The title says it all. I believe the sense of entitlement that a growing number of people have come to have over recent decades is slowly killing America and other western countries. This issue is one that has been championed by political conservatives and while they are right on many accounts they don’t seem to understand that they are just as much a cause of the problem as those on the left.
I’ll start by acknowledging, as I said, that conservatives are right on many accounts: America does seem to have too many people who expect others to take care of them and provide them with the good life simply “because” with out any regard as to whether they are actually contributing anything in return. This includes people such unionized public transit workers in the city where I live who make 50-100 thousand dollars a year for low skilled work and get generous pensions and who still manage to find something to gripe about every couple years that causes them to go on strike. It includes people who make poor decisions such as getting pregnant at 16 and then expecting society to take care of them by footing the cost of their welfare checks. It also includes those in the middle class who simply feel “I deserve” to go on a vacation to a 5 star resort or to live in a half a million dollar home simply because I know other people have these things and I deserve to have things as nice as what anyone else has because to not have it would be “unfair”. It is this latter example that played a part in the recent financial meltdown. So to all conservatives out there…I admit it, you are right!
The problem is that the issue is much deeper and more widespread than conservatives seem to understand. In fact, as the left correctly points out, they are guilty of these same sins! Those who are among the wealthiest of society are know longer content unless they are continually aquirring more and more wealth. They seek to continually alter the rules of the game so that it allows them to have a larger, and larger piece of the pie simply because they feel “they deserve it” or “they are societies best” regardless of whether their actions (cutting taxes for the top 1% and social programs for the lower and middle classes, outsourcing…etc..) hurt families who are working just as hard as they are and deserve to at least have a decent standard of living. This also ties in directly to what was mentioned in the previous paragraph about the real estate market. Members of the lower and middle classes may have bought houses they knew they couldn’t afford but greedy rich bankers on wall street were all too eager to help them along since doing so would bring them more wealth. Finally, just look at CEO compensation. 40 or 50 years ago it was 25 to 50 times that of the average worker and now it’s several hundred times as much. In order for this to be truly justified, are CEO really being that much more productive relative to their employees now versus then? Or put another way, have workers become that much more unproductive relative to CEOs? - No. quite the opposite is true. Worker productivity has soared since the early ‘70s despite the fact that relative wages have more or less stagnated.
The point is that both sides are to blame and it irks me when conservatives site the problem of “entitlement mentality” is being associated exclusively with liberalism and that if we did things their way America would be great again. Sorry, no deal. 8 years under Bush conservatism was entitlement mentality at its worst. I don’t think we’ve ever had a political leader who felt more entitled than he did to do pretty much whatever he damn well pleased regardless of what others think as long as it made him, his buddies and others in the upper classes richer. I think the best way to conclude this would be to say when it comes to this issue and the two ends of the political spectrum each side is guilty of what the other side says about them. And until we move beyond petty bickering and truly realize what what the essence of most of our problems is (we feel we deserve more than we are willing to work or pay for) America is going nowhere fast no matter who’s running the country.
I’ll start by acknowledging, as I said, that conservatives are right on many accounts: America does seem to have too many people who expect others to take care of them and provide them with the good life simply “because” with out any regard as to whether they are actually contributing anything in return. This includes people such unionized public transit workers in the city where I live who make 50-100 thousand dollars a year for low skilled work and get generous pensions and who still manage to find something to gripe about every couple years that causes them to go on strike. It includes people who make poor decisions such as getting pregnant at 16 and then expecting society to take care of them by footing the cost of their welfare checks. It also includes those in the middle class who simply feel “I deserve” to go on a vacation to a 5 star resort or to live in a half a million dollar home simply because I know other people have these things and I deserve to have things as nice as what anyone else has because to not have it would be “unfair”. It is this latter example that played a part in the recent financial meltdown. So to all conservatives out there…I admit it, you are right!
The problem is that the issue is much deeper and more widespread than conservatives seem to understand. In fact, as the left correctly points out, they are guilty of these same sins! Those who are among the wealthiest of society are know longer content unless they are continually aquirring more and more wealth. They seek to continually alter the rules of the game so that it allows them to have a larger, and larger piece of the pie simply because they feel “they deserve it” or “they are societies best” regardless of whether their actions (cutting taxes for the top 1% and social programs for the lower and middle classes, outsourcing…etc..) hurt families who are working just as hard as they are and deserve to at least have a decent standard of living. This also ties in directly to what was mentioned in the previous paragraph about the real estate market. Members of the lower and middle classes may have bought houses they knew they couldn’t afford but greedy rich bankers on wall street were all too eager to help them along since doing so would bring them more wealth. Finally, just look at CEO compensation. 40 or 50 years ago it was 25 to 50 times that of the average worker and now it’s several hundred times as much. In order for this to be truly justified, are CEO really being that much more productive relative to their employees now versus then? Or put another way, have workers become that much more unproductive relative to CEOs? - No. quite the opposite is true. Worker productivity has soared since the early ‘70s despite the fact that relative wages have more or less stagnated.
The point is that both sides are to blame and it irks me when conservatives site the problem of “entitlement mentality” is being associated exclusively with liberalism and that if we did things their way America would be great again. Sorry, no deal. 8 years under Bush conservatism was entitlement mentality at its worst. I don’t think we’ve ever had a political leader who felt more entitled than he did to do pretty much whatever he damn well pleased regardless of what others think as long as it made him, his buddies and others in the upper classes richer. I think the best way to conclude this would be to say when it comes to this issue and the two ends of the political spectrum each side is guilty of what the other side says about them. And until we move beyond petty bickering and truly realize what what the essence of most of our problems is (we feel we deserve more than we are willing to work or pay for) America is going nowhere fast no matter who’s running the country.
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