracy is failing us. The institutions for governance that we have created have been transformed into vehicles for the plunder of the masses while feeding them on concepts of individual importance and promises of a brighter future that will not materialize. Not that the masses have a monopoly on right thinking, kindness, generosity, understanding or any other positive attribute. Perhaps they should be treated like sheep after all.