Americas Entitlement Attitude
Where did America get the idea that all Americans are entitled to “FREE”: money, cars, appliances, homes, healthcare, food, and anything else? Did this just happen when we were not looking? Did it happen a step at a time in the last 100 years? What is an entitlement? Entitlement (1944) is defined by the Merriam Webster’s Collegiate Dictionary (2001) as: 1a: the state or condition of being entitled: RIGHT b: a right to benefits specified esp. by law or contract 2: a government program providing benefits to members of a specified group; also: funds supporting or distributed by such a program.
Looking back it started with President Woodrow Wilson trying to pass an income tax that failed, but later passed during the Franklin Delano Roosevelt presidency. FDR continued to push entitlement programs during WWII; which he said would help the millions without food and jobs- which failed miserably and cost the taxpayers millions of jobs and money, plus extended the Great Depression. As time moved forward, more government entitlement programs were created costing billions of dollars: Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and it will be there for all generations ( basically bankrupt)-as the government grows bigger & more costly, Welfare/WIC was created because we must help our poor and disadvantaged (that have 5 kids with 5 different fathers)-as the government grows bigger & more costly, and the 1992 Federal Housing Enterprises Financial Safety Soundness Act that required government sponsored credit agencies (Fannie Mae & Freddie Mac) to purchase more mortgages that banks (threatened if they did not) issue to minority neighborhoods (Detroit); which led to the housing bubble collapse-as the government grows bigger and more costly.
This is not including what is being taught in schools around this country:
- Cannot grade with a red pen, because it is so harsh to the emotional stability of a child (I survived)
- No playing the game Tag, because it is so devastating to the kid who is “it” (Loved it)
- Since our great-great grandparents took all the land away from the Indians, we as good Americans must keep paying them monthly for that horrible mistake-even though it has been many generations ago
- By the way, since your great-great-great grandparents enslaved black people; the generations today deserve money for all the suffering that was inflicted upon them then
- Illegals deserve the same rights and privileges as a legal American citizen, even when they kill & rape somebody’s daughter, mother, wife, and friend
- Everybody has a right to “free” healthcare, a new car, a home, new appliances because we must “share the wealth”
What happened to teaching self reliance and independence? What happened to “…that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights that among 
these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness.” (Declaration of Independence, 1776). There is nothing that says government endows you with the rights of sharing in everybody else’s wealth.
Our Founding Fathers came to this country to get away from the tyranny and control of big, bloated government-they died for FREEDOM! Freedom is to do what you can with your talents and hard work; be the best YOU can be, plus have the Freedom to fail, learn, and try again. You are not entitled to “free” anything…you must work!
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5 Responses to Americas Entitlement Attitude
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I believe you’ve made a contradiction in bemoaning the sense of entitlement the people in this country feel, and then writing off the annihilation of the American Indian culture and the enslavement of Africans. It was the same sense of entitlement that people might now invest in the want of a car or home (although, to be honest, I’ve never heard of anybody demanding a free house or car– but I’ll trust you’ve done your research) that led our ancestors to feel entitled to take land away from American Indians (often by force) and enslave other human beings. That, too, is a sense of entitlement (and a pretty severe one, in my opinion; much more severe than asking a government that taxes its citizen so much to provide health care), and yet you wonder where this sense of entitlement came from. The truth is, it’s been here all along.
Taking land away from the Native Americans and enslaving African Americans to me is not an entitlement-it is the pursuit of power that Man has done since the beginning of time. Entitlement to me is expecting the government (taxpayers) to take care of you while you do nothing to improve your circumstances or that you are not responsble for.
Do you want to pay for something you did not do? You already help pay the Native Americans millions of dollars of year for what our great-great -great grandparents did. I use to live by an Indian Reservation and it was ridiculous the money that was wasted there. New houses built and destroyed by the Indians within months, government cheese never used and thrown into the dump, monthly government salary paid and much of it wasted on alcohol (dry reservation) and drugs, and unemployment very high. There were jobs available, but many would not work because they already received a monthly salary from the taxpayers. Have you ever lived by or been on an Indian Reservation?
Do you want to pay for what your great-great grandparents did or did not do? I did not enslave the African Americans, so why should I pay for that?
Do you want to give your hard earned money to somebody who sits on their butt and does nothing?
I disagree about the sense of entitlement always been here all along. It did not really come to light until the Progressive attitudes of Theodore Roosevelt, Woodrow Wilson, and Franklin D. Roosevelt, came into power.
Thank you.
You are free, of course, to define entitlement any way you wish. There are many varying accepted definitions of this word, some having to do with the sense that one deserves a particular reward or benefit (a state of feeling entitled, as you mentioned). To me, regardless of the reason (for example, a “pursuit of power” that has occurred “since the beginning of time”), our ancestors felt they deserved the “reward” of the land that American Indians once inhabited, or that they deserved the “benefit” of free labor gained from enslaving other people. To me, this fits the definition of entitlement. And I’m not suggesting by this that we need to pay money to any one group of people (if I gave that impression with my previous post, I was mistaken)– I’m merely drawing up historical comparisons to debate and consider the nature of “entitlement” as a larger concept, without political or financial ramifications.
Also I would feel remiss if I did not point out that I do, in fact, disapprove of the unfair conquest of lands and the enslavement of other human beings, regardless of whether these things can be classified as a timeless “the pursuit of power.” Many things which have been present through the entire course of human history (cold-blooded murder, slavery, prejudice, genocide… things that continue to this day) are still typically categorized as immoral, regardless of their timeless qualities. Again, this is just my opinion, and I feel morally obligated to state it– I by no means wish to invalidate the opinions of others or call into question those opinions.
SS advises each January what my employers and myself have paid in to date. So far to date it’s $290,000 for me.
SS was never a Tax. It was supposed to be a savings account held by and guaranteed by the US Govt. to provide for my old age.
The bill was passed in 1936 in an effort to protect me from ending up like the millions of people who pre-1929 invested in the stock market and ended up with nothing after the crash of the market and the banks that had invested in the market.
Now they are calling SS an “entitlement program”. Not wanting to be a beggar please have the Govt. return my $290,000 (I won’t even seek the interest over the last 46 years).
I think I’ll be able to live just fine on that kind of money or even the interest on that money which would be considerably more then what they send me each month.
Then after my death my estate can divide up the $290K. Under the current system where does that money go? Oh yes, thanks to that ex-president Johnson it goes into the general fund and disappears for ever.
How the heck do illegals deserve the same right as legal american citizens? They ARE NOT american citizens therefore they do NOT get any protections from the U.S. constitution. PERIOD!