Via email, I was sent this Barry Deutsch cartoon (see reprint rights). My comments follow:
The entire premise of the cartoon is absurd.
First of all, the Sue was COERCED into public school attendance. To think she should be thankful for it is the equivalent of saying that a prisoner should be grateful for the free food and shelter. When was the last time you were FORCED into doing something and felt gratitude? What if the girl would have developed quicker and learned more in an alternative environment? Considering the per capita costs of “educating” a child in the current schooling system. Are taxpayers getting anything close to a good return? Is Sue getting the best education she could get?
Second, taking advantage of tax breaks is NOT THE SAME as receiving a check from the government. If you think it IS the same thing, then your position is that everything you earn belongs to The State. Any amount the government allows you to keep is a “benefit” for which you should be slavishly grateful. Do I like the tax breaks? No. But I’ll never criticize anyone who utilizes these legal means. Aren’t they just preserving what should never have been stolen in the first place?
Third, the very defenders of Social Security and Medicare claim that these programs are NOT welfare programs, but are rather entitlements that their recipients deserve because they themselves paid into the program so long. You can’t have it both ways! On the one hand they are NOT welfare programs, yet Left-Statists claim, on the other hand, that the recipients should be “grateful” for them. To whom should you be grateful for something you’ve earned?
Sue was born into, and still lives in a world where she didn’t ask for all of the things in this cartoon. The very places the politicians have tried to “help” Sue the most have become the most unaccountable, expensive things in Sue’s world. She didn’t vote for all this help. She just found that these were the rules, and she played by them.
And it shouldn’t surprise us when Sue worries, late in life, that Social Security and Medicare could be taken. She was, after all, coerced, by people who think like this cartoonist, to pay for all of it.
Statists can screw Sue by stealing her parent’s finances and a lifetime of her money too. But expecting universal gratitude is going too far. The pomposity of Statism is sickening.