Entitlement?
What the government actually owes you.
For as long as anyone can remember, politicians have been talking about entitlement reform. They haven’t done much, but they have talked about it. Maybe they don’t really want to do anything because it is an easy campaign MacGuffin — important sounding (who doesn’t favor reform?), but a vague enough for everyone to fill in their own definition — which can be trotted out every election cycle. Or, maybe it is because it is a difficult thing to accomplish because of its vagueness. After all, what is an entitlement? Is Social Security an entitlement? It is actually retirement insurance with premiums that come out of our paychecks. Is Medicare an entitlement? It is actually minimal retirement health insurance that we also pay for. What about welfare? Food stamps? Head Start? Education? A Job?
For this discussion, consider entitlement to be: something all citizens are owed by virtue of their citizenship alone.
We are a nation of immigrants, most of whom left their homeland looking for the opportunity to make a better life through the use of their own skills, intelligence, and hard work. Our ancestors, just wanted a chance to prosper. They didn’t ask for a guarantee, just an opportunity, and that opportunity is grounded in the liberties guaranteed by the U. S. Constitution and the Bill of Rights, which provide the framework for the freedoms needed to have that opportunity and to be able to take advantage of it.
Some of our immigrant ancestors already had the skills they needed. Some succeeded because of their willingness to work hard at manual labor. Many found that they needed to learn new skills in order to find employment that paid enough to support their families. But, they all shared the willingness to leave their homes and travel thousands of miles to find new opportunities.
Many discovered that there were no opportunities in or near their ports of entry into the United States. These immigrants traveled many more miles. Some opportunities dried up quickly, and families had to move on to find new ones. This cycle of immigration and migration created a boom time for the United States, during which the Homestead Act of 1862 was the catalyst for over 600,000 Americans to move to find new opportunities.
In the Dust Bowl of the 1930’s, extreme changes in weather patterns (drought and dust storms) disrupted the agricultural economy of the prairie states, displacing more than 3.5 million Americans, and forcing families who had farmed the same land for generations to move yet again. In a single Dust Bowl year, over 85,000 people migrated to California, more than the number who moved there during the California Gold Rush of 1849. Regardless of their destination, these refugees had one thing in common: they moved to find new opportunities. Some found work on farms, many moved to cities and learned the new skills needed to survive there. But they all moved.
The Great Depression, beginning in 1929 and leading up to World War II, was a similar disruption. Families had to abandon homes and businesses. Unemployment levels in some cities reached staggering levels: by 1933, Toledo, Ohio’s unemployment had reached 80%, and in Lowell, Massachusetts, it was 90% — both were large manufacturing centers of the time. The agricultural industry all but collapsed. Banks crashed. It was a dark time of bread lines, soup kitchens, despair. During the recovery effort, the government created many jobs, mostly unskilled, so that families could get back on their feet. And Americans were happy for the opportunity. In most cases, the earnings did not come close to their previous income, but was a welcome first step. Typically, breadwinners and their families had to move to where the work was. From 1916 to 1930, over 1.5 million people moved from rural areas to northern and mid-western industrial cities. The combination of recovery programs and the industrial mobilization during World War II, helped the nation recover; it also helped retrain the work force.
The result was the economic boom of the 1950’s, a golden age for American workers. This boom was spearheaded by industries which had ‘tooled up’ for the war effort, primarily manufacturing industries providing well-paid jobs for skilled and unskilled workers alike. During this period, there was still more migration. Once again, workers moved to where the work was, and learned the new skills they needed. From 1940 to 1970, some 5 million people moved to industrial centers in the north, and to California and other western states. As before, this migration was about jobs and opportunity.
In all of these cases, Americans moved towards opportunity for the prosperity of their families. In many cases, they had to learn new skills to accomplish this. They moved from one industry where their opportunities were limited or non-existent to another that offered a better future for them and their families. The self-reliance and willingness to undertake hardship that served their ancestors was a key success trait. They moved toward opportunity, asking for no guarantee, other than the opportunity.
The latest disruption in our work force began in the 1970's, picked up speed in the 1980's and 1990's, and continues at an even more rapid pace today. Personal computers and computerized database systems replaced clerical workers. The industrialization of nations like Japan, China and India created manufacturing jobs in those countries and cost jobs here. Robot-based manufacturing cost jobs everywhere. Internet sites with few employees replaced traditional, well-staffed retail businesses. And the trend continues into the future with driver-less vehicles obsoleting still more jobs.
But in this disruption, unlike those that went before, many American workers are not moving to new opportunities. They are expecting the opportunities to come to them, or in some cases, that old opportunities (those that have already moved on) be returned to them. They believe they are entitled to the job of their choice in the place of their choice at the pay of their choice. Sons of lumberjacks believe they are entitled to jobs ‘in the woods’; sons of coal miners believe they are entitled to jobs in the mines, despite the fact that their ancestors who first worked those jobs moved from somewhere else to take advantage of those opportunities on the first place.
The specific reason for this new sense of entitlement is unclear, likely driven by a number of factors. Regardless, nothing lasts forever. Specific jobs only exist when the economy values them. The economy is not static. It changes over time, with an ever-increasing rate of change. In the homelands of our forebears, inheriting jobs, and even taking your personal identity and community status from your job is a tradition that goes back centuries. In the cities, towns and villages of the original colonies, this tradition was brought to our nation. But from the moment our westward expansion began, this tradition was replaced by another: self-sufficiency. And that change was enabled by the mobility needed to find and take advantage of new opportunities. Today, these are (or should be) fundamental to the American character: self-sufficiency and mobility. Opportunity is the only American entitlement. You don’t get to choose the opportunity; you only get to choose whether to take advantage of it. The government doesn’t owe you more or less than that.
