Behind the 8 Ball: Earned Entitlements

In the news: many stories about war, fighting, violence.  Domestic, national, international: doesn’t matter, such stories abound. In the 50 state capitols, a different kind of fight: harsh words over budget deficits, each side blaming the other.  In the nation’s capitol, the same battle is waged between parties, between political labels, between personalities.  

New ideas come and go; old ideas reappear, are measured, reshaped, discarded.  The struggle develops its own nomenclature: “entitlement” becomes a key term.  Are Americans “entitled” to Social Security, health coverage, retirement pensions, and benefits?  Have we become “soft”, expecting too much? 

Can we make do with less even if it means losing a home, going without medical treatment, ending “retirement” to re-enter the workplace, reducing caloric intake and cutting pills in half, giving up on believing college will be affordable for our children?  
Are we expecting too much from our money economy, our culture, our country?  Are we being selfishly extravagant to the detriment of national needs with financial emergencies piling up one on top of the other?

To what are we, the people, entitled?  How much should we downsize our expectations, our earnings, our comfort level, our material existence, to please the gods of high finance who wish to warn us via Doomsday.net that our lives of sinful luxury and self-indulgence must soon end lest the bankrolls of billionaires begin to shrink to unacceptable amounts!!  

I would suggest we change the landscape of the debate by adding a new word to create a phrase that reads “Earned Entitlement” to counter any suggestion that the American people are part of a selfish arrogant aristocracy asking for something which they haven’t earned.  Many four-letter words come to mind in response to this subtle nuance, this poisoned misuse of the word ENTITLEMENT, but suffice it to say, in regular prose, that any such suggestion is pure nonsense!

People who have worked all their adult years paying into Social Security (and/or other pension plans) have the RIGHT to expect a sizable chunk of money will be returned to them when they retire: THEY HAVE EARNED IT.  Hence, let’s rename this social issue EARNED ENTITLEMENT or EARNED REWARD to take it out of the hands of those who wish to suggest that all of the nation’s economic woes are caused by working people because they expect some level of decency in their standard of living when they finally retire after a lifetime of work and a lifetime of contributing to the nation’s productivity and wealth.  

Granted, each person’s rightfully earned expectations, multiplied by the million-fold, can create its own economic currents—as a mountain is sometimes said to produce its own weather—but even so, that remains but half the story!

What about the enormous amount of wealth sucked out of circulation to be hoarded by the wealthy? (luxury yachts, private jets, multiple mansions and villas, art and jewelry collections, lavish parties on the grand scale, etc.)  Tens of millions of working Americans remain the real backbone of our national economy: responsible for its productivity, producing the goods that support the currency that we all use as our main medium of exchange.  

And yet millions of dollars are daily, hourly being sucked into the private caves, bank vaults, and hidden safes of millionaire-billionaires!  Capitalism may be defined in many ways but certainly, especially during a crisis recession, we should never forget the most basic doctrine of all: the exploitation of working people by the rich! 

Imagine a desert island where many survivors of a ship-wreck have arrived.  There are hundreds of hungry survivors on the south end of the island.  At the other end of the island are a few persons who have amassed a huge amount of food of every kind.  They have enough food to feed everyone for days, for weeks, for months or years, until rescue can be affected.  They are obscenely rich in food!  They have 100 times the amount of food they themselves could ever consume.  

The hungry survivors politely ask these food-wealthy persons if they wouldn’t please share?  To which they receive a resounding “No!”  The food hoarders shout out at the top of their lungs: this is OUR food, OUR property; this all belongs to JUST US and we don’t have to share a single crumb!  You are entitled to none of it, do you hear?  To none of it!”  Now imagine substituting MONEY for FOOD and you get an idea of what America is like, although to say as much is to suggest a scenario that most rich people would rather avoid discussing.  

Add to the above scenario the notion that the food the selfish ones wish to hoard was produced in the first place by the island’s other survivors!  As thousands of pounds of food are being kept from hungry people on the island, is it not true that millions of dollars of wealth are being kept from the American people?  Ask yourself: what is a billionaire?  From whence this wealth?  Whence the sense of ENTITLEMENT that millionaires and billionaires have developed that it is perfectly all right FOR THEM to hoard millions and billions of dollars?  

Who gives them the right to remove all this wealth from the currents of the national economy from whence it first originated, while all the while pretending that this selfishness on their part has no effect on the American people or our national economy?  Why are working people, whose labor already suffers from an unconscionable degree of exploitation (underpaid for the true value of their labor) being asked to make additional sacrifices in order to keep the rich people happy and their enormous wealth intact?    

What is best for society?  What happened to “caring and sharing”, as ordinary people do for one another?  What happened to the language of the Declaration of Independence?  Where do we, the people, get OUR sense of entitlement?  “We hold these Truths to be self-evident, that all Men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness.”  That’s OUR source of entitlement: the very Birth Certificate of the United States of America!   

Where do the rich get THEIR sense of entitlement?  Not from the Declaration of Independence; not from the Constitution; nor from the American people, I daresay.  Theirs comes from from social stratification inherently and violently unequal wherein the wealth hoarded by the rich derived from the labor and misery of millions of people at the bottom of society: serfs, slaves, peasants, laborers, factory workers, miners, textile mill hands, railroad employees: the list goes on.  Historically, the rich accumulated their great wealth based on the labor of the common people.  That wealth is as much the people’s as it is theirs, truth be told!

When we talk about ENTITLEMENT in the future, perhaps we should more carefully distinguish between the EARNED ENTITLEMENT and EARNED REWARDS of working people who paid in to Social Security their whole working lives in order to create a viable retirement funding plan for themselves and their families, and the obscene SELF-AWARDED ENTITLEMENT of the wealthy believe the protection of their millions of dollars is more important than the economic health of the nation.

What may we say of the morality and economic logic of the richest families who control the corporations and factories, here and overseas, and who constantly remove billions of dollars from the economy annually while selfishly squirreling away enormous amounts of wealth derived from the productivity of working people!  

People who work for a living can look with pride upon the fact that they have EARNED their livelihood and their right to a decent standard of living when they retire. 

LET’S CALL IT WHAT IT IS FROM NOW ON TO SET THE RECORD STRAIGHT:

THIS IS OUR EARNED ENTITLEMENT

AND NOTHING LESS!!! 

PEOPLE ARE “ENTITLED” TO THAT WHICH THEY HAVE EARNED!!