{"id":13417,"date":"2012-02-06T00:08:59","date_gmt":"2012-02-06T05:08:59","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/?p=13417"},"modified":"2012-02-05T12:41:31","modified_gmt":"2012-02-05T17:41:31","slug":"americas-boom-in-moocher-culture","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/2012\/02\/06\/americas-boom-in-moocher-culture\/","title":{"rendered":"America’s boom in “Moocher Culture”"},"content":{"rendered":"

Glenn Harlan Reynolds<\/a> in the Washington Examiner<\/em> explains why the growth in something-for-nothing attitudes can and will come to grief:<\/p>\n

\n

\u201cFifty thousand for what you didn\u2019t plant, for what didn\u2019t grow. That\u2019s modern farming — reap what you don\u2019t sow.\u201d<\/p>\n

That\u2019s a line from a song about farm subsidies, \u201cFarming The Government,\u201d by the Nebraska Guitar Militia.<\/p>\n

But these days it applies to more and more of the U.S. economy, as Charles Sykes points out in his new book, A Nation Of Moochers: America\u2019s Addiction To Getting Something For Nothing<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The problem, Sykes points out, is that you can\u2019t run an economy like that. If you tried to hold a series of potluck dinners where a majority brought nothing to the table, but felt entitled to eat their fill, it would probably work out badly. Yet that\u2019s essentially what we\u2019re doing.<\/p>\n

[. . .]<\/p>\n

But the damage goes deeper. Sykes writes, \u201cIn contemporary America, we now have two parallel cultures: An anachronistic culture of independence and responsibility, and the emerging moocher culture.<\/p>\n

\u201cWe continually draw on the reserves of that older culture, with the unspoken assumption that it will always be there to mooch from and that responsibility and hard work are simply givens. But to sustain deadbeats, others have to pay their bills on time.\u201d<\/p>\n

And, after a while, people who pay their bills on time start to feel like suckers. I think we\u2019ve reached that point now:<\/p>\n

    \n
  • People who pay their mortgages — often at considerable personal sacrifice — see others who didn\u2019t bother get special assistance.<\/li>\n
  • People who took jobs they didn\u2019t particularly want just to pay the bills see others who didn\u2019t getting extended unemployment benefits.<\/li>\n
  • People who took risks to build their businesses and succeeded see others, who failed, getting bailouts. It rankles at all levels.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n

    And an important point of Sykes\u2019 book is that moocher-culture isn\u2019t limited to farmers or welfare queens. The moocher-vs-sucker divide isn\u2019t between the rich and poor, but between those who support themselves and those nursing at the government teat.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

    Glenn Harlan Reynolds in the Washington Examiner explains why the growth in something-for-nothing attitudes can and will come to grief: \u201cFifty thousand for what you didn\u2019t plant, for what didn\u2019t grow. That\u2019s modern farming — reap what you don\u2019t sow.\u201d That\u2019s a line from a song about farm subsidies, \u201cFarming The Government,\u201d by the Nebraska […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[32,25,84,53,13],"tags":[645,727,262,95,76],"class_list":["post-13417","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-books","category-economics","category-government","category-politics","category-usa","tag-corporatewelfare","tag-cronycapitalism","tag-culture","tag-jobs","tag-socialism"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p2hpV6-3up","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=13417"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":13422,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13417\/revisions\/13422"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=13417"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=13417"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/quotulatiousness.ca\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=13417"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}