Human Entitlements

Cats may have entitlements and so do human beings. (see previous article.)

I regularly hear the term entitlement used in a derogatory manner. It is used to demean those folk who are seen as abusing our hard earned tax dollars to be parasites upon others. For instance, students and young people in general can be viewed as having too many entitlements. Lazy buggers would to work and appreciate all that we do for them.

Most commonly we sneer about the entitlements of those who make use of our welfare system and abuse that system. The lazy welfare mother, who gets paid for having children rather than working. The drug addict benefits from rehab programs. We complain about those who use food stamps to augment their buying power. The list goes on an on and you and I have probably used them in this negative manner as a way of expressing our superiority over others.

But we have entitlements as citizens of the country and as human beings. Our country was build, in part, upon these assumptions of entitlements: entitlements of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness; basics of the constitution and its preamble.

In this country we are entitled to find work that we find rewarding. We are entitled to education, to improve ourselves and those around us. We are entitled to voting for those who share our values and beliefs. We are entitled to decent health care. We are entitled to not be abandoned with life goes wrong for us. We are entitled to have our end years without undue strife. We have many entitlements that we should expect and is a part of citizenry.

When we poo-poo the abusers of entitlements as being deadbeats do we also include those who do in fact, get more than their fair share of the bounty in the land of opportunity. Do we complain in the same manner about CEOs who get outrageous salaries at the expense of the workers in the industry? Do we complain about bankers and Wall Street investors who take public money when the gamble and lose? Do we complain when politicians cater more to those who contribute extravagantly to the campaigns?

Well, we do complain about the later but not in the same way. We somehow seem to thing their false sense of entitlements is not as bad as the down and outers. The abusers of our social welfare systems are small in number and take little from the overall good these programs provide. In contrast, the harm done but the greedy of our society do incomparable harm to society. The 1% ers are not entitled to govern our society, but they are. Grumbling about the abuses of those who receive government entitlements just removes our focus from the fact that we live now in an oligarchy rather than a democracy.