No, I’m not advocating violence. I’m just observing the existence of a conflict between 2 completely irreconcilable ideas (and the people who hold them) that’s been growing for the past 100 years in America.

On one hand is the simple idea that “by the sweat of your face you will eat bread, till you return to the ground“. Or stated only a bit more pleasantly, that everyone should work, that earning a living must be encouraged, that charity should only be given to or accepted by people in a misfortune entirely beyond their control.

On the other hand is a century of serious intellectual effort not to accept that fact. To proclaim, in much prettier words than I’ll use here, that people are entitled simply by their existence to various things they want (a “job”, a “living wage”, “social justice”, “access to healthcare”, “decent” housing, and other items in the intellectuals’ easily malleable list of “rights”), without the traditionalists’ demand that they pay for such things themselves, or receive them as a willing gift from another who had.

In the middle of this have been the mostly decent people of America going about their business and paying sporadic attention to the ideological conflict.

For the past 100 years, the entitlement idea has advanced. There have been rear-guard actions opposing it (fought by, e.g. William F. Buckley, Milton Friedman, and Ronald Reagan), but these have delayed or postponed, rather than reversed the trend.

Now, however, the idea of entitlement is, to borrow a term used by many others, literally and figuratively nearing bankruptcy. The cost of taxing, borrowing, or inflating to pay for people NOT to produce is going to be higher than Americans are willing to pay within the next 10 years.

On the side of the entitled are a motley collection of genuine scum who want to use them as a way to actively destroy civilization, the “Anointed” busybodies trying to hold on to their self-image as morally superior (or in many cases, to distract from their own fantastic wealth acquired partly or wholly through the political process), politicians (almost all of the Democrats, but many Republicans as well) who’ve managed to use “compassion” through the money of others to get themselves elected, and an army of sympathizers throughout the media, government agencies, court systems, unions, Hollywood, and subsidized universities.

On the side of the workers (the producers, not the proletariat of Marxist lore) are reality, and a relatively young (the Tea Party for lack of a better comprehensive term) movement supporting them, with good intentions, few illusions, but little or no experience in political battle. There are also the established conservative and libertarian organizations – some of which, like any organization, have some inertia in their culture, but almost all of whom recognize the need to fight.

What do we need to do now?

• First, we can’t forget that also on the “entitled” side are the victims of the welfare state themselves – the children (and even the mothers and fathers) from families whose breakup was subsidized by the welfare check. The disabled worker whose will to be productive in spite of his disability is eroded. The able-bodied young man who loses the habit of working daily after more than a year of collecting an unemployment check and pretending that he’s tried to find a job. The elderly who haven’t made provisions for their own retirement income or medical care. Most of these are people who can work and get along with each other if they have an incentive to do so.

  Keep them in your mind when you’re lectured for your supposed lack of compassion. Keep them in mind too when you’re tempted to think that it’s only a lack of moral character and not the perverse incentives in a man-made system that led to their current conditions.

• Second, fight relentlessly and NOW. There are a minority of the Entitled who are going to fight back just as fiercely at any attempt to take away what they think is Theirs. We’ve seen them in 2011 in Greece, in the Wisconsin statehouse, in public parks all over America.

  They’ve convinced themselves they can win this fight, despite the fact that the United States federal government alone has a debt greater than what all Americans produce in a year (leaving aside its less-binding promises such as Social Security and Medicare), and despite the fact that even some local and state Democrats have recognized the looming fiscal crises.

  They will continue to convince themselves of a win unless and until their funding dries up and their ideas are widely recognized as the rotten lies that they are. And they will grow temporarily much stronger if they get to keep any semblance of the current President and Congress.
  (Which category of entitlement supporters the President and various members of Congress belong to is debatable; that they’re on the side of entitlement is not.)

  This fight, like other predictably imminent conflicts throughout history, can be resolved with much less cost now if it’s decisively pursued to a conclusion than if it’s delayed or half-assed. Would there have been an American Civil War, had a compensated emancipation program been instituted in 1850? Would the conflict of 1914-18 still be the only “Great War” had Hitler been removed from power after occupying the Rhineland? It’s plausible but not certain in both cases. Would the costs in money and lives lost have been much lower had slavery and National Socialism been defeated earlier? Undoubtedly.

How can we defeat entitlement now? Fight it with everything we’ve got.

• We have a largely sympathetic population around us who understands the underlying reality. They want economic growth and job opportunities, not entitlement. We are the only ones offering that, and we should not be ashamed nor should we deviate from that path.
• We should by all means continue to encourage each other and the less ideologically committed in the House and Senate of the reality of our conviction, at every chance we get.

