Opus 2018-068: New Terms: Robin Hood Drugs, Part 1 of 2

The welfare mentality is infiltrating our thinking at all levels.  It says that someone else will pay for our wants and needs.  It is a way of passing the buck.  The beginning was innocent enough.  We  buy car insurance just in case.  The rates are established by the company based on competition and actuary tables.  Competition in a free market keeps the prices down and profits reasonable.  The actuary tables predict the chances of a claim being made and limit how low they can go and still stay in business.  Then the government gets involved.  When I was a kid boys paid more for car insurance than girls.  Why?  Because teenage boys had a lot more accidents.  It made sense and made a profit.  We understood.  We may not have liked it, but we understood.  Then the early prototypes of the Social Justice Warriors said, “That is not fair.”  The government stepped in and everyone paid the same insurance.  The science of predicting went out the window.  Everyone’s rates went up, just to be fair.

Apply that kind of manipulation to other areas of life and we end up with the welfare mentality we have now.  We are told that health care is a right not a benefit.  In the pre-welfare world if you wanted health insurance you would need to find a way to pay for it.  That usually meant a better job.  The coverage could come as a benefit because you were a valuable employee.  It could come because you went back to school, got an education and got a job that enabled you to pay for what you wanted.  You could have worked hard, get a promotion and a raise and begun to pay for what you wanted.  Now all you need to do is convince your congressman that it is your right.  He will find a way to meet your “need”.  Enter such programs as Aid for Dependent Children, Medi-cade, Medicare and the ultimate, Obamacare.  After all you deserve it.  And the expectation is that someone else will pay.  Since I am now on Medicare I hope you continue to do your part.

Then you extend that thinking to food, housing and any other dream you have.  If you remember one of the goals of the Obama administration was internet for everyone.   Remember the free phones and the video of the woman wondering where her free gas was.  The one thing that is ignored is that someone has to pay for all this.  When the kids at school would tell me health care should be free, I would ask them who wanted to the be nurse who was working for nothing, or if they didn’t want to get an education, would they volunteer to change bed pans for nothing.  Sometimes they get the idea but they have usually been conditioned to say, “Let the rich pay.”

Welcome to Robin Hood thinking.  In the world of Robin Hood the evil wealthy are robbed so that the deserving poor can be rewarded.  It sounds good until you get the modern system where anyone who has worked hard to get a good job and saved their nickels is defined as rich.  It doesn’t matter.  The government can print money.  Tax breaks are okay as long as it benefits me.  Government subsidies are great as long as I get them.  Don’t try to make me pay for any of this though.

To be continued...

homo unius libri