And by all means, do not just stand on the sidelines and cheer.

• Get involved in your local Republican Party as a precinct captain, and oppose the party leadership if they won’t fight.
• Register sympathetic voters and get them to turn them out at election time.
• Politely correct people when they state Entitlement assumptions as though they were fact.
• Ridicule Leftists when they spew nonsense, no matter how prominent they are.
• Expose the “long march” through an institution before it gets entrenched.
• Continue working to get conservative Republicans elected to office, and don’t shy away from stepping on anyone’s toes to get that done.
• DON’T get bogged down in personality conflicts with people who agree with you.

Do ALL of these. They don’t take that much time once you’ve done them once; it takes less time to succeed then to fail.

With you all to victory,

Chris Renner

 A new report by The Washington Times shows that Medicare will lack the sufficient funds to pay out full benefits by 2024.  And where Social Security was not expected to experience such an event until 2037, a slow economic recovery has shortened that forecast by a year to 2036.  Knowing well that these have been considered “doomsday” events for the two leviathan entitlement programs, the government will look to continue demanding that taxpayers fund them, and will just run them in “permanent” yearly deficits. 

Despite the fact that progressive politicians have often bucked the calls to reform these programs by presenting them as not only moral imperatives but as complex abstractions that can only be understood by experts, it should be clear to anyone who can balance a checkbook why they are unsustainable.  One expert named William G. Shipman condensed it very clearly.  He describes “an interesting paradox; as countries become more wealthy, their social security systems become more poor.  The oddity is driven by the casual relationship between increasing wealth- and increasing life expectancy along with decreasing birth rates- all wrapped up around pay-as-you-go financing.” 

The dire formula is painfully easy to solve:

(Decreasing number of contributors) + (Increasing number of collectors) =

Perpetually increasing burden upon taxpayers                                          

Yet despite being ever more unsustainable, the government has chosen to accept inevitable failure and simply run these programs in “permanent” deficits until the taxpayer fountain dries up.  But as shareholders financially backing the American venture, shouldn’t we do something to stop such nonsense?

Imagine for a moment that Medicare is not a government entitlement program, but a business.  Then imagine that the CEO of that business announces his intention to run his company in “permanent deficits.”  What would be the reaction?  Shareholders would largely jettison their stock, the CEO would be replaced by order of the remaining shareholders, and the business model would be amended to again become productive. 

Government programs enjoy no such adaptability.  We can’t just stop paying, immediately cast Obama and Geithner out of their positions, and revamp entitlement programs to become more successful.  So we must wait to hold elections.  And to ensure that those elections yield a proper result, we have to first convince the indoctrinated American people that we need to amend what is obviously broken. 

Yet election after election, this has proven to be a difficult task.  Progressives cling to these entitlement programs with profound ideological resolve.  Where our founders and modern conservatives view the government as a “necessary evil” whose influence must be limited to preserve individual liberty, progressives have come to view government a sort of “necessary benevolence;” a means for the productive to subsidize the unproductive via wealth redistribution.  And no deluge of logic or reason can dislodge some of them from this unmistakably socialistic position.

But sensible Americans need to act- and fast.  The Social Security and Medicare constructs are aflame, and adding more taxpayer revenue will only fuel the fire and make it that much more difficult to douse.  We must demand that our representatives restore our individual property rights and seek responsible alternatives to counter the undeniable fiscal burden of these entitlement programs, rather than allowing the left to continue positioning it as a moral debate that has been twisted into a crisis by a fear-mongering right.

The aforementioned William G. Shipman, among others, has presented sound and constitutionally prudent ideas to Congress.  He suggests that we can pay benefits for existing collectors and proximally collecting retirees while establishing a personal investment alternative to government administrated retirement programs.  In describing this course of action, he relates:

If [Americans] could acquire this freedom they also would have personal property rights over their accumulated wealth. They have no such rights to Social Security benefits. They also could bequeath some or all of their retirement assets. They cannot under Social Security… They would no longer be tethered to the government. They would no longer be subject to politicians’ preferences over when they can retire, how much they can get, how their spouses are treated, how much they’re going to pay, and all of the rules and regulations that have evolved to the point of being incomprehensible. They would be free.

Now that sounds like a plan our founders would agree to: limiting the government’s right to an individual’s property and allowing liberty and freedom of choice to shape the destiny of American citizens.  We cannot let our lamentable lapses into socialistic enterprise lead us to our ruination, but rather, we must re-imbue our nation with the ideals of its founding.  That is the only way we can reverse or reform these destructive redistributive platforms.

Including ObamaCare.

William Sullivan commonly contributes to American Thinker, and blogs at http://politicalpalaverblog.blogspot.com